As a fan and follower for many years of all things Charlie Chan, I was pleased to read in Variety recently that a new television series based on the iconic Golden Age detective is in the works.
Quentin Lee and Josh Sager call their series “a proud reclamation of a complicated legacy . . . transforming a once-offensive cultural caricature into a complex, dignified protagonist for a new generation.” The reboot—featuring a stellar cast that includes Tzi Ma as Chan—reimagines Charlie as a Hong Kong immigrant to Vancouver, Canada; a retired police detective whose private investigation agency takes on “cases for the city’s overlooked and forgotten.”
Mystery fans unfamiliar with Chan’s 100-year history might wonder what past offenses the new series aims to address. As the new project’s creators put it, it’s “complicated.”
An Ohio native and already successful writer of light-hearted mystery-romance novels, Earl Derr Biggers wrote the first of six Chan novels in 1925. He initially inserted the detective as a minor character into The House Without a Key, later recounting that he had been inspired by a newspaper clipping recounting the exploits of Honolulu’s only Chinese police detective, Chang Apana.The notion of a heroic Chinese detective who solves the crime, Biggers wrote, would be something new; villainous Asian characters, e.g., Fu Manchu, were already far too common in the popular literature of the time.
Readers who embraced the wise, witty, and humble Chinese-Hawaiian-American father of eleven who outsmarted criminals and colleagues alike clamored for more. Biggers obliged, but it was forty-plus Chan movies in the 1930s and ‘40s (plus radio, TV, and other media adaptations) and their years of subsequent airing on local TV stations that turned Charlie into something of a cultural icon. Biggers’s books were themselves wildly popular, but “alas,” as Chan might say, the author's 1933 demise brought the detective’s literary exploits to an abrupt end.
More people were, and are, more familiar with the Chan movies than Biggers’s more complex character, and much cultural criticism has focused on their casting and the detective’s stilted speech. Practically all mass media portrayals of Chan (apart from three early films) featured white actors in makeup, and movie-radio-TV Chan spouted aphorisms that pleased some and offended others. In 1974’s Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Literature, its editors decried a dearth of published fiction and poetry by Asian-American writers. Chan’s popularity and influence, they posited, were part of the reason.
“[T]he pushers of white American culture,” they wrote, had “long ignored [Asian America] and forcibly excluded [it] from creative participation in American culture.” Biggers (“a subtly racist writer”), they argued, “created the modern Chinese-American . . . [a] fat, inscrutable, flowery but flub-tongued effeminate little detective.”
That was just the beginning.
By 2003, Asian-American group advocacy prompted Fox Movie Channel to rethink its planned showing of Chan films, and the greatly reduced series eventually offered to viewers added panel discussions with Asian-American academics and actors to “help promote understanding of the issues many Asian-Americans have with these films.”
In 2011, the (so-far) definitive examination of Chan came from Chinese-born Yunte Huang, academic and author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. In the award-winning book Huang sees both sides of the argument, but the “sage” detective, he wrote, should not be viewed as Chinese . . .
Charlie Chan is an American original, “made in the U.S.A.” . . . a wise, calm, responsible, and commonsensical man who also happens to be a hilarious wisecracker . . . an American stereotype of the Chinaman . . . a distinctly American brand, not a Chinese import . . . [epitomizing] both the racist heritage and the creative genius of this nation’s culture.
But Huang cautioned that, despite efforts by “many well-meaning Asian Americans” to “banish” the detective . . .
Charlie Chan is here to stay. He is an American folk hero in the same tradition of . . . complicated, nuanced characters such as [Mark Twain’s] Jim and Huck Finn, without whom American literature would be penurious.
And so the debate goes on, from the many Chan fans on social media and Huang’s book-length assessment, to Stanford University scholar Haiyan Lee’s 2016 journal publication. Her article, Lee writes, “seeks to make sense of the enigma of Charlie Chan by situating him at the intersection of critical legal studies, genre studies, cognitive psychology, and postcolonial critique.”
Charlie has become a serious scholarly topic. Biggers, it seems safe to say, would be astounded by the results of his attempt to simply create a memorable detective character.
My fondness for Chan and Sherlock Holmes dates back to youthful late-night TV viewing and trips to the local library. I read Biggers’s six Chan novels and other genre favorites for the first time and developed a love for the 1920-1940 Golden Age period.
Fast-forward to 2023: I began what has become a sustained effort to continue Biggers’s six-book timeline in a series of new novels. Taking up the detective, other assorted Biggers characters, and plenty of new ones, I penned a kind of “seventh” novel to continue the original series. Chan fans and other readers have responded favorably, and the fifth new Chan book, Destiny Laughing, will be issued by NKB Publishing in November.
To be sure, my version of Charlie does not (and cannot) replicate Biggers’s original, but I believe much of his essence is present along with something new, perhaps. (Careful readers may notice the absence of certain problematic elements more common to the films.) Fans and reviewers have been kind enough to embrace the effort, and I am happy to think that, in a modest way, these stories will continue to bring readers pleasure for some time to come.
The still popular old Chan is mostly free online now, and thanks to Messrs. Lee and Sager and Margin Films a new, more culturally intentional and appropriate Chan will soon triumph over his criminal foes in Vancouver. The world is big enough for both the old and the new.
Hopefully, more and different Chans are still to come.
John L. Swann is the author of the Charlie Chan Returns series. A native of the Midwest, he lives with his wife, Patricia, in a part of New York state where it snows a lot (but usually only in the winter). His fifth Chan novel, Destiny Laughing, will be issued by NKB Publishing in November 2026.
