[In the following essay, Ellman examines the various film characterizations of Charlie Chan and discusses the actors who have portrayed him over the years.]

Charlie Chan Carries On is the title of the fourth novel in the series of six Charlie Chan stories written by Earl Derr Biggers during the 1920s and early 1930s. The title has additional meaning, for the character of Charlie Chan has, indeed, carried on. His popularity has outlived the memory of his creator; his name is more a household word than are the names of many of the great detectives admired by whodunit aficionados; and he continues to appear in countless television reruns of the early Chan movies, a television cartoon show for children, and numerous parodies and comedy skits. The physical image of Charlie Chan is as permanently fixed on the popular consciousness as that of Sherlock Holmes, and his recognizability far exceeds those of such fictional detectives as Sam Spade, Hercule Poirot, and Mike Hammer.

It is ironic that this should be the case, for Charlie Chan was created by an author who began his career by belittling best-sellerism, and who, before he died, resisted many efforts to popularize his creation in the mass media. Biggers had not even planned a Chan series. In the first novel, The House Without a Key, the detective is merely a secondary figure who does not appear until the seventh chapter; but he quickly attracted the attention of the public, which demanded to see more of him. Biggers responded with five more novels featuring the detective. As each was written, the author became more attached to his creation and more concerned with making Chan (and himself) immortal.

Nevertheless, Biggers resisted popularization through the mass media. He completely rejected an offer to have Chan appear in a comic strip, and it took the effects of the Depression for him to allow radio broadcasts of his stories. At first, he believed "radio broadcasting would make Charlie so common and well-known that he would soon be squeezed dry, and a valuable property on which I am depending for support for years to come, would be valueless" (June 30, 1932). Soon after this statement, however, Charlie Chan stories were being broadcast with Walter Connelly as his voice.

Although Biggers did feel that a successful portrayal in the movies would establish Chan "as the leading sleuth of his generation" (February 6, 1931), he feared what Hollywood might do to the character. When Conrad Veidt was being considered as the movies' first Charlie Chan, Biggers was afraid that the German actor and his German director would "scare the public to death, and brand Charlie as a sinister devil from the Orient" (January 31, 1927). When it was finally announced that Sojin, a Chinese actor, would play the role, Biggers was equally concerned, calling Sojin "a corking actor, but a long, thin, sinister chink" (March 10, 1927). The author's worst fears became reality. "The general opinion of people out here," he later explained to his publisher, "is that I ought to sue Universal for defamation of character" (February 6, 1931). Warner Baxter was the next to play Chan and the first to do it well. However, the public, as well as Biggers, was not satisfied: "The news is all about over there that Charlie cannot be cast—Fox tried every Chinese laundryman on the Coast, but never thought of trying an actor—and the issue looks like a dead one" (December 10, 1929).

A successful portrayal of Charlie Chan was finally achieved by Warner Oland, who did as much to fix the popular image of Chan as did Basil Rathbone for Sherlock Holmes. With Holmes, the image was also established through book illustrations, but with Chan this was never the case. As Biggers commented about the illustrations in his novels, "Six books and six different Charlies so far" (June 11, 1932). Oland finally took the ingredients established by Biggers and transformed them into a visual image that survives even today. While the original Chan novels are hardly ever read, the Oland portrayal keeps the image of Chan alive. It is Oland whom countless imitators have mimicked.

At first glance, it is difficult to see why Charlie Chan has survived for nearly a half-century. The original novels, as well as their sixteen movie successors, do not exploit sex or violence, and the character himself lacks much of the dynamism that contemporary fictional detectives frequently possess. Upon closer examination, however, two factors tend to explain Chan's continuing popularity—his reinforcement of a stereotype, and his domesticity.

Indeed, Charlie Chan reflects something of the occidental stereotype of Orientals. While the detective was never a Fu Manchu on the right side of the law, his sagaciousness and inexplicability reinforce rather than counter the popular image of the Oriental. In fact, in explaining his rules for writing mystery stories, Ronald A. Knox stated in 1928 that a Chinese character should never figure in a story. "Why this should be so," he tried to explain, "I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our Western habit of assuming that the Celestial is over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals." Although such strong biases are seldom expressed today, they are still reflected in the mass media through such characterizations as the sagacious oriental servant who always manages to save the day for his employer and the sinister oriental villain who works for a communist government or international crime organization. If Charlie Chan is not sinister, he is certainly inexplicable, solving crimes with uncanny intuition and insight.

At first, Biggers played upon the stereotype, but then he hit upon a formula that subdued this approach while retaining the detective's appeal. "Sinister and wicked Chinese are old stuff," the author explained in a newspaper interview, "but an amiable Chinese on the side of law and order had never been used up to that time." Thus, the detective became more American, more Western, and more human. He became, in fact, the first "domestic" detective in fiction. The great detectives are seldom married, and even more infrequently do they have children and a home life. Chan, however, is married, has ten children, and lives a very normal life in his home on Punchbowl Hill. The movies retained this dimension of his character by utilizing his "number one son" as the equivalent of Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the novels, Chan is also portrayed as being torn between his oriental background and his occidental environment. When his cousin, Chan Lee Kim, asks him, "The foreign devil police—what has a Chinese in common with them?" Chan answers, "There are times, honorable cousin, when I do not quite understand myself."

It is this Chan, then, that Warner Oland successfully portrayed in the movies—a Chan whose speech is marked by the use of sagacious aphorisms, whose criminological methods depend more upon inexplicable intuition than on reasoning, and whose life is as normal as any man's. Oland fused these appealing characteristics with a visual image that is unforgettable and endlessly imitable.