Sat 25 Feb 2023
EARL DERR BIGGERS – The Chinese Parrot. Charlie Chan #2. Bobbs Merrill, hardcover, 1926. Reprinted many time, both in hardcover and paperback. Film: TCF, 1934, as Charlie Chan’s Courage,
The Charlie Chan stories are classics of detective fiction. However, classics of the past are not always to be read with enjoyment in the present. I reread The Chinese Parrot to see how well it holds its own with modern mysteries. My verdict is that it does so very well.
The many details which are of its own time add to the interest rather than detracting from it: the use of the telegraph, the “flivvers,” the ubiquitous Chinese “boys” as servants. The story is one of murder — surmised rather than known, an atmosphere of something wrong rather than a crime to be unraveled.
It progresses as theory after theory put forth by young Bob Eden is proven wrong by Charlie Chan’s detective work. It is most unbelievable when Bob continues to bend to Charlie’s plea not to hand over the pearl necklace which he is supposed to deliver.
Evidence of anything wrong at the Madden ranch is slim indeed; I have trouble believing that any impatient young man would procrastinate so on only the word of a Hawaiian detective he has never known before.
However, it is necessary to the story that he delay, so delay he does.And delay at last brings the story to a smashing conclusion. Dated? Yes, of course. Outdated? Never.
February 26th, 2023 at 3:22 am
I agree with the reviewer. We read Twain, or Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” from an even earlier date than 1926, and find no fault with them. I have not yet been able to detect why anyone applies ‘blanket’ criticisms to Biggers, or Rockwood, or Rohmer. Might be a specific, individual story here-or-there, may be executed in a way we’re not used to. I still do not blame the author or their timeperiod. Democratic feeling should be fair to everyone past or present. This new wave of fashionable lockstep intolerance wears me thin.
February 26th, 2023 at 10:53 am
This is the first Charlie Chan novel I read and I recall liking it quite a bit. I must have, because I went on to read all the others. The Popular Library reprints were pretty easy to find in the Seventies.
February 26th, 2023 at 11:49 am
Lazy,
A grand and thoughtful comment. More to come, no doubt.
February 26th, 2023 at 10:51 pm
My favorite Chan novel, with Charlie undercover as a Chinese cook taken to firing his revolver indoors. Charlie is a delight gently digging at the racism that allows his disguise and doing one of his best jobs of detection proving he what he was capable of.
I still hold CHARLIE CHAN CARRIES ON in high regard, but this one has more Charlie on stage more often than most of the novels and he is by turns brilliant and funny showing up everyone.
It also has a couple of Charlie’s better epigrams. You should be able to find the SATURDAY EVENING POST issues on Internet Archive that have the beautifully illustrated serial version too.
Because there are so few of them the Chan novels are probably the most consistently entertaining series of their era, there isn’t a misfire among them.
February 27th, 2023 at 12:29 am
It is one of tragedies of the world of detective fiction that Biggers was able to write only six Charlie Chan novels before he died, at the terribly young age of 48.
And yet how many Charlie Chan movies and TV shows have there been made? A wonderfully many. (Some better than others, of course.)