Christianna Brand

Born: Malaya; December 17, 1907

Died: London, England; March 11, 1988

Also wrote as • Mary Ann Ashe • Annabel Jones • Mary Roland • China Thompson

Types of plot • Master sleuth • police procedural • cozy Principal series • Inspector Cockrill, 1942-1955.

Principal series character • Inspector Cockrill is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition of detectives who have almost supernatural powers but who disclose little about their methods of reasoning until the case is over. The elderly Cockrill’s outward manner is crusty, but he is kind and has a paternal affection for young women. A perceptive judge of character, he sympathizes with hu-man weakness, though he is indefatigable in his search for truth.

Contribution • Christianna Brand may be considered a pioneer of the medical thriller, as her highly honored 1944 novel Green for Danger preceded by decades the popular works of Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook. Indeed, H. R. F. Keating called it the finest novel of the Golden Age of mystery fiction. Her de-tective fiction illustrates the dictum of G. W. F. Hegel that a change in quantity may become transformed into a change in quality. The standard British mystery emphasized complex plotting in which the reader was challenged to decipher the clues to the perpetrator of the crime.Brand’s works took the emphasis on surprise to new heights: Sometimes the key to the story emerged only with the novel’s last line. Few readers proved able to match wits with her Inspector Cockrill, and, if he was not pres-ent, she had other ways to fool the audience. On one occasion, she “gave away” the story by a subtle clue in the first paragraph. Also, many of her books show an irrepressible humor which she carried to much further lengths than most of her contemporaries.

Biography • Mary Christianna Milne was born in Malaya in December, 1907, and grew up there and in India. She was sent to England in order to attend a Franciscan convent school in Somerset, an area of England known for its beauty. Her happiness at school received a rude upset when her father lost all of his money; Mary had to begin earning her own living at the age of seventeen. 

She went through a rapid succession of ill-paid jobs, mostly in sales, but also in modeling, professional ballroom dancing, receptionist and secretarial work, shop assistant work, interior design, and governess work. At one point, she opened a club for working girls in a slum section of London. Her financial prospects took a turn for the better when she met and fell in love with a young surgeon, Roland Lewis, whom she married in 1939.Before her marriage, she had already begun to write. Her decision to try de-tective stories had behind it no previous experience in fiction writing. (It is said that she wrote her first book, Death in High Heels, 1941, while working as a salesgirl, as a way to fantasize about killing a coworker.) 

She nevertheless was soon a success, and her second novel won a prize of one thousand dollars offered by Dodd, Mead and Company for its prestigious Red Badge series. Her early success proved to be no fluke; by the time of the publication of Green for Danger (1944), she had come to be generally regarded as one of the most important mystery writers of her time.Brand once more did the unexpected by ceasing to write mystery novels according to her hitherto successful recipe. Instead, she turned to short stories. After the appearance of Starrbelow (1958), she did not write another mystery novel for ten years. Her writing career, however, was by no means over. She had in the meantime tried her hand at several other varieties of fiction, including historical romances and screenplays. Although she never achieved the renown for these which her mysteries had brought her, her Nurse Matilda series of novels for children gained wide popularity. She returned to the ranks of mystery novelists in the late 1960’s. She died on March 11, 1988, in the arms of her husband of fifty years, Roland Lewis.

Analysis • An author who, like Christianna Brand, has achieved a reputation for the ability to surprise her readers faces a difficult task. Her readers, once forewarned, will be expecting deception and hence will be on their guard. Nevertheless, Brand managed to pull off one surprise after another in each of her most famous mysteries. In her stress on bafflement, she was hardly origi-nal, but the seemingly impossible culprits she produced made her achievement in this area virtually unequaled.There is much more to Brand than surprise. There is almost always in her work a romance, an idealistic love affair whose sexual elements are minimal. In her work, heroines at once fall in love with the man whom they will eventually marry, although only after overcoming numerous obstacles. Remarkably, in Brand’s novels this approach to romance is carried to such lengths that it does not seem at all cloying or stereotypical. Rather, it is yet another manifestation of her unusually pronounced sense of humor.Brand, whatever one may think of her, is certainly no unalloyed optimist. Often, her characters must realize a bitter truth about close friends. 

In Green for Danger, for example, the overriding ambition of many of the nurses makes them petty and nasty. In Brand’s view of things, even “ordinary” people may harbor serious failings. Her murderers are not obvious villains but characters indistinguishable from anyone else in the novel, until their bitter secret is ex-posed.Here, the element of romance often reappears, although this time more somberly. The murderer’s secret usually involves either a disgruntled lover or someone whose ambition consumes all ordinary restraint. The motives of ambition and unrequited love, like the heroine’s experience of falling in love, operate in an absolute fashion. Idealism and an awareness of evil thus work to balance each other, making Brand’s stories less unrealistic than a first encounter with one of her romantic heroines would lead one to suspect. 

All of this, further, is overlaid with a veneer of humor, making up in high spirits for what it lacks in sophistication.As just presented, the characteristics of Brand’s novels hardly seem a pro-gram for success. She managed, however, to put all the diverse pieces together in an effective way, as a closer look at Green for Danger illustrates. In this work, sometimes regarded as her best, a patient in a military hospital for bombing victims dies on the operating table. At first, his death hardly attracts notice, being regarded as an accident (by some mischance, the man’s anesthetic had been contaminated) . It soon develops, however, that more than accident is involved. Testimony of several student nurses who were present at the scene shows indisputably that foul play has occurred. The murderer can only have been one of the seven people present in the operating room theater, but not even the ingenious probing of Inspector Cockrill suffices to reveal the culprit. Still, the inspector is far from giving up.He devises a characteristically subtle plan to trap the murderer into at-tempting another killing during surgery. His plan almost backfires, as the culprit possesses an ingenuity that, however twisted by malign ambition, almost matches that of Cockrill himself.

When the method of the murderer at last is revealed, even the experienced mystery reader will be forced to gasp in astonishment. Although dominant in Green for Danger, this element of surprise does not stand alone. A young nurse who has aroused suspicion is the person responsible for bringing Cockrill into the case. She is in love with a young doctor; although her romantic feelings do not receive detailed attention, they are unmistakably present. Although the reader will hardly take this nurse seriously as a suspect, since otherwise the romance would face utter ruin, this fact provides little or no aid in stealing a march on Cockrill.

Romance and murder are a familiar combination; to join humor with them is not so common. Brand does so by means of amusing descriptions of the petty rivalries and disputes among the nurses and other members of the hospital staff. The points that induce them to quarrel generally are quite minor: For example, someone has taken over another’s locker space, or wishes to listen to a radio program that another dislikes. These irritations soon flare up into severe disputes, which, however humorously depicted, serve to remind the reader of Brand’s belief that murderous rage lies close at hand to more every-day feelings.

Her contention was based on personal experience. Before her marriage, she felt an enormous dislike for one of her fellow workers. This animosity, she conjectured, was of the sort that might easily lead to murder. It was this expe-rience that colored her development of the motivation of her murderers and added a starkly realistic touch to her romantic and humorous tendencies.For a lesser author, the old combination of traits Brand’s novel presented might seem difficult to repeat—but not for Brand. In Fog of Doubt (1952; first published as London Particular), she again startles the reader. This time she does so by withholding until the last line of the book the method of the murderer in gaining access to a house he seemingly had no opportunity to reach. After one has read this last line, one realizes that Brand had in fact given away the essential clue to the case in the book’s first paragraph. So subtly presented is the vital fact, however, that almost every reader will pass it by without a sec-ond glance.In this book, Brand’s strong interest in romance comes to the fore. 

The characters’ various romantic attachments receive detailed attention; the many rivalries and jealousies present among the main characters serve to distract the reader from solving the case. Again characteristically for Brand, true love eventually triumphs, and the culprit is the victim of an uncontrollable and unrequited passion for another of the principal characters.Green for Danger stresses surprise, Fog of Doubt, romance. A third novel, Tour de Force (1955), emphasizes the final element in Brand’s tripartite formula: humor. The story is set on an imaginary island in the Mediterranean, near a resort where a number of English tourists have gone for vacation. Among them is the now-retired Cockrill, as well as his sister, Henrietta. A murder quickly arouses the local gendarmerie to feverish but ineffective activity. Their burlesque of genuine detection, consisting of an attempt to pin the blame on one tourist after another until each possibility is disproved, does not even exempt Cockrill. 

His efforts to solve the case are foiled at every turn by police bum-bling.Firmly behind the police is the local despot, who threatens the tourists with dire penalties unless he at once receives a confession. The dungeon on the island is evidently of medieval vintage, and the petty satrap whose word is law on the island regards this prison as a major attraction of his regime.Here, for once, surprise, though certainly present, does not have its customary spectacular character. Instead, the reader receives a series of lesser shocks, as one person after another seems without a doubt to be guilty, only to be replaced by yet another certain criminal. Cockrill eventually discloses the truth with his usual panache.Brand’s short stories further developed some of the techniques of her novels. In several stories in the collection Buffet for Unwelcome Guests: The Best Short Mysteries of Christianna Brand (1983), Inspector Cockrill figures in inverted plots. 

Here the reader knows the identity of the criminal, and the interest lies in following the efforts of the detective to discover him. This technique poses a severe test to a writer such as Brand who values suspense. Can there be surprises in a story in which the identity of the criminal is given to the reader at the outset? Brand believed that there could, and one can see from the popularity of her stories that many readers agreed with her. One of these, “The Hornets’ Nest,” won first prize in a contest sponsored by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Brand’s style does not have the innovative qualities of her plots. It is, how-ever, a serviceable instrument, both clear and vigorous. She tends to emphasize, more than most detective story authors, long descriptive passages of scenery. In her depiction of the imaginary island in Tour de Force, she captures with great skill the atmosphere of several Mediterranean islands favored by British tourists. A reason for the popularity of Green for Danger lies in its stylistically apt portrayal of the loneliness of women whose husbands and boy-friends had gone to fight in World War II. Here she once more relied on personal experience, for her own husband was away on military service for much of the war.

Another feature of Brand’s style was characteristic of the writers of her generation, though not of younger authors. In writing of love, she had no interest in depicting sexual encounters in detail, or even in acknowledging their existence. Sex, along with obscene language, is absent from her books; these could only interfere with the unreal but captivating atmosphere she endeavored to portray.To this generalization there is, however, a significant exception. The Honey Harlot (1978) is a novel of sexual obsession; here, the approach to love differs quite sharply from that of her more famous mysteries. Her characteristic work does not lie in this direction, and this novel has so far not been followed by one of similar type.To sum up, Brand carried some of the elements of the classic British detective story—in particular surprise, romance, and humor—to extremes. In doing so, she established a secure place for herself as an important contributor to the mystery field.

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Anthony Boucher

Born: Oakland, California; August 21, 1911

Died: Berkeley, California; April 24, 1968

Also wrote as • H. H. Holmes

Types of plot • Amateur sleuth • private investigator • police procedural

Principal series • Fergus O’Breen, 1939-1942 • Nun, 1940-1942.

Principal series characters • Fergus O’Breen is a private investigator, around thirty, with red hair and a fondness for yellow sweaters. He has a sharp, analytical mind and is attracted to young, not-too-bright women. He is a heavy smoker and a recreational drinker.

•Lieutenant A. Jackson is with the homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). He is around thirty, tall, handsome, single, and intelligent, but he always has the help of an amateur sleuth in solving his murder cases.

•Lieutenant Terence Marshall is also with the homicide division of the LAPD. Tall, handsome, and happily married, he is a closet intellectual. He can be seen as a married version of Lieutenant A. Jackson in the Fergus O’Breen series.

•Sister Ursula is of the order of the Sisters of Martha of Bethany. Of indeterminate age, she is compassionate, devout, an amateur sleuth par excellence, and instrumental in the solution of Marshall’s cases.

Contribution • Anthony Boucher entered the field of mystery/detective fiction in 1937, just as the Golden Age of that genre was drawing to a close. The five novels he published under the Boucher pseudonym and two others under the name H. H. Holmes were typical of one branch of the field at the time: intellectually frothy entertainments offering several hours of pleasant diversion. Boucher’s plots were clever murder puzzles which could be solved by a moderately intelligent reader from the abundant clues scattered generously throughout the narrative. The murders were antiseptic affairs usually solved in the end by an engaging deductionist. The characters (or suspects) were often intriguing but always only superficially developed. The settings were potentially interesting but somehow unconvincing. Boucher was, however, one of the first writers to bring a high degree of erudition and literary craftsmanship to the field of popular mystery/detective fiction. 

Boucher was much more important to the field as a critic and as an editor than as a writer. As a mystery/detective critic with columns in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Book Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, Boucher showed that he could recognize talented writers and important trends in the field. As an editor, he had a penchant for extracting the best from the contributors to the journals and anthologies which he oversaw.

Biography • Anthony Boucher was born William Anthony Parker White on August 21, 1911, in Oakland, California. He was the only child of James Taylor White and Mary Ellen (Parker) White, both physicians and both descended from pioneers of the California/Oregon region. His maternal grandfather was a lawyer and a superior court judge, and his paternal grandfather was a captain in the United States Navy. Despite being an invalid during most of his teenage years, Boucher was graduated from Pasadena High School in 1928 and from Pasadena Junior College in 1930. From 1930 to 1932, he attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in German. He spent most of his time outside classes at USC in acting, writing, and directing for little theater. Boucher was graduated from USC in 1932 with a bachelor of arts and an undergraduate record sufficient for election to Phi Beta Kappa and the offer of a graduate scholarship from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his master of arts degree from that institution in 1934 upon acceptance of his thesis, “The Duality of Impressionism in Recent German Drama.”The academic life apparently having lost its appeal for him after he received the master of arts degree (he had planned to be a teacher of languages), Boucher embarked on an unsuccessful career as a playwright. 

When his plays failed to sell, he tried his hand at mystery writing and sold his first novel to Simon and Schuster in 1936 (it was published the following year). He adopted the pseudonym “Boucher” (rhymes with “voucher,” not “touché”) to keep his crime-fiction career separate from his still-hoped-for career as a playwright. During the next six years, Simon and Schuster published four more of Boucher’s murder mysteries. During the same period, Duell, Sloan and Pearce published two of his novels under the pen name of H. H. Holmes.During this phase of his career, Boucher married Phyllis Mary Price, a li-brarian, in 1928. They had two children, Lawrence Taylor White and James Marsden White. By 1942, Boucher’s interests had shifted from the writing of mystery fiction to editing and science fiction. During the remainder of his career, Boucher edited several periodicals in both the mystery and science-fiction fields, including True Crime Detective (1952-1953) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949-1958). He also edited many anthologies in both fields, wrote radio scripts for mystery shows, and had several book re-view columns. His reviews of mystery/detective books won for him the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery criticism in 1946, 1950, and 1953. Boucher died in his home in Berkeley, California, on April 24, 1968. 

Analysis • Anthony Boucher began writing mystery/detective fiction as a way to support himself while he pursued a never-realized career as a playwright. All five novels published under the Boucher pseudonym and those published as H. H. Holmes between 1937 and 1942 are well-constructed murder-detection puzzles featuring a deductionist hero or heroine and often a locked-room theme. The characters in his novels are not well developed, are almost exclusively Caucasian with bourgeois attitudes and goals, and are always secondary to the puzzle and its solution. Only rarely do the novels mention the so-cial and political issues of the period during which they were written, and they offer no particular insights into the several potentially interesting subcultures in which they are set. In short, the Boucher-Holmes novels are examples of much of the Golden Age mystery/detective literature, in which the crime and its solution through logical deduction are paramount.

In many ways Boucher’s first novel set the pattern for those that followed. Set on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) introduces several promising characters whose personalities prove to be disappointingly bland. The novel demonstrates Boucher’s acquaintance with literature in four languages, with ancient heresies com-bated by the Catholic church, and his intimate knowledge of several forms of tobacco usage. Virtually nothing comes through, however, concerning academic life at Berkeley in the 1930’s or the mechanics of the little-theater movement, in which most of the characters in the novel are involved and with which the author had considerable experience. Still, the novel is well plotted, the deductionist (a professor of Sanskrit) sufficiently Sherlockian, and the clues abundant enough to make the puzzle enjoyable.

Boucher was heavily influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle and fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, as demonstrated in all of his novels, but particularly in the third, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940). Again, Boucher introduces a cast of initially fascinating but ultimately flaccid characters, most of them members of an informal Holmes fan club (a real organization of which Boucher was a member) . Again the plot is clever, this time revolving around various Doyle accounts of the adventures of the Sage of Baker Street. The hoped-for insights into the subculture in which the novel is set—in this case, the film industry in Hollywood—are again absent. Boucher does have his char-acters make several innocuous political observations, vaguely New Dealish and more or less anti-Fascist, but one of the primary characters, a Nazi spy, comes off as a misguided idealist and a basically nice fellow. The deductionist in the novel is an LAPD homicide lieutenant who appears in several of Boucher’s novels, A. Jackson (his first name is never given).

In his other appearances in Boucher’s novels (The Case of the Crumpled Knave, 1939; The Case of the Solid Key, 1941; and The Case of the Seven Sneezes, 1942), Jackson has considerable help in solving his cases from Fergus O’Breen, a redheaded, yellow-sweater- wearing private detective. Despite the sweater and the hair, O’Breen is surely one of the most colorless private eyes in all of mystery fiction, his blandness exceeded only by that of A. Jackson. In The Case of the Solid Key, considered by his fans to be Boucher’s best, O’Breen and Jackson deduce the perpetrator of an ingenious locked-room murder from among some potentially exciting but typically undeveloped characters, including a Charles Lindbergh-like idealist and a voluptuous film star (Rita La Marr, no less) who remains incognito during most of the novel. Once again, Boucher sets the action of the novel against a backdrop of the little-theater movement, the actual workings of which are largely unexplored in the novel. 

The Case of the Solid Key also includes some unconvincing dialogue concerning politics and social issues, with Boucher’s own New Deal convictions emerging victorious over the selfish, big- business attitudes of a spoiled rich girl who always gets her comeuppance (a stereotype which appears in several of Boucher’s stories).Boucher created a potentially more engaging but characteristically incom-plete deductionist, Sister Ursula, in two novels published under the pseud-onym H. H. Holmes. Sister Ursula, a nun of the order of the Sisters of Martha of Bethany, helps Lieutenant Terence Marshall of the LAPD homicide division solve murders in Nine Times Nine (1940) and Rocket to the Morgue (1942). The characters in the latter novel are drawn in part from the science-fiction writers community in the Los Angeles of the early 1940’s and are thinly dis-guised fictionalizations of such science-fiction luminaries as John W. Cambell, Robert Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard. 

The plot revolves around another locked room and is amusingly complicated and pleasantly diverting. The novel contains the obligatory spoiled rich girl, several conversations mildly critical of the socioeconomic status quo, and several comments mildly lamenting the imminent outbreak of war.Taken collectively, the Boucher-Holmes novels are the epitome of one branch of Golden Age mystery/detective fiction. They are amusing escapist works of no particular literary merit. Boucher, an only child from a comfort-able middle-class background, did not have the worldly experience of a Dashiell Hammett. Thus, his characters were portrayed in a narrow world in which ugliness, if it existed at all, derived from character flaws, not from social realities. 

He did not possess the poetic insight into the human condition of a Ross Macdonald or a Raymond Chandler, so his characters lack depth, and the situations which he created for them are generally unconvincing.Boucher was much more successful in his short stories, in which character-ization is less important than in novels. Nick Noble, an alcoholic ex-cop who was featured in “Black Murder,” “Crime Must Have a Stop,” and “The Girl Who Married a Monster,” is a much more engaging character than any of those appearing in Boucher’s longer works. Fergus O’Breen and Sister Ursula are also more believable when they appear in short stories. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Playboy , and Esquire are only a few of the many journals which published Boucher’s short stories.Boucher’s greatest contributions to the mystery/detective field, however, did not come through his novels or short stories. 

After a successful but exhausting stint as a plot developer for radio scripts for shows featuring Sherlock Holmes and Gregory Hood, Boucher began editing and writing book reviews in the fields of both science fiction and mystery/detective fiction. As an editor, he excelled, creating The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and turning it into one of the first literate journals in that field. He brought the same skills to True Crime Detective, which he edited from 1952 to 1953. He encouraged many young talents in both the science fiction and mystery/detective genres, including Richard Matheson, Gore Vidal, and Philip José Farmer.The Mystery Writers of America recognized Boucher three times as the top critic of mystery/detective crime fiction. As a critic and an editor, he was gen-tle, humorous, and always compassionate, and he was usually able to provoke the best efforts of those whose work he assessed. In no small way, he contributed through his criticism and editing to the emergence in the 1950’s of a real literature of mystery/detective fiction.

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Lawrence Block

Born: Buffalo, New York; June 24, 1938

Also wrote as • William Ard • Jill Emerson • Leo Haig • Chip Harrison • Paul Kavanagh • Sheldon Lord • Andrew Shaw

Types of plot •  Private investigator • amateur sleuth • inverted • espionage • thriller

Principal series • Evan Tanner, 1966-1970 • Chip Harrison, 1970-1975 • Matthew Scudder, 1976-1986 • Bernie Rhodenbarr, 1977-1983 • Martin Ehrengraf, 1983-1997 • J. P. Keller, 1994

Principal series characters • Evan Tanner, an agent working for an un-named, secret government agency, who cannot sleep because of a shrapnel wound to the brain. When not working on an assignment, he spends his spare time joining various oddball political movements.

•Chip Harrison, a private investigator and assistant to Leo Haig, a fat private detective who raises tropical fish and patterns his life after Nero Wolfe. Acting as Haig’s Archie Goodwin, Chip in his two mystery adventures is full of humorous references to various mystery writers and their characters as well as his own sexual exploits.

•Matthew Scudder, a private investigator and an alcoholic ex-cop who works without a license. His cases are favors for which he is paid. Guilt-ridden because he accidentally killed a young girl in a shoot-out, Scudder drowns his despair with alcohol and occasionally accepts a case in order to pay the rent.

•Bernie Rhodenbarr, a burglar and amateur sleuth who steals for a price. In his amusing capers, Bernie, who derives an emotional thrill from thievery, usually winds up in trouble when dead bodies appear in places he illegally enters. He then must play detective to clear himself.

•Martin Ehrengraf, a dapper little criminal defense attorney who believes that all of his clients are innocent. To prove it, he is willing to use every trick in the lawyer’s black bag. He will kill to win his cases.

•J. P. Keller, an appealing, conscientious hired assassin who is a thorough professional, cool but not too cold to be on the constant lookout for a girl-friend. For a killer, he is an occasionally whimsical man prone to loneliness and self-doubt, the sort who worries what kind of present to give the woman who walks his dog.

Contribution • Lawrence Block is a storyteller who experiments with several genres, including espionage, detective, and caper fiction. Regardless of the genre, he delivers a protagonist with whom his readers can empathize, identify, and even secretly wish to accompany on the different adventures. Block’s tone ranges from the serious and downbeat in the Matt Scudder novels to the lighthearted and comical found in the works featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr and Chip Harrison. His characters are outsiders to conventional society, and Block captures their true essence through their first -person vernaculars. Further-more, his vivid and realistic descriptions of the deadbeats, the bag ladies, the pimps, the cops—both good and bad—and those hoping for something better portray New York City as a place devoid of glitter and elegance. Writer Stephen King has called Block the only “writer of mystery and detective fiction who comes close to replacing the irreplaceable John D. MacDonald.”Several of Block’s novels were (rather poorly) adapted to film. These include Nightmare Honeymoon (1973), the 1983 Shamus Award-winning Eight Million Ways to Die (1986, scripted by Oliver Stone and David Lee Henry and starring Jeff Bridges), and The Burglar in the Closet (as Burglar, 1987, starring Whoopi Goldberg).

Biography • Lawrence Block was born on June 24, 1938, in Buffalo, New York. He attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, from 1955 to 1959. In 1957, he became an editor for the Scott Meredith literary agency, but left one year later to pursue a professional writing career. In 1960 he married Loretta Ann Kallett, with whom he had three daughters. In 1973 he and his wife were divorced. Ten years later he married Lynne Wood. Fond of travel, they visited eighty-seven countries by the end of the twentieth century.

Block’s first books were soft-core sex novels (for which he used the pseudonyms Andrew Shaw, Jill Emerson, and—as did Donald E. Westlake—Sheldon Lord), which were released in paperback. In fact, for many years his novels were published as paperback originals. He is a multiple winner of nearly every major mystery award for his writing, including the Nero Wolfe, Shamus, Maltese Falcon, and Edgar Allan Poe awards. He has served as a member of the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America, which honored him with the title of Grand Master in 1994, and as president of the Private Eye Writers of America. In 1964 he became associate editor of the Whitman Numismatic Journal, a position which reflects his interest in and knowledge of coins. For many years he was a contributing editor for Writer’s Digest, for which he wrote a monthly column on fiction writing. His seminar for writers, “Write for Your Life,” has been highly successful.

Analysis • Lawrence Block is one of the most versatile talents in the mystery field. His desire to entertain his readers is evident in the many categories of mystery fiction that he has mastered. With each genre, Block utilizes a fresh approach to the protagonists, the plots, and the tone, and avoids relying on established formulas. With Evan Tanner, introduced in The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (1966), Block created an agent who, faced with the prospect of rotting away in a foreign jail, reluctantly accepts his new career. While most private detectives are former cops, thus having the proper knowledge and experience for their new professions, Chip Harrison’s previous employment in a bordello offered no formal training for working for Leo Haig. Bernie Rhodenbarr, the polished and sophisticated amateur sleuth, is actually a burglar for hire. With the character of Matthew Scudder, Block destroys the cliché of the hard-drinking private detective by making Scudder an alcoholic who wrestles with the demons of his past.

Block is a master at creating the right tone for each series of mystery works. The Tanner novels are laced with wisecracks and screwball characters. Not only are the Rhodenbarr novels full of lighthearted comedy, but they also contain fascinating burglar lore such as how to deal with locks, alarms, and watchdogs. With his two Chip Harrison mysteries, Make Out with Murder (1974) and The Topless Tulip Caper (1975), Block’s sense of humor is fully developed. The nineteen-year-old private eye’s adventures with Haig are full of mystery in-jokes and puns. In the short story “Death of the Mallory Queen,” Chip and Haig encounter a suspect named Lotte Benzler, which is clearly a play on the name Otto Penzler, the well-known mystery bookstore owner, au-thority, and critic.Chip’s tales parody the tough, hard-boiled detective stories, but they are also Block’s tribute to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe -Archie Goodwin legacy. In sharp contrast, though, are the novels featuring Matt Scudder. The stark, unsentimental prose lends these books a serious, somber tone, as glib dialogue and flowery metaphors would only ruin the effect for which Block strives: to allow his readers to enter the mind of a man who is haunted by his guilt.

What Block’s characters have most in common is that they are outsiders to the world in which they live. Walking the thin line between law and lawless-ness, these men disregard the conforming demands of a complacent society. Bernie Rhodenbarr, for example, as a thief and an amateur sleuth, is a descendant of the outlaw of the Wild West or the gangster of the Roaring Twenties, both elevated to the status of folk heroes by the early dime novels and pulps. Bernie is able to beat the system and get away with it. When someone needs something stolen, Bernie is more than happy to oblige—for a price. His profession satisfies a secret desire that must be common to many readers, that of wanting something more exciting than the usual nine- to-five routine. Bernie is not, however, a completely amoral character. There are times when he does feel some guilt for his stealing, but as he says, “I’m a thief and I have to steal. I just plain love it.”Bernie’s illegal excursions into other people’s homes, however, often lead him into trouble. 

In The Burglar in the Closet (1978), before he can finish robbing the apartment that belongs to his dentist’s former wife, the woman comes home with a new lover. Trapped in her bedroom closet, Bernie must wait during their lovemaking and hope they fall asleep so he can safely escape. The woman is later murdered, and Bernie must discover who killed her in order to keep himself from being accused of the crime. As amateur sleuth, Bernie holds the advantage of not belonging to an official police force and is there fore not hampered by rules and procedures. With Bernie, Block adds a new twist on the role of the detective. Instead of being on a quest for justice or trying to make sense of the crimes of others, Bernie is motivated by more self-centered feelings. Like Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, and a host of other detectives, Bernie is an outsider to the world through which he must travel on his investigation, but he is motivated by his need to save his own neck.

Perhaps the most complex and believable of Block’s series characters is Matthew Scudder, the alcoholic private detective who is introduced in The Sins of the Fathers (1976) . Scudder is an ex-cop who abandoned his roles as policeman, husband, and father after an incident that shattered his world. While in a bar one night after work, he witnessed two punks rob and kill the bartender. Scudder followed the two and shot them both, killing one and wounding the other. One of Scudder’s bullets, however, ricocheted and hit a seven-year-old girl named Estrellita Rivera, killing her instantly. Although Scudder was cleared of any blame in the tragic shooting and was even honored by the police department for his actions in apprehending the bartender’s killers, he could not clear his own conscience. After resigning from the force and leaving his wife and two sons, Scudder moved into a hotel on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan to face his guilt in lonely isolation.

Scudder’s alcoholism is a central theme throughout each novel, and if the books are read in sequence, the alcoholism increasingly dominates Scudder’s life. He suffers blackouts more frequently, and twice he is told to stop his drinking if he wants to live. As the alcoholism becomes worse, so does Scudder’s isolation from those for whom he cares. In A Stab in the Dark (1981), a female friend, a sculptress and fellow alcoholic, tries to make Matt confront his drinking, but he denies having a problem and says that a group such as Al-coholics Anonymous would not work for him. By the end of the book, the woman refuses to see Matt any longer, as she herself has decided to seek help.Eight Million Ways to Die (1982) is the turning point in the Scudder series. It is a superior novel for its social relevance and psychological insights into the mind of an alcoholic. 

In this book, Matt has made the first steps toward con-fronting his alcoholism by attending regular meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. He is hired by a prostitute, Kim Dakkinen, who wants to leave her pimp in order to start a new life. Afraid that the pimp, Chance, will talk her out of her plans or hurt her, Kim wants Matt to act as a go-between with Chance. When Kim is murdered a few days later, Scudder suspects Chance, who had earlier agreed to Kim’s freedom. Chance, however, asserts his innocence and hires Matt to find Kim’s murderer. Thus, Matt’s quest to solve the murder holds the chance for him to quit drinking. “Searching for Kim’s killer was something I could do instead of drinking. For a while.”In this novel, Matt’s isolation is more complete. Because of his worsening alcoholism, he has been barred from buying any alcohol at Armstrong’s and becomes an outcast among the drinkers who have been a major part of his life for many years. Each day without a drink is a minor victory, but his mind is obsessed with the need for a drink. 

Matt has also begun going to daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Usually he sits off to the side or in the back, listening with cynical disdain to the qualifications of the many problem drinkers. To him, their saccharine-sweet tales of hope sound absurd in contrast with the brutal fate suffered by Kim. Not only is Scudder an outsider to his fellow drinkers; he is an outsider as well to those hoping for a life free of alcohol. He can admit to himself that he has a problem but is unable to do so in public. He needs the help the support group can give, but he wants to tackle the problem alone. This conflict between appearance and reality recurs throughout the novel. Scudder appears to be handling his period of drying out, but in reality he is afraid to leave the bottle behind and fearful of the future.With Chance, Block has created a man who longs for power and who must lead a double life in order to maintain it. He lives in a quiet neighborhood, pretending to be the faithful manservant of a nonexistent, wealthy retired doc-tor, so as not to arouse suspicion from his neighbors. 

He appears to care for his prostitutes, support them financially, and encourage them to follow their dreams. In reality, though, Chance demands complete loyalty from his girls. He uses them for his own financial gain and need for power. Coming from a middle-class background, he studied art history in college. When his father died, however, he left school, enlisted in the military, and was sent to Vietnam. When he returned, he became a pimp and created a new identity, that of Chance. In the end, however, he is left with nothing. Because of Kim’s murder and another girl’s suicide, the rest of his prostitutes leave him.

The world that Block depicts in Eight Million Ways to Die is precariously balanced on the edge between appearance and reality, hope and despair, life and death. Although Chance’s prostitutes appreciate his care and protection, they want something better for their lives. One dreams of being an actress, an-other, of being a poet. There is hope that they will leave their present professions and pursue these dreams, but underneath there is the impression that they will never do so.Another perspective is furnished by the stories of hope told by the members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Each alcoholic who publicly admits his problem tells of a past life full of despair. These stories are contrasted with the tales of modern urban horror that Matt reads in the newspapers. In one case, Matt hears about an elderly woman who was killed when her friend found an abandoned television and brought it to her house; when he turned on the television, it exploded. 

A bomb had been rigged inside, probably as part of a mob execution attempt that failed when the target grew suspicious and discarded the television.These tragically absurd tales of people who die sudden, violent deaths serve as proof of life’s fragile nature. The ways that people die are just as numerous as the body counts. As a cop tells Scudder, “You know what you got in this city? . . . You got eight million ways to die.” The prospect of death scares Matt. In the end, he realizes the seriousness of his alcohol addiction and his desperate need for help, even if it comes only one day at a time. As the novel closes, he is finally able to say, “My name is Matt, . . . and I’m an alcoholic.” 

With the Scudder novels, Block has achieved a “kind of poetry of despair.” Scudder is a man who loses a part of himself but takes the first steps in building a new life.

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Robert Bloch

Born: Chicago, Illinois; April 5, 1917

Died: Los Angeles, California; September 23, 1994

Also wrote as • Tarleton Fiske • Will Folke • Nathan Hindin • E. K. Jarvis • Wilson Kane: John Sheldon • Collier Young

Types of plot • Psychological • invertedContribution • Robert Bloch wrote many crime novels, as well as science-fiction novels, screenplays, radio and television plays, and hundreds of short stories. Working in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft, Bloch portrays characters who are plagued by their psychological imbalances. In addition, he gives new life to the surprise ending. Often the reader is shocked or even appalled at the ending with which he is confronted. Unlike many writers in the genre, Bloch does not always let those who are right succeed or even live. In fact, many times those who are good are the ones done away with.The characters Bloch employs are quite ordinary. They are hotel owners, nuns, psychiatrists, and secretaries. The use of seemingly normal people as inhabitants of a less than normal world is part of what makes Robert Bloch one of the masters of the psychological novel. His novels do not have vampires jumping out of coffins; instead, they have hotel owners coming out of offices and asking if there is anything you need.

Biography • Robert Albert Bloch was born on April 5, 1917, in Chicago, Illinois. He attended public schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During his early years in school, Bloch was pushed ahead from the second grade to the fifth grade. By the time he was in sixth grade, the other children were at least two years older than he. While Bloch was more interested in history, literature, and art than were most children his age, he was not an outsider and was, in fact, the leader in many of the games in the neighborhood.

At age nine, Bloch attended a first-release screening of the 1925 silent classic Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney. He was at once converted to the genres of horror and suspense. In the 1930’s, he began reading the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft. When he was fifteen, he wrote to Lovecraft asking for a list of the latter’s published works. After an exchange of letters, Lovecraft encouraged Bloch to try writing fiction. By the time he was seventeen, Bloch had sold his first story to Weird Tales magazine. As a tribute to his mentor, Bloch wished to include Lovecraft in a short story titled “The Shambler from the Stars.” Lovecraft authorized Bloch to “portray, murder, annihilate, disintegrate, transfigure, metamorphose or otherwise manhandle the undersigned.” 

Lovecraft later reciprocated by featuring a writer named Robert Blake in his short story “The Haunter of the Dark.”Bloch worked as a copywriter for the Gustav Marx advertising agency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1942 to 1953. Copywriting did not get in the way of creative writing, however. Besides a short stint as a stand-up comic—Bloch was often in much demand as a toastmaster at conventions because of his wit— he wrote scripts for thirty-nine episodes of the 1944 radio horror show Stay Tuned For Terror, based on his own stories. After leaving advertising, he turned to free-lance writing full-time. Bloch was married twice, first with Marion Holcombe, with whom he had a daughter, Sally Francy. In 1964 he married Eleanor Alexander.

In 1959 Bloch received the Hugo Award at the World Science Fiction Con-vention for his short story “The Hellbound Train.” The following year he re-ceived the Screen Guild Award, the Ann Radcliffe Award for literature, and the Mystery Writers of America Special Scroll. He later served as that organi-zation’s president (1970-1971). “The Skull” received the Trieste Film Festival Award in 1965. He received the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society Award in 1974 and the Comicon Inkpot Award in 1975. The World Fantasy Convention presented him with its Life Achievement Award in 1975. He also received the Cannes Fantasy Film Festival First Prize for “Asylum.”Bloch earned several Bram Stoker Awards, granted by the Horror Writers Association, for his autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, (1994), for his fiction collection The Early Fears (1995), for his novelette “The Scent of Vinegar” (1995), and for lifetime achievement (1990). At the 1991 World Horror Convention he was proclaimed a Grand Master of the field. Likewise, the World Science Fiction Association presented Bloch with a Hugo Special Award for “50 Years as an SF Professional” in 1984. Bloch died of esophageal cancer in 1994.

Analysis • Robert Bloch began his writing career at age seventeen when he sold his first short story to Weird Tales magazine. His early crime novels The Scarf (1947) and The Kidnapper (1954) reflect his fascination with psychology and psychopathic behavior. Bloch was quite prolific and published Spiderweb and The Will to Kill, in addition to The Kidnapper, in 1954. He later revised The Scarf in order to tighten the ending and eliminate any sympathy the reader might have felt for the main character, a psychopathic killer. While Bloch’s efforts at the early stages of his professional career cannot be called uninteresting, they are flawed by a certain amount of overwriting which serves to dilute the full impact of the situation at hand.

In 1959, Bloch published Psycho, the compelling tale of Norman Bates, the owner of the Bates Motel. In his novel, Bloch brings together all the terrifying elements which have been present in his earlier works. Bates, like many of Bloch’s past and future characters, is an apparently normal human being. The citizens of Fairvale think he is a little odd, but they attribute this to the fact that he found the bodies of his mother and “Uncle” Joe after they died from strych-nine poisoning. 

Psycho has become the model for psychological fiction. The character of Norman has also become a model because he appears to be so normal. In fact, until near the end of the novel, the reader does not know that Mrs. Bates is not, in fact, alive. The part of Norman’s personality which is still a small boy holds conversations with Mrs. Bates which are so realistic that the reader is completely unaware of the split in Norman’s personality. The horror the reader feels when the truth is discovered causes the reader to rethink all previous events in the novel.One of the most successful scenes in Psycho occurs when the detective, Mil-ton Arbogast, goes to the house to speak with Mrs. Bates. Norman attempts to convince his “mother” not to see the detective. Bloch writes:“Mother, please, listen to me!”

But she didn’t listen, she was in the bathroom, she was getting dressed, she was putting on make-up, she was getting ready. Getting ready.And all at once she came gliding out, wearing the nice dress with the ruffles. Her face was freshly powdered and rouged, she was pretty as a picture, and she smiled as she started down the stairs.Before she was halfway down, the knocking came.It was happening, Mr. Arbogast was here; he wanted to call out and warn him, but something was stuck in his throat. He could only listen as Mother cried gaily, “I’m coming! I’m coming! Just a moment, now!” 

And it was just a moment.Mother opened the door and Mr. Arbogast walked in. He looked at her and then he opened his mouth to say something. As he did so he raised his head, and that was all Mother had been waiting for. Her arm went out and something bright and glittering flashed back and forth, back and forth—It hurt Norman’s eyes and he didn’t want to look. He didn’t have to look, either, because he already knew.Mother had found his razor. . . .The reader can clearly see from the above passage how convinced Norman is that his mother is indeed alive. It is also evident how skilled Bloch is at convincing his reader that a particular character is at least reasonably sane. A similar situation occurs in Psycho II, in which Norman Bates escapes from the state mental hospital. Dr. Adam Claiborne, certain that Norman is alive, even after the van in which he escaped has been found burned, goes to California to at-tempt to find Norman. 

By all accounts, Norman is still alive and leaving evidence to support this theory. In fact, Claiborne claims to see Norman in a grocery store. The reader is, however, shocked to learn at the end of the novel that Norman did indeed die in the van fire and that the killer is Dr. Claiborne himself. Again, the reader must rethink the events preceding the startling dis-closure.In none of his novels does Bloch rely on physical descriptions of characters to convey his messages. For example, the reader knows relatively little about Norman Bates. He wears glasses, is overweight, and has a mother fixation, among other psychological problems. By the end of the novel, the reader is well aware of Norman’s mental state. Before that, the reader, like the citizens of Fairvale, sees him as a little odd, even more so after the murder of Mary Crane, but the reader has no clue as to the extent of his problems until the end of the novel. This is what makes Norman, as well as the rest of the mentally unstable inhabitants of Bloch’s world, so frightening. Bloch gives the reader a vague physical picture of many of his characters so that the reader is left to fill in the details which make these characters turn into the reader’s next- door neighbors. Bloch’s antagonists could be anyone. 

appear normal or near normal on the outside; it is what is inside them that makes them so dangerous.In spite of Bloch’s talent, his novels are predictable. After one has read several, one can almost always guess the ending. While the reader is not always correct, he is normally quite close to discovering who the criminal is. The problem with predictability in works such as Bloch’s is that the impact of the surprise ending, to which he has given new life, is diminished when the reader had been reading several of his books in quick succession.Since the publication of Psycho, Bloch has written a number of novels and short stories, as well as scripts for such series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller. He has also written science-fiction novels and short stories. While Bloch became better known after the release of the film Psycho by Alfred Hitch-cock, it cannot be said that this novel is the “only” good novel Bloch has writ-ten. His style has tightened since his first publications, and Psycho marked his development from a merely good novelist to one who has achieved a lasting place in the genre.

While Bloch writes in the style of H. P. Lovecraft, his novels cannot be said to imitate those of Lovecraft. Lovecraft is known for gruesome tales guaranteed to keep the reader awake until the wee hours of the morning if the reader is silly enough to read them in an empty house. Bloch’s novels tend more to-ward the suspenseful aspects of Lovecraft without many of the gory details. Lovecraft gives the reader detailed accounts of the horrible ends of his characters. In Night-World (1972), Bloch simply tells the reader that a character has been decapitated and that his head has rolled halfway down an airport run-way. The nonchalant way in which Bloch makes this pronouncement has more impact on the reader than any number of bloody descriptions.Bloch terrifies the audience by writing about criminals who seem to be normal people. These are the people one sees every day. The crimes that these supposedly normal people commit and the gruesome ends to which they come have also become quite normal. Bloch’s reaction to the atrocities of society is to make them seem normal, thereby shocking the reader into seeing that the acts and ends are not normal, but rather abnormal and more shocking and devastating than people realize.

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Earl Derr Biggers

Born: Warren, Ohio; August 26, 1884

Died: Pasadena, California; April 5, 1933

Types of plot • Police procedural • master sleuth

Principal series • Charlie Chan, 1925-1932.Principal series character • Charlie Chan, a middle-aged Chinese detec-tive on the police force in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he advances from sergeant to inspector in the course of the series. He is short and stout, but agile. He solves his cases through patience, attention to detail, and character analysis.

Contribution • In Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers created one of the most famous fictional detectives of all time. The amusing Chinese detective with the flowery, aphoristic language became widely known not only through the six novels in which he is featured but also through the many films in which he appeared. There were in fact more than thirty Charlie Chan films made from 1926 to 1952, not to mention some forty television episodes in 1957, a television feature in 1971, and a television cartoon series in 1972. In addition, in the 1930’s and 1940’s there were radio plays and comic strips based on Biggers’s character. A paperback novel, Charlie Chan Returns, by Dennis Lynds, appeared in 1974. Charlie Chan has become an American literary folk hero to rank with Tom Sawyer and Tarzan of the Apes, and he has inspired the creation of numerous other “cross-cultural” detectives.

Biography • Earl Derr Biggers was born in Warren, Ohio, on August 26, 1884, to Robert J. and Emma Derr Biggers. He attended Harvard University, where he earned his B.A. in 1907. He worked as a columnist and drama critic for the Boston Traveler from 1908 to 1912, when he was discharged for writing overly critical reviews. His first play, If You’re Only Human, was produced in 1912 but was not well received. That same year, he married Eleanor Ladd. The couple had one child, Robert Ladd Biggers, born in 1915. His first novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), a kind of farcical mystery-melodrama, was exceedingly popular, and in the same year a play by George M. Cohan based on the novel enjoyed even greater success; over the years, it inspired five different film versions.In the next eleven years, Biggers was quite prolific. Aside from a number of short stories for such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, he wrote two short novels, Love Insurance (1914) and The Agony Column (1916), frothy romantic mysteries, and several plays, which enjoyed only moderate success. None of his plays was published. 

In 1925 Biggers came into his own with the publication of the first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key, first serialized, like all the other Charlie Chan novels, in The Saturday Evening Post. With the exception of one short novel, Fifty Candles (1926), after 1925 Biggers devoted himself exclusively to Charlie Chan, producing five more novels about him. Biggers died of a heart attack in Pasadena, California, on April 5, 1933. A volume of his short stories, Earl Derr Biggers Tells Ten Stories (1933), appeared posthumously.

Analysis • When Earl Derr Biggers wrote his first Charlie Chan novel, he had already been practicing his craft for a number of years. He had developed a smooth and readable colloquial style in the four novels and numerous short stories he had already published. In the several plays he had written or collaborated on he had developed a knack for writing dialogue. Thus, he was at the peak of his literary powers in 1925, when Charlie Chan first burst into print in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post . All of his preceding novels had some characteristics of the mystery in them, but they would best be described as romantic melodramas rather than crime novels.

The Charlie Chan novels, particularly the earlier ones, are invested with the spirit of high romance and appeal to the natural human desire to escape the humdrum of everyday existence. Thus Biggers chooses exotic and picturesque settings for them: a Honolulu of narrow streets and dark alleys, of small cottages clinging to the slopes of Punchbowl Hill, and a Waikiki that in the 1920’s was still dominated by Diamond Head, not by high- rise hotels. He makes abundant use of moonlight on the surf, of palm trees swaying in the breeze, and of aromatic blooms scenting the subtropical evening. The streets are peopled with quaint Asians and the occasional native Hawaiian; the hotel lobbies house the white flotsam and jetsam of the South Seas in tired linens.

The reader is introduced to the speech of the Hawaiian residents, peppered with Hawaiian words such as aloha, pau, and malihini. Then, a part of this romantic picture, and at the same time contrasting with it, there is the rotund and humdrum figure of the small Chinese detective. In three of the novels Charlie is on the mainland, seen against the fog swirling around a penthouse in San Francisco, in the infinite expanse of the California desert, and on the snow-clad banks of Lake Tahoe.There is also a strong element of nostalgia in Biggers’s works. One is re-minded, for example, of the good old days of the Hawaiian monarchy, when Kalakaua reigned from the throne room of Iolani Palace. Also, in San Francisco the loss of certain infamous saloons of the old Tenderloin is deplored, and in the desert the reader encounters the last vestiges of the once-prosperous mining boom in a down-at -heels cow town and an abandoned mine. Biggers delights in contrasting the wonders of nature with those of modern civilization, such as the radio and the long-distance telephone.

Parallel to the mystery plot, each novel features a love story between two of the central characters. The young man involved often feels the spirit of adventure in conflict with his prosaic way of life. This conflict is embodied in the person of John Quincy Winterslip of The House Without a Key, a blue-blooded Boston businessman who succumbs to the spell of the tropics and to the charms of an impoverished girl who resides in Waikiki. It is also present in Bob Eden of The Chinese Parrot (1926), the wastrel son of a rich jeweler who finds that there are attractions to be found in the desert and in connubial bliss that are not present in the bistros of San Francisco.

The heroines of these romances are usually proud and independent liberated women, concerned about their careers: Paula Wendell, of The Chinese Parrot, searches the desert for sites for motion pictures, while June Morrow, of Behind That Curtain (1928), is an assistant district attorney in San Francisco. They are torn between their careers and marriage and deplore the traditional feminine weaknesses. “I don’t belong to a fainting generation,” says Pamela Potter in Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), “I’m no weakling.” Leslie Beaton of Keeper of the Keys (1932) had “cared for a spineless, artistic brother; she had learned, meanwhile, to take care of herself.” Charlie makes no secret of his be-lief that a woman’s place is in the home. In fact, although he seems to admire all these liberated women, at one point he remarks. “Women were not in-vented for heavy thinking.” Still, as the reader learns in Charlie Chan Carries On, he sends his daughter Rose to college on the mainland.

The first two novels are narrated mainly from the perspective of the other characters, rather than from that of Charlie Chan. That enables the author to present him as a quaint and unusual person. When he first comes upon the scene in The House Without a Key, Biggers provides a full description: “He was very fat indeed, yet he walked with the light dainty step of a woman. His cheeks were as chubby as a baby’s, his skin ivory tinted, his black hair close-cropped, his amber eyes slanting.” When Minerva Winterslip, a Bostonian spinster, first sets eyes upon him, she gasps because he is a detective. In popular American lit-erature of the 1920’s, Chinese were depicted in the main either as cooks and laundrymen or sinister characters lurking in opium dens. Biggers consciously chose a Chinese detective for the novelty of it, perhaps inspired by his reading about a real-life Chinese detective in Honolulu, Charles Apana.

There is more than a little fun poked at Charlie in the early novels. His girth is frequently mentioned. He is self-deprecatory and polite to others al-most to the point of obsequiousness. He speaks in a bizarre mixture of flowery and broken English, leaving out articles and confusing singulars and plurals. The very first words he speaks in the series are odd: “No knife are present in neighborhood of crime.” Charlie confuses prefixes, as in “unprobable,” “unconvenience,” “insanitary,” and “undubitably,” one of his favorite words, and is guilty of other linguistic transgressions. He spouts what are intended to be ancient Chinese maxims and aphorisms at every turn, sometimes quoting Confucius: “Death is the black camel that kneels unbid at every gate,” “It is always darkest underneath the lamp,” and “In time the grass becomes milk.” He is often underestimated, even scorned, by the whites with whom he comes into contact—Captain Flannery of the San Francisco police in Behind That Curtain is particularly unkind.

In spite of the amusement with which Biggers writes of him, Charlie emerges as an admirable, sympathetic figure. He is kind, loyal, persistent, and tenacious. His Oriental inscrutability is misleading, as his “bright black eyes” miss nothing. In spite of his rotundity he is light on his feet and can sometimes act with remarkable agility. He is a keen student of human behavior—he has little use for scientific methods of detection, believing that the most effective way of determining guilt is through the observation of the suspects. “Chinese are psychic people,” Charlie is fond of saying, and he frequently has hunches that stand him in good stead. He possesses great patience, a virtue with which he believes his race is more richly endowed than other races.

Charlie was born in China, “in thatched hut by side of muddy river,” and at the beginning of the series has lived in Hawaii for twenty-five years. He re-sides on Punchbowl Hill with his wife, whom he met on Waikiki Beach, and children. Charlie has nine children at the beginning of the series (eleven by the end). In his early years in Hawaii Charlie worked as a houseboy for a rich family. In The Chinese Parrot, when he masquerades as a cook, he has a chance to practice his cooking, although he believes that kitchen work is now beneath his dignity. He also masters an outrageous pidgin English, although it hurts his pride when he must affect it.

In the course of the series Chan increases in dignity. He advances from sergeant to inspector, and his exploits become widely known. His English retains its quaint vocabulary but loses much of its earlier pidgin quality, except for the occasional omission of an article. While the earlier works are told mainly from the perspective of the other characters, in the later ones the story is often told from the perspective of Charlie himself. One reads what he sees and what passes through his mind. If this diminishes somewhat the quality of the super-human, it makes him more human, so that instead of viewing him with a combination of awe and amusement, one can more readily identify with him.

It is instructive to compare two scenes that take place in Charlie’s bungalow on Punchbowl Hill. In The House Without a Key he greets a visitor dressed inalong loose robe of dark purple silk, which fitted closely at the neck and had wide sleeves. Beneath it showed wide trousers of the same material, and on his feet were shoes of silk, with thick felt soles. He was all Oriental now, suave and ingratiating but remote, and for the first time John Quincy was really conscious of the great gulf across which he and Chan shook hands.In an amusing chapter in The Black Camel (1929), the reader encounters Charlie at breakfast. Here one finds that Henry, his eldest son, is a man of the world, or at least is making his way in the field of business, and speaks in a slangy manner that causes Charlie to wince. His two older daughters are more interested in the illusions of Hollywood than in anything else. They constitute a typical American family, in spite of their exotic origins. The reader also finds that Charlie’s wife speaks the kind of pidgin that Charlie so much de-cries in others and that he felt humiliated to have to affect when he was playing the part of the cook Ah Kim in The Chinese Parrot.

There is some continuity in the novels apart from the character of Charlie himself and a certain logic to justify Charlie’s forays to the mainland, where Biggers probably thought he would have more scope for his talents than in the sleepy town of Honolulu in the 1920’s. In The Chinese Parrot, he travels to San Francisco to deliver an expensive necklace for an old friend who had employed him in his youth. He also travels to the desert as part of this same com-mission. In Behind That Curtain, Charlie becomes embroiled in another mystery while waiting for the ship to take him home from the one he has just solved.

At this time he meets Inspector Duff of Scotland Yard, whom he later meets in Honolulu, where Duff has gone to ferret out the perpetrator of a murder which has been committed in London. When Duff is wounded, Charlie goes to San Francisco to catch the culprit. While in San Francisco he is hired by someone who has read in the papers of his exploits to go to Lake Tahoe to unravel a mystery for him.Biggers’s mysteries tend to have the same romantic nature as his settings. They tend to involve relationships from the past, long -festering enmities or complicated plans for revenge or extortion. While they are never so fantastic as to be completely unbelievable, they are not realistic either. Biggers em-ploys coincidence and such melodramatic devices as false identities, impersonations, chance encounters.In the spirit of the classical mystery of the 1920’s, Biggers more or less plays fair with his readers, allowing them to see clues that Charlie alone has the perspicacity to interpret correctly.

In the classical tradition, Charlie reveals the killer in the final pages of the work. Biggers is good at building suspense, often by placing the life of one of the sympathetic characters in jeopardy. The mys-teries are generally such that the reader has a strong idea as to the identity of the murderer long before the denouement, even if he cannot put his finger on the pertinent clue, and much of the suspense comes from waiting for the narrator to confirm a suspicion.In a sense, the mysteries are secondary. They serve as a kind of backdrop for the romantic setting, the love affair that unfolds as the mystery is solved, and, above all, for the personality of Charlie Chan.

It must be admitted that Charlie Chan’s status as a folk hero depends more on the cinema image projected by Warner Oland and Sidney Toler, and such catchprases as “number one son” and “Correction, please,” than on the character portrayed in Biggers’s books. Still, the series has a lasting charm derived from the peculiar combination of mystery, romance, and gentle humor that Biggers achieved—and of the nostal-gia they evoke for the Waikiki Beach and the Honolulu of the 1920’s.

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