Making the Detective Story American: Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925-1930

Making the Detective Story American

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Making the Detective Story American Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925 –1930 J.K. VAN DOVER

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY

OF

CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG

DATA

Van Dover, J. Kenneth. Making the detective story American : Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the turning point of the genre, ¡925–¡930 / J.K. Van Dover. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4895-1 softcover : 50# alkaline paper ¡. Biggers, Earl Derr, ¡884–¡933 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Van Dine, S.S.— Criticism and interpretation. 3. Hammett, Dashiell, ¡894–¡96¡—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Detective and mystery stories, American—History and criticism. 5. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. PS374.D4 V35 20¡0 8¡3'.087209 — dc22 20¡0007¡44 British Library cataloguing data are available ©20¡0 J.K. Van Dover. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover ©20¡0 Shutterstock Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the memory of Virginia Godfries Van Dover, 1920–2008

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to Lincoln University for employing me from mid– August until mid–May every year since 1978, leaving me the summers (and a sabbatical in 2006–07) to work on projects like this. My colleagues and my students at Lincoln both inside the English department and without have made the past 30-odd years rewarding ones. As I began to write about Earl Derr Biggers, Willard Wright, and Dashiell Hammett, I was given the opportunity to deliver a lecture course surveying the development of the genre of the detective story to the students of the English department at the University of Vienna. I am grateful to the Austrian Fulbright Commission (and especially to Lonnie Johnson) for providing me with this opportunity, and to Professor Waldimar Zacharasiewicz, his assistant Elizabeth Damböck, and all the Anglisten for so warmly welcoming me to their department. Lincoln University participates in New York University’s Faculty Resource Network, and I have profited from the June seminars on the literature of the 1920s and the literature of New York held at NYU. The Bobst Library was a valuable resource. I am also grateful to the Morris Library of the University of Delaware, which has, for decades, been my principal recourse for research. The University of Iowa Library was also helpful. I should also like to thank friends who have discussed detective stories (and much else) with me. John Jebb knows and teaches detective fiction; we have been talking about the genre for decades. Bruno Thibault knows and teaches French literature and has come, perhaps, to appreciate the detective story, as I have come, perhaps, to appreciate French literature (in translation). Our exchanges are necessarily uneven: what are Ronsard, Labé, Molière, Rimbaud, Proust, and Le Cleszio when set against Poe, Conan Doyle, Hammett, Gardner, and Chandler? Admit Gaboriau, vii

Acknowledgments

LeBlanc, and Simenon; I reply, Chesterton, Christie, Carr, Higgins, Leonard, Grafton.... Yet we remain friends (des amis). Juan Alonso and Viola Thomas have also listened with patience, and though I cannot really claim any credit, I can observe with satisfaction that Juan’s latest novel seems to venture into detective story territory (and with provocative results). Finally, as is customary, but is no less sincere for being customary, I am pleased once more to be able to thank my wife, Sarala. Her spirit, her grace, her wit — she is a wonder. I can only hope that when the final measurement of my life is taken, the points are awarded to teams and not to individuals. Andrew and Lara are no longer children, but are no less essential parts of my life. My mother died last year. Both she and my father had a strength of character that has made the line “There were giants in the earth in those days” so meaningful to me. I dedicate this book to her.

viii

Table of Contents vii

Acknowledgments Preface

1

1. Introduction: The Detective and the 1920s

7

2. He Used to Be a Highbrow: Intellect, Taste, and the Detection of Crime in the 1920s

30

3. No Chinaman: Ethnicity and the Detective in the 1920s

66

4. Ripped from the Headlines: Translating Sensational Crime Fact into Popular Crime Fiction in the 1920s

97

5. Enterprising, Flippant, Hard: Young American Women in Detective Fiction of the 1920s

124

Appendix A: Three Brief Biographies Oh Yes, There Was a Man Named Earl Derr Biggers Willard Wright (S.S. Van Dine) Dashiell Hammett

145 164 178

Appendix B: Mystery and Detection Bestsellers, 1925 –1935

186

Appendix C: Films Based on the Works of Earl Derr Biggers, S.S. Van Dine, and Dashiell Hammett

190

Chapter Notes

197

Bibliography

211

Index

217

ix

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Preface The last two decades have seen a remarkable advance in criticism of detective fiction. In the early 1980s, the major approaches to the genre could be collected in two volumes: Twentieth Century Views of Detective Fiction (1980, edited by Robin Winks) and The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory (1983, edited by Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe). These might be supplemented by two works from the 1940s by Howard Haycraft: his collection of essays, The Art of the Mystery Story (1946) and his history of the genre, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. Julian Symons’s Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (1972, revised 1985; original American title: Mortal Consequences) provided an intelligent and more recent survey of the development of the genre. And then there were the enthusiast’s vade mecums: works such as Jacques Barzun’s and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1976), or Dilys Winn’s Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion (1977), or Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler’s Encyclopedia of Mystery & Detection (1976). And finally there were the biographies of individual writers — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett. But by the early 1980s, there were also appearing booklength academic studies that were bringing more sophisticated analytic approaches to the genre. Colin Watson (Snobbery with Violence, 1971); William Ruehlmann (Saint with a Gun, 1974); John Cawelti (Adventure, Mystery, Romance, 1976); Robert Champigny (What Will Have Happened: A Philosophical and Technical Essay on Mystery Stories, 1977); David I. Grossvogel (Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie, 1979); Stephen Knight (Form and Ideolog y in Crime Fiction, 1980); Dennis Porter (The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideolog y in Detective Fiction, 1981); Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok (The Sign of Three, 1983); and Ernest Mandell (Delightful Murder: 1

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A Social History of the Crime Story, 1984) were among the heralds of the new scholarship that would fill library shelves with analytical surveys of the genre broadly defined, and with specialized studies of particular aspects of the detective story: the detective story and forensic science, the detective story and religion, the detective story and imperialism/postcolonialism, the detective story and ethnicity (African American, Chicano, Jewish, Native American), the detective story and the working class, the detective story and postmodernism, the detective story and film (especially film noir), the detective story and regionalism, the detective story and alcohol. And, above all, the detective story and gender: women, masculinity, sexual orientation. Every year now sees the publication of several significant new studies of the genre, and more and more individual detective-story writers are seeing their works subjected to book-length critical scrutiny. When I first began studying the detective story in those innocent early 1980s, it was possible in a single summer to read every book-length work written about the genre — both the brilliant and the pedestrian — as well as most, if not all, of the journal articles. A summer will no longer suffice. And although one might, in one’s private moments, hope that some — many — of these new late-20th and early-21st-century views of detective fiction could be dismissed as tendentious excrescences of the Ph.D. industrial complex, in fact, they are not. Most continue to provide provocative new analyses of standard texts by Poe, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Sayers, Chandler, Hammett, Himes, Macdonald and equally provocative analyses of contemporary writers whose detectives are still in mid-career. The standard of the scholarship is high. I have, in the past, made my own gestures toward rethinking aspects of the genre and its popularity, but in Making the Detective Story American I am not proposing a new ideological reading of the detective fiction, or even of the three writers I am focusing upon. I am not pursuing a thesis. Rather, I am making the experiment of selecting a small but crucial sample of the genre — a half-decade’s work by three key American detective-story writers — and trying to trace the threads of their attachment to their times. Of course, I am drawing upon these recent decades of research as I talk about ethnicity and gender and method in the work of Earl Derr Biggers, S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright), and Dashiell Hammett. Like anyone who presumes to write on the genre today, I stand on 2

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the shoulders of giants. But my focus is narrowly upon these three authors and their fictions, 1925–1930. The selection of the authors and the half-decade is easily defended. The 1920s were, even during the 1920s, recognized as some sort of watershed in American culture. The economic foundation of the change can be traced backward into the 19th century, and the transformation of high culture certainly had its roots earlier in the 20th century. But it was in the 1920s that the changes reached the kitchens and the garages and the hemlines of average Americans. And it was in the 1920s that the detective story made its most decisive turn. Sherlock Holmes was not yet dead, but, as Conan Doyle continued to publish the stories that would be collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), it was clear that he was living off his gas-lit past. In England and America there was a new and enticingly large audience for detective novels, and, in response to this new demand, there emerged a new generation of detective story novelists, nearly all English: R. Austin Freeman, Agatha Christie, A.E.W. Mason, Freeman Wills Croft, Dorothy Sayers. Their works would inaugurate the “Golden Age,” in which crime is depicted as an aberration in an orderly world, in which the murderer is a crafty manipulator of appearances, and in which the detective is a clever and well-bred amateur. This version of the detective story would persist as the standard form until World War II, and it has continued to be popular enough to sustain careers into the 21st century. Earl Derr Biggers and S.S. Van Dine were the most successful of the early American contributors to the Golden Age model. Willard Wright sought conscientiously to construct his novels to this model’s specifications, and he was, for a moment, regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as the epitome of the detective story writer. Earl Derr Biggers was slightly more eccentric. His detective was not an amateur and, more importantly, was not a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. But the Charlie Chan novels fit the model in other respects. And Biggers, like Wright, was writing bestsellers. If America was to have an influence in the turning of the genre, Biggers and Wright were odds-on the Americans to watch. But, as everyone now realizes, there was a dark horse in the race. Dashiell Hammett had begun publishing detective stories in Black Mask in October 1923. He was still publishing short stories in Black Mask in 3

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1925 and 1926, when Charlie Chan and Philo Vance first appeared in novels. Not until November 1927 would Hammett begin to serialize a Continental Op novel, and not until 1929 would Red Harvest be published in book form by Knopf. But it would be Red Harvest, joined by The Dain Curse (1929) and The Maltese Falcon (1930), that forever changed the genre by replacing the “great good place” and the erudite amateur of the Golden Age novels with the mean streets and the private eye of the hard-boiled novel. The hardness of the hard-boiled novel would, by the 1960s and 1970s, be softened, but for most detective novelists today, the essential scene of the detective story is still the street, not the vicarage library; the detective is still the cop or the private eye, not the well-bred amateur. So while the chauvinist eyes of most American detective story readers were, in the second half of the 1920s, concentrated on the extraordinary exploits of a cynical New York aesthete and a deferential Honolulu police sergeant, it was the unnamed operative of the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency who was changing everything. While Biggers and Wright were trying to take back American ownership of the standard model detective story — it was, after all, the American Edgar Allan Poe who had started it all — it was Dashiell Hammett who was shifting the paradigm. By setting the works of Biggers, Wright, and Hammett in the contexts of their times — the intellectual context, the sensational context, the racial context, and the gender context — I hope to explore why Biggers and Wright were thought to succeed, and why Hammett succeeded. I began this study with three impulses. I came to Earl Derr Biggers fairly late. When I finally read the first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key, in 2000, I was astonished at what a good novel it was. I was probably over-impressed, but even upon re-reading, I find it to be a well-crafted and thought-provoking narrative. The later Chan novels revert to norm — they are readable Golden Age novels, though each has unusually rewarding moments. I have always felt I ought to like the Philo Vance novels more than I did. I kept finding that I very quickly found completing each novel more a task than a pleasure. John Loughery’s biography of Willard Wright only increased my distress: Wright was in some respects a despicable man, but in many respects he was heroic. His novels deserved to be liked. Re-reading them in sequence has been, I can honestly say, more 4

Preface

pleasurable than the random first readings that I found so onerous. They are not worthless curiosities. And finally, I have always thought that I ought to confront Dashiell Hammett in some way. In 1975, I read Julian Symons’ weighing of Hammett and Chandler in Bloody Murder. Symons came down for Hammett, so I naturally determined to favor Chandler. It is not, I hope, any longer adolescent perversity that keeps me on the side of Chandler. Chandler’s stories and novels seem to me still to be the gold standard. But Hammett was Marlowe to Chandler’s Shakespeare. And there was nothing but pleasure in re-reading all of Hammett. It would have been possible to select other moments in the history of the genre for study; it would have been possible to expand this crosssection to include developments in England, 1925–30, or, for that matter, France, 1925–30. But the focus on the two American false starts — false starts, not failures: whatever the degree of pleasure derived from reading the novels of Biggers and Wright, they are important contributions to the development of the genre — and the one American triumph of the second half of the 1920s surely justifies itself. Reading the three of them carefully can help us to understand the way that one of the most popular genres of fiction would develop in the 20th century, and perhaps can also provide some insight into the way that American popular culture as a whole was moving in the American Century.

5

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1

Introduction The Detective and the 1920s Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Damn it, it was the Twenties, and we had to be smarty. — Dorothy Parker

i By 1930, Philo Vance was the American detective. Beginning with the publication of The Benson Murder Case in 1926, S.S. Van Dine’s extraordinarily popular series of annual Murder Cases had made the highbrow detective an icon. The Harvard-educated aesthete who guided Manhattan’s district attorney to the correct solution of baffling homicides was, it appeared, at least the peer of England’s Sherlock Holmes, and, given his footnoted expertise in all manner of esoteric topics, perhaps even Holmes’s superior. Of course, the expertise and the footnotes and the air of superiority could be a bit much. And by 1930 there were also signs of doubt about a Harvard-educated aesthete as the embodiment of the American detective. Parodies of Vance were appearing in print (“The Pinke Murder Case” by “N.O.T. Von Dime,” The John Riddell Murder Case by Corey Ford) and on the screen (Ub Iwerks’s cartoon, Flip the Frog, in The Cuckoo Murder Case). In 1930, the man behind S.S. Van Dine — the Harvard-educated aesthete Willard Huntington Wright — could read his royalty statements and afford to be amused by the parodies. When Ogden Nash published his widely-reprinted couplet, “Philo Vance / Needs a kick in the pance,” Wright enjoyed the joke, and even quoted it in a footnote to The Winter Murder Case (1935). 7

Making the Detective Story American

But Nash’s lines now serve as Vance’s (and Van Dine’s and Wright’s) epitaph. By the time that the final Philo Vance Murder Case appeared in 1939, it was the clear judgment of the American audience for detective fiction — the audience that Vance had created — that Philo Vance did need a kick in the pance. American readers could embrace egg-head detectives if they claimed an English or a Belgian nationality; and they might even embrace an American egg-head, if he toned down the arrogance, dropped the footnotes, solved really impossible crimes, and called himself Ellery Queen. But the American detective would be a man who was definitely not an egg-head, who had not been to Harvard, who did not require footnotes; the American detective would be a hard-boiled blond Satan who, had he ever met Philo Vance, might well have administered the needed kick. Though his debut in 1930 was not entirely overlooked, Sam Spade was at the time certainly overshadowed by Philo Vance. Yet within the decade, it would be Spade and a deluge of hard-boiled epigones who would permanently establish the new model of the fictional American detective. What the readers of the 1920s, with eyes educated by Conan Doyle, thought they had found in the novels of S.S. Van Dine (and perhaps in those of Earl Derr Biggers), the readers of the 1930s found in fact in the novels of Dashiell Hammett. Van Dine (and Biggers) had tried to write an Americanized Sherlock Holmes, and had enjoyed notable success. Hammett had tried to write an American detective, and he changed everything.

ii The 12-year Republican ascendancy between Woodrow Wilson’s experiments with progressive reforms and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s experiments with New Deal economic engineering was advertised by the Republicans — in the slogan of their 1920 candidate, Warren G. Harding — as a “Return to Normalcy.” When, in November 1920, an unprecedented majority of Americans (60.3 percent) cast their ballots for Harding and Calvin Coolidge, they declared their unambiguous intention to reorient the nation away from the idealistic pursuit of social change — from the crusades, domestic and foreign, of Woodrow Wilson — and back to the 8

1. Introduction

policies that would reinstate business, not reform, as the business of America. By assuring the nation that he was no innovator — indeed, that he was in most respects as unoriginal as any other citizen — Harding was able to bring into office with him increased Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. America — including for the first time its newly enfranchised female citizens —firmly declared itself tired of novelty. And yet, the decade that Harding (and his Republican successors, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover) oversaw as president has entered history as a decade of shocking novelty: they were the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance. And each of these epithets reflects a sense of dynamic, roaring change. Flappers and bootleggers, flivvers and victrolas, nudes descending staircases and jazz: unsettling novelties were everywhere, in the headlines and in daily life. Frederick Lewis Allen, writing his history of the twenties, Only Yesterday, in 1931, was already confident that the prior decade had constituted a watershed in American social, cultural, and economic history. The physical and mental world into which the average American citizen awoke on any given morning in 1929 was, Allen argued, a very different one from the world into which he or she would have woken in 1919. An increase in disposable income and the economies of mass production meant that how Americans lived (and, given the phenomenal success of Henry Ford and his emulators, where Americans lived — and, some moralists observed, even where Americans were conceived) had been altered dramatically.1 And the emergence of new entertainment industries — book clubs, magazines, but above all the new media of radio and cinema — meant that the ways Americans entertained themselves (and the lifestyles that those entertainments promoted) were radically altering the expectations of the citizens, especially the young citizens, of the new consumer society.2 These visible, lowbrow changes in daily life were mirrored by equally dramatic changes in the ways the intellectuals were learning to interpret the world. Paul Johnson opens his survey of 20th-century history with a precise dating of the beginning of the new age: “The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse ... confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe” (Modern Times, 1).3 The confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and its subsequent universal acceptance seems to be a genuinely revealing turning point. Even when scientific rel9

Making the Detective Story American

ativity is disallowed as an exact metaphor for cultural relativism, Einstein’s undermining of Newton’s authoritative explanation of common perceptions of the stability of time and space was a notable moment in the larger project of the intellectual vanguard: “Marx, Freud, Einstein all conveyed the same message to the 1920s: the world was not what it seemed” ( Johnson, 11). This prospect, which was liberating to many elite thinkers and artists, might be unsettling to the common readers, as its implications percolated outward and downward, from their precise meanings in the physics of Einstein, the sociology of Marx, and the psychology of Freud into the less precise usages of popular discourse. To citizens disturbed by rapid and seemingly endless innovations in their material world — innovations at once irresistible and often of questionable morality — the thought that behind the visible dizziness of 20th-century life lay mysteries penetrable only by the specialty tools such as dialectical materialism, psychoanalysis, and quantum mechanics, offered little comfort. And the new conclusions — that even with these tools, one could expect to establish only relativities and uncertainties — added to the new disquiet. It may not, then, be entirely a coincidence that lay readers in the 1920s took up with renewed enthusiasm a genre of literature that presented advanced thinkers — cerebral detectives — who reliably delivered definitive answers to a crucial question: whodunit? The detective’s conclusions were unqualified by indeterminate factors of class-consciousness, or the return of the repressed, or the position of the observer. And the detective arrived at his certainties in a credibly modern world: unlike popular backwardlooking genres (Westerns, chivalric romances) or forward-looking genres (science fiction), the detective story was set in cities and villages and resorts that readers could imagine visiting themselves (and would reach by consulting the same railway timetables that the detective consults). These fables of certain knowledge were so popular in Britain and America in the 1920s that historians of the genre have labeled the decade “the Golden Age of the Detective Story.” The Great Detective favored by Golden Age writers was, of course, the antithesis of Warren Gamaliel Harding; in politics Americans might expect to recover normalcy through an all-too-normal senator from Ohio; in fiction, however, it was clearly more interesting to see normalcy restored by a retired Belgian policeman with a luxuriant moustache or by a second son of the lesser nobility who collected incunab10

1. Introduction

ulae and dropped his g’s. Nonetheless, the abnormal Poirot and Wimsey promised the same result as did Harding: they would restore normalcy to a world disrupted by murder. And they always delivered. The roll call of celebrated detective story novelists who established their reputations in the 1920s is an impressive one: A.E.W. Mason, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, H.C. Bailey, Ronald Knox, Philip Macdonald and many others, all British, and all practicing the country house, guilty vicarage sort of detective story that so captivated W.H. Auden.4 Not only did the plot invariably conclude with undoubted answers to all questions, the milieu in which the action took place was also comfortingly familiar: “it should be the Great Good Place”: “The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do — or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum” (Auden, 151). Golden Age mysteries usually take place in spaces that have not been traumatized by history — estates and villages and resorts where signs of continuity — vicars, butlers, maids; lawns, hedges, libraries; holiday rituals and social customs — prevail. On the one hand, the Styles Court to which Hercule Poirot retreats in Agatha Christie’s first novel is definitely set in an England of 1918: it is the Great War that has made him a refugee from his native Belgium.5 But although Styles Court has adjusted to the automobile and telephone, it is a Great Good Place. The normalcy that is restored in the Golden Age mystery is a normalcy of a world that is somewhat greener and somewhat younger than the world its readers inhabit; and for American readers, it is usually an ocean away. Though they would never even see a vicarage, Americans could still be shocked by the corpse discovered in the vicar’s library (“shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet,” Auden, 151), and they could still be pleasantly relieved when the detective explains why (and when and how) this English corpse wound up on this English carpet.

iii But if America lacked suitable vicarages, might not native writers find other Great Good American places in which to place shocking corpses? 11

Making the Detective Story American

On 11 July, 1930, The New York Times editorial page seized the occasion of the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle four days earlier (7 July) to remark that American detective story writers had done just that. No longer would “normalcy” necessarily be pronounced with an Oxbridge accent in detective fiction. The westward course of empire now applied even in the preeminent genre of popular literature. The editors began by — at the very moment when Christie, Crofts, Sayers, et al. were producing their masterworks — deploring the prevailing standards in the genre. Readers, the Times sniffed, could no longer be certain that their two dollars would purchase them narratives that were “perceptibly superior” to those stories marketed for a dime to the patrons of pulp fiction. Fortunately, the editors observed, American talent and ingenuity were coming to the rescue of the enervated old world, which was unable to supply a virile heir to Sherlock Holmes. Exempting G.K. Chesterton as more sui generis than English, the Times reported with satisfaction that “We may say that the best writing of this kind in the sustained average is done in this country” (18). As the first item entered in evidence, they singled out Melville Davisson Post’s very American Uncle Abner stories for special praise. But Post, who had died in June, had actually predeceased Conan Doyle; and nearly all of the Uncle Abner stories which constituted his claim to eminence in the genre had been published in The Saturday Evening Post between 1911 and 1917, and had been collected in a volume published as long ago as 1918 (though Post did publish three additional Abner stories in 1927 and one in 1928). And even in a jingoist mood, the Times could not pretend, whatever his excellences, that Uncle Abner stood shoulder to shoulder with the immortal Holmes. Post’s stories might have heralded America’s emerging claim to the territory of the fictional detective, but the full realization of that claim would have to rest on other, younger shoulders. The Times offered an explanation for America’s failure hitherto to match England’s level of play in this field of literature: America is not England. Echoing Henry James’s explanation for the ultimate feebleness of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s achievement in fiction,6 the Times explained that the American detective-story writers must operate without one specific advantage exercised by their English competitors, and that is the English scene. 12

1. Introduction As a setting for murder, there is a rich quality about a Tudor mansion that is not to be had in a Long Island country home. A house standing in its own grounds in Surrey carries more shivery promise than a house standing in its own grounds in Westchester. And the English nobility obviously furnishes more great psycho-pathological facilities than our own absurdly healthy millionaire class [13].

American writers were thus handicapped by a paucity of historic buildings and historic families and a surfeit of happiness. All American healthy millionaires are blandly alike; it is the psychotic English nobleman and his pathological English wife who are each homicidal in his and her own fascinating way. And with what, after all, other than millionaires, has an American detective story to do?7 And so, the Times concluded, American detective story writers must “devote considerable effort to dimming the familiar American lights down to the proper ghostly flicker before proceeding with the murder.” Melville Davisson Post had dimmed the American scene as best he could; if he could not discover a Tudor America, he could at least locate his Uncle Abner stories in the western frontier of early 19th-century Virginia, a setting safely devoid of healthy millionaires. Uncle Abner’s world of pioneers is genuinely American, yet it satisfies the Times’ call to de-familiarize the scene. But, as the Times’ editors must have known, the real achievement of a truly American detective fiction called for a more challenging de-familiarization. If they were to wrest the genre from the English hegemons, American writers would need to dim the lights in 20th-century America. They would need to find usable Great Good Places in contemporary American scenes—if not in Long Island or Westchester, then perhaps in Manhattan, or Honolulu, or New England. At least that is where the living writers whom the editors cited as examples of the current American insurgency were now setting their detective stories. Against E.C. Bentley, H.C. Bailey, A.E.W. Mason, A. Christie, and D. Sayers,8 the Times proposed the triumvirate of “S.S. Van Dine, EARL DERR BIGGERS and MARY ROBERTS RINEHART,” acknowledging that while they might not place in the company of Chesterton and Post, they were performing “on a lower but still entirely competent level,” and competence, the Times implied, sufficed to leave Bentley, Bailey, Mason, Christie, and Sayers eating American dust. The reader who pays two dollars for a novel by one of these three Americans could be sure of a gratifying return on his or her investment. 13

Making the Detective Story American

Mary Roberts Rinehart (celebrating her 54th birthday in 1930) was the senior member of the trio. She had published her first best-selling mystery novel, The Circular Staircase, in 1908, and by 1930 had placed eight other books on the Publisher’s Weekly bestsellers lists. The Circular Staircase is a landmark in the genre, her novels are both readable and revealing, and Rinehart has, in recent years, received some attention from scholars. But her combination of sentimental melodrama, decorous language, and mysterious old houses has often led to her being dismissed as the mistress of the “Had-I-but-known” corner of the cozy detective story, and even by the time of the editorial, it was clear that she was committed to the style which was now marked as quaintly old-fashioned.9 She dimmed the lights by the most traditional of methods: though her narratives are full of sharply observed detail, they often rely upon the motifs of gothic fiction to provide the shivery effects in the isolated houses that her spunky girls and spunky spinsters find themselves inhabiting. These motifs even extend, in a novel such as The Red Lamp (1925), to including communications from (possibly) the spirit world. The distinction between the achievement of Rinehart and that of Biggers and Van Dine can perhaps be seen in the nature of their respective extra-literary success. Charlie Chan and Philo Vance both transferred their appeal to the cinema (as, of course, did Sherlock Holmes), which was, in the 1920s, becoming the medium for popular culture. Rinehart’s work did not enjoy success in Hollywood. The Circular Staircase was made into a silent film in 1915, but it was the theatrical version produced on Broadway (retitled The Bat) that received the most acclaim. Broadway matters and Rinehart matters, but it would be Biggers and Van Dine who would compete to inherit the mantle of Conan Doyle, producing detectives that the world would embrace. Biggers and Van Dine were at most a half-generation younger than Rinehart (they were 46 and 43 respectively in 1930), but they were consciously modern American writers, though they approached the modern reader with opposite intentions. Biggers had devoted himself to attempting to please his middle-brow audience with fashionably amusing plays, stories, and novels; Van Dine (as Willard Wright) had spent a decade and a half attempting to infuriate his middle-brow audience with aesthetic screeds against the Encyclopædia Britannica, the booboisie, and representational painting. And Biggers and Wright took different approaches to 14

1. Introduction

dimming the American lights and locating their stories in a place that was authentically 20s America, but which also offered the “rich quality ... that is not to be had in a Long Island country home” and which furnishes great “psycho-pathological facilities” comparable to those furnished by the English nobility. Biggers chose not to set his detective novels in his own native Midwest or his adopted northeast, where so many of America’s “absurdly healthy millionaire class” were making their fortunes and building their mansions. The primary detective in the first Charlie Chan novel is a young Boston Brahmin, John Quincy Winterslip, but the narrative immediately thrusts him westward, first to the San Francisco household of a somewhat disreputable but very wealthy relative, and then on to Honolulu, where he undertakes to discover the murderer of a very wealthy but quite disreputable relative. This relative, Dan Winterslip, is, as it happens, “absurdly healthy”: “he was sixty-three ... but only the mass of wavy white hair ... betrayed his age.... Deep-chested and muscular, he could have passed on the mainland for a man of forty” (4). But Dan Winterslip had not made his fortune by what the Times or its readers would have recognized as “healthy methods”— he was not an exploiter of industrial labor. He was a “blackbirder,” ferrying “contract labor”— in effect, little more than slave labor — to plantations around the South Pacific (46). But neither is he simply a pathological villain; Biggers sets him up as an attractively open exile from New England, contrasting him with his unappealingly puritanical brother. And as John Quincy Winterslip immerses himself in the investigation of Dan’s death, he immerses himself in what was still, in 1925, an exotic world for mainland Americans. Charlie Chan’s Waikiki Beach is edged with bungalows, not high-rise hotels. It is an American world — Charlie Chan and a few servants are the only non–Anglos in the novel — but a peculiarly American world.10 The servants are Chinese or Japanese. And, of course, so is Honolulu’s premier detective. And thus Biggers achieved the Times’ desideratum. If Hawthorne overcame America’s paucity of country gentlemen, palaces, thatched cottages and little Norman churches by situating his fiction in an allegorized landscape of the Puritan past, Biggers overcame the dullness of Long Island’s American normalcy in the 1920s by pushing his detective to the West Coast, and then beyond. The second and third Charlie Chan nov15

Making the Detective Story American

els take place in the California desert and in San Francisco; the fourth (The Black Camel, 1929) returns to Hawaii. None of Charlie’s investigations brings him east of California. So the second of the Times’ American successors to Sherlock Holmes is not native-born, is not Anglo-Saxon, spends only a few weeks of his life on the North American continent; he is emphatically American, but he is Chinese American; if he does not recite pseudo–Confucian aphorism with the frequency of the cinema Chans, Biggers’s Charlie Chan does indeed quote the sage, and very definitely identifies himself with the culture of China. It is, he asserts, his uniquely Chinese qualities —“Chinese most psychic people in the world” (10.97), “Patience are a virtue” (19.194)— that underlie his success as a detective. Charlie Chan’s distinctive character, impressive as it is for its time, is, however the series’ only real distinction. In the five novels that followed The House Without a Key, the other characters in the mysteries do become rather routine American millionaires surrounded by routinely plucky American girls and routinely enterprising young men, all of them caught in routinely complicated plots. S.S. Van Dine’s detective, Philo Vance, also claims a distinctive method, one based on advanced psychological and aesthetic principles, as well as a distinctive — to many readers, an irritatingly distinctive — character, but these are the sum of his distinctions. Vance travels in a small universe of Manhattan millionaires, and while, probably to their distress (and certainly to his), neither he nor they would be mistaken for Englishmen, they are not representative Americans either. They — Vance and the victims — are more eccentric than unhealthy, and their eccentricities tend to be copied after English originals. Their mansions and penthouses not only lack the “rich quality about a Tudor mansion” and the “shivery promise” of a house standing in its own grounds in Surrey; they tend to consist of schematic surfaces drawn to facilitate incomprehensible crimes, and do not represent interesting, or even plausible, American scenes. What Van Dine offered was a small palette of special appeals: Vance’s posturing as a cosmopolitan übermensch, however irritating, is memorable. And Van Dine quickly began the practice of garnishing each murder case with esoteric contexts — quantum physics, Egyptology, pedigree dog-breeding. The first two Philo Vance novels, adapted as they are from actual, celebrated New York City homicides, may have an American air about them — at 16

1. Introduction

least, a New York City air about them; the remaining ten novels might as easily be set in London. And, except to a small band of philo–Philoists, none of the Vance novels have had a lasting appeal. But if the Times’ July 1930 proclamation of America’s annexation of the realm of detective fiction was unjustified, it was not wrong. Almost five months earlier, Alfred A. Knopf had published The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s third novel. While they might be forgiven for not noticing Hammett’s six-year long apprenticeship in Black Mask, The New York Times’ editors might surely have noticed when the New York publisher of writers such as Willa Cather, Wallace Stevens, and Thomas Mann issued Hammett’s two Continental Op novels (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse) in 1929, and his Sam Spade novel in 1930. In Red Harvest, Hammett supplied the watershed answer to the problem posed by the Times’ worry over absurdly healthy American millionaires living in sunlit, unshivery Westchester or Long Island. Red Harvest takes place in Personville, an ugly mining town located in Montana, near the Continental Divide. Personville’s millionaire is the reprehensible Elihu Wilsson, a sickly, old man who employs gangsters to discipline the workers whom he exploits to extract profit (and ugliness) from his mines. Red Harvest may not be the Marxist tract it has sometimes been read as, but it is new in its social and economic realism. There is in Personville nothing of the arcadian Great Good Place that typified the English Golden Age detective novel — no Tudor mansion, no vicarage. It is a desolate scene of raw nature and raw industrialization: set in “an ugly notch between two ugly mountains” is a city of 40,000 that smelters had “yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess” (5). There is here no paradise to be regained. Personville is not a place where Golden Age detective stories of the sort Auden preferred could take place. The Times had deplored America’s excess of healthy millionaires and looked for American detectives who could practice their art — the cerebral English art — of detection despite that excess. Dashiell Hammett found that unhealthy American millionaires and unhealthy American cities could provide the scene for the exercise of a different art—a vigorous (and at times vigilante) American art—of detection. And this would be the model for the new hard-boiled model of the detective story: the fable of an uneccentric detective using willpower, not intelligence, to correct a particular injustice in a world where, as one of Raymond Chandler’s policemen would say, it is naïve to expect the American legal system to apply the 17

Making the Detective Story American

same standards to well-connected gangsters and white collar criminals (“flashy well-dressed mugs like Eddie Mars”) as it does to small-time grifters (“poor little slum-bred guys that got knocked over on their first caper”): “You and me both lived too long to think I’m likely to see it happen. Not in this town, not in any town half this size, in any part of this wide, green and beautiful U.S.A. We just don’t run our country that way” (743–44). It is, in the end, this vision — this dark vision — of how we run our country that became the hallmark of the American detective story. What Hammett and the hard-boiled writers that followed him did was immerse the detective in the destructive element, and that is what has made all the difference. If English (and Swedish and Mexican, etc.) writers of detective stories today look to America for inspiration, it is not Post, Rinehart, Biggers, and Van Dine that inspire them. They are not hoping to invent updated Tudor mansions and Surrey country homes; they are hoping to translate Personville into its English/Swedish/Mexican equivalent. The United States was becoming the metropole of detective fiction in the 1930s, but it was the San Francisco of Hammett and the Los Angeles of Chandler — not Westchester County or Long Island, not Honolulu or Manhattan — that supplied the paradigmatic scenes. The detectives would become private eyes, and the millionaires who employed them would be neither uncommonly healthy nor uncommonly wealthy; they would be rich enough to employ a private eye, and so to start him on his exploration of the tensions that underlay lives of the citizens in the multi-ethnic milieus of the modern megalopolis. America seized the detective story not by discovering a new American field of genteel homes and degenerate home-owners, but by proving that ordinary people committing crimes for ordinary motives and by ordinary means in ordinary places could be as interesting (and perhaps a great deal more meaningful) as any over-thought homicide committed by a barrister with Polynesian dagger in a locked room in a vicarage. The art of murder, as Chandler would write, might be simple, much simpler than the Times in 1930 could imagine.

iv Nonetheless, the way that detective fiction looked to The New York Times in June 1930 can help us to see more clearly what the Times could 18

1. Introduction

not see: we can better appreciate the invisible achievement of Dashiell Hammett by contrasting it with the visible (to the Times) achievements of Biggers and Van Dine. All three writers used the essential formulas of a formulaic genre to produce narratives that their contemporaries would purchase. Each provided in every tale a crime, a detective, an investigation, and a solution. And all three were good enough writers to engage themselves with at least some of the topical issues of the day. Wright and Hammett were men of strong conviction, and while neither would be as overtly polemical in his detective stories as he would be in his extra-fictional commitments, both would certainly use their detective narratives to convey their considered impressions of American civilization in the 1920s. Earl Derr Biggers would never be much of a polemicist, and the Charlie Chan novels are generally light in their social commentary, but Charlie Chan’s world does reflect some of the significant problems that troubled the decade. The relation of ethnic heritage to American identity is, of course, a paramount concern, but generational conflicts, the new autonomy of young women, the influence of the cinema — these are issues that also trouble Charlie Chan’s world. All three writers, then, proposed to instruct as well as to entertain, and for all three, entertainment was the priority. But Biggers and Wright understood “entertain” within the existing generic paradigm. Adopting the Golden Age model of the detective story, they kept their commentary at the periphery of the narrative. The central plots, characters, and scenes of their mysteries would be standard: a tangled skein of clues that would be unraveled by a Great Detective; involving largely upper-middle-class victims, villains, and suspects (with a liberal sprinkling of eccentricities); and set in an island of limited access where suspicion could be focused on a few. Biggers added least to the conventions, though by the single decision to make the principal authority in the conventional plot of detection a Chinese man, it might be said that he altered everything. In this sense, it was Wright who changed nothing at all. Philo Vance is peculiar, but in the way all Great Detectives are peculiar. Wright’s innovation was to use the bully pulpit of a Great Detective — a man who is, by convention, an infallible authority — to broadcast a version of his own high-minded American taste and morality. Philo Vance is clearly a mouthpiece for Wright’s renewed philippics against the booboisie. He might in some degree be a 19

Making the Detective Story American

caricature, but his pronouncements were meant to be received as serious judgments. Despite this light touch of caricature, Vance’s pronouncements were soon found tiresome by readers, and — either as a concession to those readers, or because Wright’s own indignation was exhausted — diminished as the series went on. Hammett developed a new paradigm. He did away with the Great Detective, the arcane clues (and arcane poisons, icicle daggers, unknown twins, etc.), the mannered eccentricities, the Great Good Places.11 The Continental Op encountered, as Raymond Chandler famously said, the kind of Americans that commit murder “for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish” (989). Hammett’s characters are, as a rule, closer to average Americans than any of the characters (detectives, victims, or suspects) in Golden Age novels. They are, to be sure, above average in their homicidal impulses — a murder mystery demands murderers. But in their occupations and their passions, they are relatively ordinary. There is less distance between them and the reader.12 Hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish are not inherently English (even in London they cannot be very common murder weapons), but Hammett’s detectives almost always discover a very American .38-caliber bullet in their corpses. And those corpses are usually found on the street (or perhaps in an office or a kitchen), not in a vicarage, not in a locked room, and very definitely an American street. No one could mistake Charlie Chan’s Honolulu or Philo Vance’s New York for London, but a Londoner might well have written a comparable Honolulu or New York. A London writer could not have written Personville, or Sam Spade’s San Francisco.

v A brief example of the ways that the three writers engaged with their decade may be useful. In 1929, Biggers, Wright, and Hammett each published a series detective novel that featured an element of the occult. Charlie Chan and Philo Vance are untroubled by these seeming intrusions of the supernatural into their world, and justifiably so: they remain wisely aloof, and in the end, the solution to the mystery involves no appeals to 20

1. Introduction

the paranormal. The Continental Op also finds that, in the end, human and material causes suffice to explain everything, but he has had to wrestle — literally — with apparent manifestations of the occult. The manifestations were manufactured, but the wrestling was real. The 1920s had seen the rise to prominence of a number of new, heterodox religious movements, and, in reaction, a series of journalistic exposés of the abuses committed by cults.13 The origins of the trend are complex. They can be seen as the final phase of what has been called the Third Great Awakening in America (1890–1920). They can also be seen as part of a reaction to the massive influx of Catholics and Jews that was perceived by many as threat to traditional (i.e. WASP) American identity. Certainly some of the new denominations — Alma White’s Pillar of Fire Church and William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of America, for example — traded in a vigorous anti–Semitism. Other new churches offered unsettled and dislocated Americans a path to certain knowledge of an afterlife. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s missionary commitment to Spiritualism throughout the 1920s was certainly impelled in part by the loss of his son (and so much of his son’s generation) in World War I. Membership in Spiritualist churches had dropped from 35,000 in 1906 to 23,000 in 1916; by 1926, it exceeded 50,000 ( Jenkins, 79). And some of the new churches (such as Frank B. Robinson’s New Scientific Religion) offered comfort of a more practical nature, promising through the power of positive thinking to provide believers with concrete success in this world. Bruce Barton’s portrait of Jesus Christ as the prototype of the self-promoting businessman, The Man Nobody Knows, topped the American bestseller list in both 1925 (#4) and 1926 (#1). The character of the cults that prospered in the 1920s was, as a consequence, various. Aimee Semple McPherson arrived in California in 1918; by 1925, her Church of the Foursquare Gospel had secured her a 5,000 seat church in Los Angeles, a radio station, and a personal fortune. Father Divine (né George Baker, in New York, was profitably preaching his own “repersonified and rematerialized” Godhood by 1915 ( Jenkins, 82). The Theosophists had discovered Jiddu Krishnamurthi in Adyar, India, in 1909, had brought him to England in 1911 and finally to California in 1922. Benjamin Purnell founded his House of David cult in Michigan 1905, and, amid charges of sexual misconduct, disappeared in 1923. Edwin J. 21

Making the Detective Story American

Dingle rechristened himself Ding Lei Mei and opened his Institute of Mentalphysics in California in the 1920s. In New York, Pierre Bernard would run his Sanskrit College as “Oom the Omnipotent.” Frank B. Robinson, in Idaho, announced that he had spoken with God and been instructed to inaugurate a New Scientific Religion, called Psychiana; for $28.00 would-be initiates could receive ten lessons. Bishop Alma White founded the Pillar of Fire Church (the Holy Rollers) in Denver in 1901; in the 1920s she was making common cause with the Ku Klux Klan. R. Swinburne Clymer of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, rose through the ranks of the Rosicrucians, becoming the Supreme Grand Master of Fraternitas Rosae Crucis in 1922 and establishing a subordinate Order of the Holy Grail. This proliferation of these alternative avenues of worship (and the scandals that seemed regularly to accompany them14) made the topic a current one in the 1920s. And Biggers, Wright, and Hammett would incorporate it into their detective fiction in different ways. When movie star Shelah Fane arrives in Honolulu in the fourth Charlie Chan novel, The Black Camel (1929), her entourage includes Tarneverro, a fortune-teller who, Charlie Chan reports, has a “vast reputation as one who lifts dark veils and peers into uncertain future” (25). The mysterious Tarneverro (portrayed by Bela Lugosi in the 1929 film adaptation of the book) appears to be Chan’s antitype, proposing to disclose the future through magic as the detective discloses the past through analysis. As it turns out, however, Tarneverro is in fact a detective too. He is actually Arthur Mayo, brother of Hollywood director, Denny Mayo, who had been murdered three years ago. To pursue his own investigation into the unsolved crime, he adopted the persona of Tarneverro: Gradually I became impressed by the number of seers and fortune-tellers of various sorts in Hollywood.... In my younger days I had been an assistant to Maskelyne the Great.... I had some talent in a psychic way, had told fortunes as an amateur and had the nerve to carry the thing through. Why not, I thought, take an impressive name, set myself up as a crystal-gazer, and by prying into Hollywood’s secrets, seek to solve the mystery of poor Denny’s death [263].

In the end, then, the mystical Tarneverro is not a future-oriented alternative to the backward-looking detective; he is an alternative type of detective, one who uses disguise instead of analysis.15 He is, in fact, successful in identifying the murderer of his brother; he is not, however, successful 22

1. Introduction

in preventing Charlie Chan from identifying the woman who murdered his brother’s murderer. Tarneverro thus serves several functions in the novel. He is, of course, a suspicious character who might be the villain. He is a special foil to Charlie Chan. And, as a dark seer, he provides a stimulating whiff of Babylonian sulfur to Biggers’s cast of Hollywood characters. The East Coast was not without its cults — Father Divine and Oom the Omnipotent were New York City ornaments — but it was California that was (and still is), in the popular imagination, the locus of unorthodox new belief systems. Willard Wright does not have Philo Vance contend with new age seers and cults, but, in The Scarab Murder Case (1929), Vance does find himself immersed in an atmosphere of ancient Egyptian religion. Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun in 1922 and his 1924 lecture tour of the United States had led to a period of Egyptomania in America, and it was this that Wright chose to exploit. The Scarab Murder Case involves the murder of an Egyptologist by another Egyptologist (and the eventual murder of the murderer by an Egyptian). Wright makes some effort to evoke Egyptian mysteries: the body of the first Egyptologist is found at the feet of a life-size statue of Anubis, the god of the underworld, and the murder weapon proves to be a smaller statue of Sakhmet, the goddess of vengeance. Vance, whom S.S. Van Dine reveals to be deeply versed in Egyptian lore, reports, “The Egyptians believed in her violent power; and there are many strange legend’ry tales of her dark and terrible acts of revenge....” The ominous ellipses end Chapter 2, but rather than develop the aura of a curse, Wright seems more intent on demonstrating Philo Vance’s intellectual mastery of Egyptological detail — chronologies, mythologies, aesthetics. Instead of juxtaposing the detective’s adamantly rational principles of investigation against the superstitious responses of secondary characters (as Agatha Christie would do more than once), Wright prefers to demonstrate that his detective — and of course, he himself— are well-informed savants who can dispute matters such as the interval between the 12th and 18th Dynasties of the New Kingdom. Vance’s authority is the principal concern; the 1920s fad of pharaohs and mummies provided a fashionable topic that allowed the detective to demonstrate his command of esoterica. Hammett would use the decade’s eruption of cults for more substan23

Making the Detective Story American

tial purposes. His first experiment came in the short story, “The Scorched Face” (1925). Investigating the disappearance of a pair of debutantes, the Continental Op is led to a house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The building turns out to be the headquarters of Hador, priest of Alzoa. Guarded by large black men wearing fezzes, zouave pants, and slippers, the place supplies respectable young women with drugs and with rooms in which to engage in orgies. Those women who attempt to escape the cult are blackmailed with photographs. The story ends with Hador dead and the Op and his policeman buddy burning all the files and photos in an iron stove. A melodrama with sex and drugs was, of course, de rigueur in Black Mask, and Hammett makes no attempt to shade Hador’s villainy or to explain the appeal of his cult, other than to give him a confederate named Elwood, a sleek young real estate agent whose assignment was to date young women whom he could introduce to the cult. Why young women in the 1920s would find drugs, orgies, and a “freeing of the spirit from the flesh” (CS 388) appealing enough to return “again and again, for weeks, months” (389) before rebelling (and then being blackmailed) is not explored. But Hammett certainly presents the cult as a destructive and unredeemed evil. The Temple of the Holy Grail, which becomes the central scene of the second quarter of The Dain Curse, is in all respects a more complex affair. Aaronia and Joseph Haldorn, actors living on an income below that to which they feel themselves entitled, founded the cult specifically to prey on a few wealthy, gullible women. With a stage mechanic named Fink they convert a six-story apartment building in San Francisco (having concluded that Los Angeles offered too much competition) into their temple, replete with secret rooms and concealed apparatuses. There is a tension between Aaronia, who provides the intelligence, and Joseph, who presents the priestly front and who eventually comes to believe in his own persona — “There is no Joseph.... You may now know, as the world shall soon know, that he who went among you as Joseph was not Joseph, but God Himself ” (CN 275). The appeal of the cult to Gabrielle Dain, the Continental Op’s client, is not accidental. Gabrielle has been told that there is a curse on the Dains, and the events of first quarter of the novel, in which her father and stepmother are murdered, give her reason enough to believe in the curse. She is, then, a troubled young woman who, having been 24

1. Introduction

introduced to the temple by members of her parent’s circle of friends, naturally finds solace in the spiritual home that the Haldorns happily provide her. Even her well-intentioned doctor, acknowledging that the couple are charlatans, advises permitting her to stay with the Haldorns as a therapeutic measure. And it is only when Joseph comes to see Gabrielle not as a source of income but as a source of sexual gratification that the narrative reaches its crisis. Hammett is clearly playing on the actual events of the 20s. The Temple’s name echoes that of Swinburne Clymer’s Rosicrucian order. Joseph’s proclamation of his own Godhood recalls Father Divine. And his near seduction of Gabrielle plays on the cult sex scandals of 1926 (Warien Robertson, founder of the Temple of the Gospel of the Kingdom) and 1927 (Benjamin Purnell, leader of the House of David). The Op encounters characters who refer to actual cults and religious figures of the 1920s: the Holy Rollers and The House of David (CN224), Aimee Semple McPherson, Frank Buchman, and Jiddu Krishnamurthi (CN279). Biggers exploited a Hollywood stereotype, Wright exploited a cultural fad, Hammett exploited the recent headlines. On the one hand, the action of Hammett’s narrative thus acquires a melodramatic (and Black-Mask-pleasing) color that neither Biggers nor Wright desired in their detective fiction; on the other hand, Hammett can explore aspects of character — the effect of the occult on a vulnerable girl, on a tough detective, on a besotted cult priest — that, with less credit, Biggers and Wright also desired to avoid in their detective fiction.

vi The following chapters focus on four aspects of the detective fiction of Earl Derr Biggers, Willard Wright, and Dashiell Hammett. Chapter 2 explores the problem of the intellectual detective. In the person of Auguste Dupin, Poe established what has come to be recognized as the Great Detective model: the eccentric man of genius, taste, and unlimited learning, who can solve puzzles that baffle the pedestrian minds of police. American readers had shown themselves eager to embrace this model, to the profit of the publishers of the tales of European detectives 25

Making the Detective Story American

such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, but also of Americans like Craig Kennedy and the Thinking Machine. Charlie Chan belongs to this tradition; Philo Vance is the ne plus ultra of this tradition. But, as has often been observed, a strain of anti-intellectualism runs deep in American culture. And the stories of Dashiell Hammett, with the militantly unintellectual, working-stiff detective known only as the Contintental Op, provided the American reader with a hero who could tell who’s been good and who’s been bad without also being able to quote Nietzsche or Confucius or Crebillon fils. Chapter 3 focuses on Earl Derr Biggers’s attempt to inform the average American reader about one Ohio Caucasian’s sense of what it is like to be an authoritative Chinese man in a xenophobic America that was, in the 1920s, undergoing a spasm of remorse for the open-door immigration policies that had changed, much too dramatically for some, the complexion of the American citizenry. The generic detective was white. Authoritative non–Caucasians had had, hitherto, no place in the genre. There are, certainly, problems with the ethnic authenticity of Charlie Chan, but Biggers’s construction of a Chinese detective should be examined on its merits, not simply dismissed as inexcusable racism. Wright and Hammett never made race a central issue in their fiction, but when it does appear, it too takes interestingly orientalist forms. Chapter 4 looks at the way detective story writers used sensational events from contemporary history to add interest to their stories. Though the custom was to set the classical detective story in a timeless Great Good Place, Biggers, Wright, and Hammett each made distinctive use of specific American moments. Wright, in particular, chose to make the characters and the plots of the first two Philo Vance novels imitate those of a pair of actual unsolved New York City murders that had occupied the headlines for months in the 1920s. Biggers and Wright were less explicit in exploiting current events, but they too drew upon sensational factual crimes to shape their fictional narratives. Biggers alluded to a celebrated Hollywood homicide in The Black Camel, and Hammett, who knew actual crime best, used a notoriously violent moment in American labor relations — the Anaconda strike of 1917 — as the basis of Red Harvest. Chapter 5 briefly surveys the different ways that the three writers responded to the phenomenon of the new model of the young American 26

1. Introduction

woman that emerged in America and in American literature in the 1920s. Biggers efficiently integrated her into the tradition of self-reliance and enterprise that had been the code of the young American man for decades. American women, Biggers accepted, would now be as happily out-going and as autonomous as American men, as long as, when they reached full maturity, they subsided back into dependency and home-making. Wright’s young women were enterprising only in their gestures of rebellion against the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability. But they too moved inexorably toward the ultimate state of traditional marriage. It was Hammett who produced a diversity of types of American womanhood, and who set many of them on paths that did not lead to happy marriages. The first appendix provides biographical sketches of the lives of the three writers. That of Earl Derr Biggers, because it is the least well known, is as detailed as possible. Wright has been the subject of an excellent biography by John Loughery, and Hammett’s life has been examined by a number of biographers; still it may be useful to set sketches of their lives against that of Biggers. The second and third appendices provide tables that measure the three writers as best sellers and as inspirations for Hollywood.

vii Why attend to these writers now? Hammett has remained relevant in the 21st century, but Wright is a forgotten figure, and if Biggers is remembered, it is only as the racist who presumed to put on a yellow face. The MLA International Bibliography cites a respectable 247 items written about Hammett between 1935 and 2009. The number for Wright is 15 (8 specifically for S.S. Van Dine) and for Biggers, 13. (By contrast, the number for Conan Doyle is 1310, with 589 specifically related to Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie counts 176; Mary Roberts Rinehart 12; and Melville Davisson Post, the Golden Boy of The New York Times, only 3.) The MLA numbers probably get it right. Hammett is the important writer. He can be read and reread with pleasure and profit. He had ambition, and he had accomplishment. He caught the American scene in an American language, and he deserves his current status. There is vigorous debate about which of his novels is the greatest: The Maltese Falcon is most commonly selected, 27

Making the Detective Story American

but Red Harvest and The Glass Key claim many advocates. Even The Dain Curse and The Thin Man reward study. And all of Hammett’s fiction, novels and short stories, are written with a sharp ear for American English and a sharp eye for the little observations and assumptions that reveal the attitude of Americans in the 1920s toward the exercise of power in political, social, and sexual relations. Hammett seems to have got things right. And Wright and Biggers deserve theirs. Wright was all too conscious that, after two decades of trying to edify the avant garde with high-minded polemic, his detective stories were conceived as commercial prose, designed to satisfy the expectations of middle-class readers who demanded certain returns on their two-dollar investment in a Scribner’s book. Biggers, without ambition or shame, was merely continuing his lifelong practice of pleasing the mid–American readership that The Saturday Evening Post had so assiduously cultivated. Writers who genuflect to the taste of a mass audience, unless they are born in Stratford-upon-Avon, are likely to produce literature of ephemeral interest. Even if one suspends judgment on the propriety of a white Anglo Saxon taking a Chinese American as his protagonist (an impossible suspension for many, it seems), five of the six Charlie Chan novels are routine Golden Age detective stories. Biggers’s fluency, earned by years of pleasing audiences in theaters and readers of magazines, makes his novels painless to read, and they are occasionally pleasing in their well-phrased good humor. But it is only the figure of Charlie Chan that raises them above the average of the hundreds of detective stories. The initial novel, The House Without a Key, however, rises well above the average. It is, indeed, excellent in its kind. It should be read. That the Philo Vance novels were once seen as the new gold standard in the genre now seems incredible. It is not just that they look backward (and across the Atlantic Ocean) for their style. Wright’s plotting is probably no less strained than that of Biggers, and, to be sure, Hammett’s vivid language and emphasis on action often mask plots that are also thick with coincidence and thin with motivation. But Wright’s understanding of the mechanics of the detective story allowed him to set up extremely artificial situations and obligated him to make only the slightest gestures toward credible motivation. Nor does he reward the reader with either smart dialogue or striking description. He does not even aim at the transparent 28

1. Introduction

fluency of Biggers’s prose. He deliberately cocks a snoot at American English. And as a result, the modern eye cannot see the sparkle of the Philo Vance novels. Yet they do have their virtues and are not mere curiosities, even if they are primarily curiosities. The Benson Murder Case is as good as any in the series, and will provide a fair introduction to Willard Wright’s virtues and vices as a writer of detective fiction. The Bishop Murder Case has been recommended as a high point; it certainly illustrates the artificiality that Wright took to be the essence of a mannered genre. Of the remaining ten novels, The Greene Murder Case has some of that artificiality while lacking the silliness, and The Gracie Allen Murder Case, though it has been cited as evidence of the utter exhaustion of Willard Wright’s integrity as an artist, is interesting precisely for his capitulation to the requirements of cinema, but also for his late attempt to face Philo Vance with the post–Little Caesar gangster.

viii Finally, a few notes. It was “S.S. Van Dine” who wrote (and narrated) the Philo Vance novels, but it was the life of Willard Huntington Wright that lay behind “S.S. Van Dine.” Because this study seeks to set the detective fiction in the context of the history lived by the authors, and S.S. Van Dine did not live in history, it must be Willard Wright who is set against Earl Derr Biggers and Dashiell Hammett. The author of the Philo Vance novels is referred to as “Wright”; the narrator of the Philo Vance novels remains “Van Dine.” The works of Dashiell Hammett are now readily and reliably available in the two volumes published by the Library of America in 1999 (supplemented by the 2001 publication of Nightmare Town). Neither Biggers nor Wright has been so fortunate; references to their novels are to available editions. For the reader’s convenience, I have tried to cite chapter numbers as well as page number. Thus the citation (2.23) means the quotation is found in Chapter 2 of the novel, on page 23 of the edition I had at hand.

29

2

He Used to Be a Highbrow Intellect, Taste, and the Detection of Crime in the 1920s i Willard Huntington Wright had indeed been an American highbrow. He had, by 1923, established himself as an avant garde aesthetician in the city that had established itself the intellectual center of the nation. He had seized the mantle with enthusiasm. An émigré from Santa Monica, California, he had arrived in New York in 1913 to take over the editorship of The Smart Set (“The Magazine of Cleverness”) with the intention of transforming it into a journal of the most advanced literary thought. To match his appearance to his ambition, he had shaved the beard which he had thought lent gravitas to the 25-year-old face he had presented to the readers of the Los Angeles Times, and replaced it with an ostentatious, waxed, upturned, Kaiser-Wilhelm moustache. In the photograph that introduced him to The Smart Set readership, he looked, says John Loughery, like “a forty-year-old Prussian aristocrat, a prematurely balding but energetic, self-assured, slightly unsavory man” (5). The Kaiser was not yet the universal bogeyman he would become in a year or two, as America moved toward entering the First World War on the side of the French and British, but the provocation was unmistakable. Willard Wright was not a homely, white-bearded Fireside sage; he did not regret the ocean that separated him from “our old home”; he would not truckle to moribund English traditions and tastes. He was, he announced as he introduced himself to his readers in February 1913, one who had “for years ... waged war against effeminacy and formalism in American letters” (qtd. in Dolmetsch, 34). 30

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He was young; he was masculine; he was militant; he was elitist; he had a high brow (“prematurely balding”). Willard Wright would be Mrs. Grundy’s (or Aunt Polly’s) Teutonic nightmare.1 Wright’s desire to unsettle the middle class complacencies of the reading public was, of course, in some measure an expression of the épater le bourgeoisie spirit which had infected so many young men and more and more young women since the 19th century romantics had set about shocking their elders. His defiance was more immediately tied to what Henry May has called “The Innocent Rebellion (1912–1917),” embodied in what May termed the Liberators (Europeans like Nietzsche, Freud, and Wells), the Poets (largely Midwesterners — Floyd Dell, Sherwood Anderson, Harriet Monroe, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandberg, Vachel Lindsey — but also figures like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell), the Intellectuals (the Ashcan school of painters — Robert Henri, John Sloan, et al.; Alfred Stieglitz; the Provincetown Players; and a cohort of Young Intellectuals who came to New York City from, primarily, Harvard University: Walter Lippmann, Van Wyck Brooks, John Read, Malcom Cowley, Harold Stearns, Edmund Wilson, Randolph Bourne). The rebellion aimed to move beyond the polite cultural establishment, embodied — and all too easily despised — in what was dismissed as the “smiling” realism of W.D. Howells. Howells had been feted at a New York dinner in honor of his 75th birthday in 1912; he was the “Dean of American Letters”; he had, as he said in his speech to an audience that included the president of the United States, known everyone who had mattered in American letters (everyone, he conceded, but Irving, Cooper, Poe, and Prescott). Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, Bryant, Bancroft, Stowe, Howe, Ward, Twain, Parkman: Howells had known them all. And they were all, to the Rebels, the submissive house servants of their English masters. Within five years, “The Innocent Rebellion” had declared all of them not worth knowing, or, at least, no longer relevant to modern America. Wright’s character led him to cast his participation in the rebellion in distinctly intellectual terms. May mentions Wright briefly among the Liberators, citing his effort to follow the Armory Show’s revelation of European modernist painting with the Forum Show’s celebration of American modernist painting, and earlier had noted, somewhat slightingly, Wright’s 31

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ambitions for The Smart Set. Aside from his brief alliance with Ezra Pound, Wright’s only sustained association with the “Rebels” was through the circle around Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keefe and, briefly, through the “Young Americans” led by Van Wyck Brooks. But if in most accounts of the intellectual ferment of the 1920s Willard Wright figures as bit player, he was a player; if his efforts to reshape American culture were ultimately less fruitful than those of May’s other Rebels, they were not fruitless, either, and they do constitute a creditable record of an original mind struggling to impose its views. In I Used to Be a Highbrow, but Look at Me Now, Wright declares that he began writing at the age of four, and that he had completed a novel by the age of nine. He was always a writer, but except for A Man of Promise, published in 1916 (and rumors of pseudonymous potboilers littering certain phases of his career), Wright was not a novelist until he initiated the Philo Vance saga in 1926. Wright was a polemicist — against the American grain as he found it and for the ideas he believed could redeem it. H.L. Mencken was his model and, for a time, his mentor; one of Wright’s happiest moments during his year with The Smart Set must have been the one when Mencken and Nathan invited him to collaborate with them in composing the diatribes of “Owen Hatteras.”2 Hatteras’s column in The Smart Set became a bludgeon that Mencken, Nathan, and Wright could swing against the philistines; Hatteras disparaged sentimentalism; reformism; all types of supernaturalism; preachers, politicians, publicists, and professors (Dolmetsch, 36). Intoxicated, Wright was soon out–Menckening Mencken. By the end of 1913, when Wright’s commitment to new writing and new thinking was placing him more and more at odds with the conventional-minded publisher of The Smart Set, Mencken — the scourge of the booboisie — found himself vainly trying to moderate the excesses of his protégé’s denunciations of the threadbare material of American culture and his proposals for the forms the new fabric should take. Wright’s positive accomplishments in his one-year term as editor of The Smart Set were, in fact, impressive. He published some fiction whose only virtue lay in its touching on certain forbidden topics, mainly sexual; but he also selected writing that touched on new topics in new ways: stories by Floyd Dell, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and 32

2. He Used to Be a Highbrow

Arthur Schnitzler, poetry by Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Gabriele d’Annunzio, and Ezra Pound, and plays by Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, August Strindberg, Andre Brieux, and Frank Wedekind. Wright was making a conscious effort to stimulate American thinking by drawing upon new European, not just English, voices. Following his expulsion from The Smart Set, Wright continued to belabor American readers with demonstrations of their provinciality. Though he retained no salaried position for more than a few months at a time between 1914 and 1926, and often lived on the gullibility of strangers, Wright’s fury drove him into endless confrontations with the obstinate dullness of his contemporaries. He compiled and introduced an anthology of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose thought he and Mencken (and many others) took to be one of the most effective weapons against the pieties of the time. He enlisted in Mencken’s campaign on behalf of Theodore Dreiser’s The “Genius” (1915), soliciting anti-censorship letters from other writers and intellectuals. He wrote an autobiographical novel featuring an ambitious young intellectual tamed to a small college professorship by philistines, especially female philistines. He associated himself with the Young America movement of Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, publishing three articles in their journal, The Seven Arts. He wrote a brief polemic denouncing the Encyclopædia Britannica (especially the new promotion of the encyclopedia as a talisman of superior culture for the middle class) as a scandalous emblem of the intolerable subordination of American (and European) culture to the insular British definitions of all the knowledge that needs to be known. He followed this with another, slighter polemic promoting the Britannica’s competition, the American New International Encyclopedia. And he edited a collection of stories translated from the French. Willard Wright, living in straitened circumstances throughout the decade, was doing what he could to demolish the old comforts and to introduce new ideas. And especially with his polemics and his anthologies, he was attempting at least to address a wide audience. Admirable as his intentions may have been, there appears to have been little lasting merit to any of this work. The Nietzsche book enjoyed a measure of influence for a time, but no Nietzsche scholar consults it today. The novel was stillborn in 1916, and was no more successful when 33

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the celebrity of Philo Vance led to its reissue in 1929. The encyclopedia polemics testify more to the impressively inexhaustible wrath and wide reading of the author than to the reprehensible (or admirable) intentions of the encyclopedia-makers. Not until his visit to his brother’s first painting exhibition in Munich did Wright discover the field in which he could not only exercise his intellect, but exercise it to the permanent advantage of American culture. The synchromist movement in painting — Stanton Macdonald Wright and Morgan Russell, sole proprietors — became a cause that Willard Wright first espoused, then comprehended, and then promoted. Willard had been as disdainful as of “modern” art as any son of Mrs. Grundy when, in March 1913, he visited the famous Armory Show in Manhattan. Regarding Duchamps’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” he wrote back to his wife: “It’s too deep for me,” and he expressed more interest in the prices the paintings were going for than their revolutionary impact on art (Loughery, 68). But when, in autumn of the same year, he saw the exhibition of representational and non-representational painting that his brother and Russell held in Munich, and read their manifesto declaring “synchromism” the inevitable successor to Impressionism, the scales fell from Willard’s eyes, and he dedicated himself to proclaiming the ascendancy of the new art in America. Initially influenced by Stanton (who seems to have contributed to the writing some of the pieces published under Willard’s name, and, after Willard’s death, claimed authorship of many of them), Willard organized an important exhibition in New York, the Forum Exhibition, March 1916, which featured among others, Thomas Hart Benton, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Charles Scheeler, and, of course, Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. He also composed program notes, wrote countless reviews for art journals, and produced three significant books — two specifically on painting (Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, 1915 and The Future of Painting, 1923), and one general treatise on aesthetics (The Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy and Syntax of Aesthetics, 1916). His work had an immediate and significant impact on a specialist audience — painters such as Thomas Hart Benton and Georgia O’Keeffe3 (as well as, of course, Stanton Macdonald Wright and Morgan Russell), and on impresarios in the art world — he was on intimate terms with men like Alfred Stieglitz and Mitchell Kennerley. He seized occasions to advocate the new work of artists 34

2. He Used to Be a Highbrow

such as Man Ray, John Marin, Elie Nadelman, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and Abraham Walkowitz — all names which art historians, looking backward, have recognized as important new talents. Wright was earnest, busy, and justified in his promotion of these artists. At a moment when the world of 20th-century American painting was crystallizing in New York City, Willard Wright was a key catalyst. And yet, when Edmund Wilson surveyed “The All-Star Literary Vaudeville” in June 1926, Willard received that dismissive half-sentence: “Willard Huntington Wright, some years ago, gave the impression of being important” (The Shores of Light, 237).4

ii “Highbrow” (or high-brow or high brow) and its low complement seem to have entered the American vocabulary in the first decade of the 20th century (there is a questionable citation to 1884; 1907/1908 produce the first definite uses).5 But the currency of the brows in cultural criticism dates to 1915, when a classmate of Willard Wright and Earl Derr Biggers, Van Wyck Brooks, used the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow as the opening gambit in his important polemic, America’s Coming-of-Age. As early as 1908, while Biggers was beginning his brief career as a newspaper humorist in Boston (and Wright was promoting himself from bookreviewer to literary editor in Los Angeles), Brooks had begun a campaign to diagnose the crucial defects in what he took to be the misdirection of American culture, and to propose a reorientation. In The Wine of the Puritans (London, 1908; New York, 1909), he suggested that while the Puritanism of New England had fortified the first generations of Americans (Brooks uncritically identifying New England with America), it no longer served the needs of the industrializing nation of the 19th century. Instead of fashioning a new culture responsive to the new economic world, America (i.e. New England) had turned transcendentalist, raref ying hardminded Puritanism into a spiritual idealism that sustained its authority by sequestering itself from the commercial realities — the getting and spending — that the mass of American citizens lived by. When, Brooks wrote, one pours old wine into new bottles, one gets an explosion, “and when 35

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the explosion results, one may say, the aroma passes into the air and the wine spills on the floor. The aroma, or the ideal, turns to transcendentalism, and the wine, or the real, becomes commercialism” (Wine of the Puritans, 6). The result is an etiolated high culture and a derelict mob. The New England Worthies who constituted, for Brooks, the icons of official American culture — Emerson, Bryant, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes — were, by 1900, irrelevant to the lives of readers who might still purchase their volumes for honored placement on the fireside bookshelf, but who could not use their wisdom. Brooks’s distress seems to be more from the failure of the transcendentalists to root themselves in the new realities of American life than from the failure of the commercialized masses to sniff the transcendental aromas. If there is a reconnection, it must be through the action of the artists and thinkers, the burden is theirs. In order to elevate the commercial masses, they must first comprehend commercialism. America’s Coming-of-Age develops this critique, and the contrast of the highbrow and the lowbrow repeats that of the aroma and the wine. What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? ... In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite unhypocritical assumption of transcendent theory (“high ideals”), on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humour, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground [3].

Universities, culture, progressive politics, and genteel language are opposed to business, humor, graft, and slang. The first produce a “desiccated culture”; the second a “stark utility” (7). Brooks cannot embrace unreservedly the high or the low; he deplores pedantry as much as he deplores business. His charge is that both extremes of American life — transcendental theories and catchpenny realities — are diminished by the absence of any useful commerce between the two. Brooks’s hope for American renewal lies in the last phrases of the indictment —“community,” “genial middle ground.” This vision of a “Beloved Community” was the utopia of the Young American movement for which Brooks became the principal spokesman. 6 The movement included, in addition to Randolph Bourne (who had coined the phrase 36

2. He Used to Be a Highbrow

“Beloved Community”), Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, other writers such as James Oppenheim, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Stearns.7 All of them were troubled by the widening chasm which, in the first decades of the century, seemed radically to divide America’s high arts from America’s low life.8 Brooks took “highbrow” and “lowbrow” as the vernacular expression of that fatal division in the nation’s culture. It was a peculiarly American division; Russia, England, and Germany, he was assured, had no comparable terms. Only Americans seemed to embrace a dichotomy that sneered at both the intellectuals and the folk: “the ‘Highbrow’ is the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept, unpalatable virtue; while the ‘Lowbrow’ is a good fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works” (3–4). American highbrow culture had suffered because “in America ... no warfare of ideas has ever existed” (55): “In Europe, where the warfare of ideas, of social philosophies, is always a close-pressed warfare in which everyone is engaged,” the intellectuals have had to align themselves with (or against) causes; they have had to commit themselves to practical programs. In America, “ideas have always been acutely individual and ethical,” and facing public indifference to “public and social affairs,” the intellectual (Brooks here is speaking specifically of James Russell Lowell) relaxes into indifference, and never arrives at “a comprehensive attitude” toward the forces that mold his world (55). Brooks, then, calls for intellectuals to engage with the American world (Whitman is praised as the model in this respect) and from that engagement to develop a “programme” (55–56) that will renew the culture. Socialism is suggested as the form the solution will take (87). Brooks himself would eventually revise this estimate of the cultural dead-end to which America had been brought in 1915, but America’s Coming-of-Age became the challenge a new generation of highbrows felt the obligation to answer. It was a generational challenge indeed. Randolph Bourne was explicit in looking for salvation in the young men and women entering maturity in 1910. Thomas Bender has observed that the new intellectuals of the first decades of the 20th century were revolting against the assumption that “the man of letters was a member of the bourgeoisie, its best representative” (Intellectuals and Public Life, 80), but they were not able, given their moderately privileged backgrounds, to directly identify with the lower class, 37

Making the Detective Story American

and so their generation, which Gertrude Stein would famously dub “lost,” became their totem.9 This was the generation that Christopher Lasch, in The New Radicalism in America, identified as inaugurating the “class” (or, better, the “status group”) of intellectuals in America (x). The intellectual is one “whose relationship to society is defined, both in his eyes and in the eyes of society, principally by his presumed capacity to comment on it with a greater detachment than those more directly caught up in the practical business of production and power” (ix). “Detachment” is the key term. As Lasch implies, “detachment” from the catchpenny marketplace, in this view, becomes the source of the intellectual’s virtue, enabling him to “comment on it” with perspicuity. As Brooks saw, detachment, while essential, could also be detrimental; it could lead to irrelevance.10 Though he must not capitulate to the commercialism that pervaded (and by the beginning of the 20th century, defined) lowbrow culture, the intellectual must engage with the full range of American life. Randolph Bourne’s famous celebration of that diversity of American cultures (and corresponding denigration of the “melting pot” ideal of homogeneity), “Transnational America,” was published in 1916. The Young Americans prescribed a Whitmanian spirit that embraced equally all of the American immigrants — those who crossed over the ocean in 1915 as well as those who crossed in 1620 (Blake, 116).11 Brooks’s prescription called for thinking that was at once detached from and attached to the American masses.

iii Brooks, in his memoir of his time at Harvard, does not mention crossing paths with Willard Wright (nor did he, any more than the rest of his peers, notice his classmate Earl Derr Biggers). The two men in 1915 were taking opposite views of the character of the highbrow. The separation from the lowbrow commercial culture that for Brooks might lead to a fatal etiolation, was, for Wright, a necessary sign of the intellectual’s virtue. Both men felt that the American mind urgently needed stimulation, and both felt that it was the obligation of highbrows to provide that stimulation. But where Brooks and Bourne sought a conversation between intellectuals and the masses — a conversation that would re-flesh the atten38

2. He Used to Be a Highbrow

uated highbrow as it aroused the torpid masses — Wright (and Mencken) saw the mission of the highbrows entailing a righteous lashing of the swinish multitude that had too long been left unlashed and that consequently mistook sties for palaces. Brooks had praised Whitman for his capacity to unaffectedly enjoy the company of the wounded men in Civil War hospitals; could, Brooks asks, Emerson, Bryant, Poe, Whittier, or Lowell play 20 questions with these men? Or expound the Bible to them? Or juggle oranges with them? Or review the adventures of Nick Carter with them? (America’s Coming-of-Age, 60). Wright’s response, clearly, would have been, “What has the intellectual to do with games or oranges, Nick Carter or the Bible?” The intellectual’s task is not to root himself in the sterile Sahara of the booboisie; it is to uproot the vegetable masses. It was the elite man’s burden to disabuse the mob and to teach it respect for true goodness. Wright’s intellectual is not the man who, chained in the cave, attempts to formulate and promulgate the truth by holding dialogues with his shackled fellows; rather, he is the extraordinary man who has exerted himself to escape the cave in order to see the sunlit truth. It is this Platonic model of the intellectual that Julien Benda celebrated in The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (La Trahaison des Clercs), a 1929 indictment of misguided highbrows who too readily immerse themselves in the catchpenny realities of the marketplace, and sacrifice their intellectual integrity by engaging in coarse practical politics. Of course, the Young Americans were not advocating such an oversimple sacrifice of detachment. Brooks was not demanding that the highbrow naively take up marketplace causes; he was asking the highbrow to see and to feel the marketplace realities in order to transform them. But Benda’s insistence on the purity of intellectual detachment is precisely the source of what Brooks diagnosed as the disease of American thinkers in the later 19th century. Benda passionately defends the aloofness of the intellectual, passionately opposes a world in which crass political persuasions predominate. His archetypal intellectual is Socrates, living a life of integrity in accord with his high personal standards, criticizing the flaws he sees in the marketplace of Athenian political culture, but not attempting to reorganize it himself, and, in the end, willing heroically to drink the hemlock rather than compromise his standards either by suppressing his criticisms or by submitting to the marketplace’s modalities (by, for example, making conventional plea gestures at 39

Making the Detective Story American

his trial, or by accepting plans for escape). The systematic withdrawal from the world of the medieval monks — the originals of Benda’s “Clercs”— provided a model of the genuine intellectual way of life. As Michael Walzer points out in The Company of Critics, Benda was compelled to concede that the intellectual might occasionally find himself in a situation in which he must enter the fray and employ worldly tactics: “he seems to have conceived of the intellectual’s ‘descent into the marketplace’ as an occasional foray by some heroic individual (Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case, for example). Down and back, a quick thrust in defense of ideal values and a return to the only realm where those values have a sustained existence” (39). Walzer clarifies Benda’s position with an analogy from American popular literature: Benda’s intellectual is rather like “the hero of the American Western, the lone gunman who rides into town, clears the villains out, and then rides away into the hills or endless plains” (39). He cannot settle down among the citizens; he would lose his character if he did.

iv The prevailing form of the detective story in 1925 might provide an even clearer analogy for the intellectual hero, because the detective too enters a troubled space, clears the villains out, and then withdraws (most famously to his rooms at 221B Baker Street, where chemical researches, cocaine, and the violin console him in his isolation). The lone detective, like the lone intellectual and unlike the lone gunman, uses his grey cells, not his six-shooter, and he rides in a hansom cab or an Hispano Suiza, not upon a palomino. Where the hero of the Western operates in a mythic landscape of timeless plains, deserts, and canyons, the hero of the detective story operates in the catchpenny streets of commercial cities, and time — train schedules, alibis — matters very much. The essential situation of the classical detective story originates with precisely this pattern: an alienated highbrow sallies forth into the streets of the city to clarify the causes of an unexplained event that has traumatized the community. At the end, he returns to exile. The detective story is the fable of a concretely successful interaction between the intellectual and his world.12 40

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The first detective, Poe’s Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, is thus a highbrow precisely of the sort that Brooks deprecated, that Benda advocated, and that Wright willed himself to become. Like one of Plato’s guardians, he has escaped from the cave of the world, though Poe, not being Plato, has Dupin discover his extramundane truths by moonlight rather than sunlight. Analysis, for Poe, is a category of imagination, not reason (and truth is beauty, not good). The lowbrow sun, in Poe’s world, shines on the despised world of commerce. Dupin pursues his nocturnal researches in the “time-eaten and grotesque mansion, ... tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain,” which his companion has been permitted to rent and furnish for him (Poe, 400–01). In the center of a Paris whose streets would, in 1848, see a revolution that ushered out France’s last king and ushered in its second Napoleon, Dupin and his companion live upon night thoughts: “We existed within ourselves alone” (401).13 Dupin is the most uncompromising of analysts; having escaped from the marketplace (“reduced to poverty” by “a variety of untoward events”), he devotes the “small remnant of his patrimony” to purchasing the books which constitute the world in which he chooses to live. He is indeed one “for whom thinking fulfills at once the function of work and play.” In the first exercise of his analytical skills, he traces his companion’s silent thoughts through a gamut of topics: the cutting of stones for pavements, Epicurean atomism, Laplace’s nebular cosmology, the popular press, and a line of Latin. It is presented as a tour de force of inference, but it is also the statement of a highbrow’s bona fides. Dupin is not merely a sharp reasoner; he is well and widely read.14 Poe implies that there are two key elements of his detective hero: he is a detached intellectual, and he knows his world. The dilapidated mansion and the nocturnal regimen testify to the former; the “vast extent of his reading” (400) testifies to the latter. A train of thought that in one paragraph moves from Epicurean speculations to a scurrilous libel in yesterday’s scandal sheet demonstrates that Dupin knows the world that he has rejected. Or that has rejected him. Poe has arranged Dupin’s affairs so as to make either party responsible for the alienation. “A variety of untoward events” exhausted Dupin’s patrimony; in reaction “he ceased to bestir himself in the world” (400). The fault may lie in his stars or in himself. Poe 41

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pre-empts inquiry into why the analyst is alienated; his interest lies in how the alienated analyst relates to the world from which he is alienated. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” after reviewing a pair of detailed journalistic accounts of the horrifying slaughter of Mme. L’Esplanaye and her daughter and of the arrest of Adolphe Le Bon, a clerk who had carried two bags of gold coins to the L’Esplanaye house, Dupin gives two reasons for making a personal investigation: “an inquiry will afford us amusement” and “besides, Le Bon once rendered me a service for which I am not ungrateful” (412). Neither of these motives suggests that the detective is actuated by a concern for public welfare. Indeed, “amusement” seems provocatively anti-social when applied to an inquiry into an unusually brutal crime. Lest any reader pass over the line unprovoked, Poe has Dupin’s companion insert a parenthetical remark: “[I thought this an odd term, so applied, but said nothing]” (412). Dupin descends into the sunlit world of butchered women and locked rooms for personal reasons only: for the intellectual satisfaction of solving a puzzle and the moral satisfaction of repaying a benefactor. There is, of course, a public benefit to his descent. By identifying the murderer and explicating his method and his motive, Dupin relieves the city of its anxiety over a homicidal maniac at loose and relieves the prefect of police of his bewilderment at the lockedroom crime. But the public will remain ignorant of the highbrow who knew how to recreate the crime of the lowbrow (and whose brow could be lower than an ourang-outang’s?), and the prefect actually disparages the intellectual amateur who has interfered, however successfully, with the professional conduct of the police investigation. Because the police are “caught up in the practical business of production and power,” they fail to see what the intellectual, with his “greater detachment,” can.15 Dupin does receive a pecuniary reward in the final story, “The Purloined Letter”: 50,000 francs. Tens of thousands of francs take Dupin’s compensation out of the catchpenny marketplace of wages and into the romantic realm of fantastic rewards.16 On the one hand, Poe wants to make it clear that the detective does not work for money; he is not in any degree complicit with the contemporary American capitalist economy. On the other hand, the detective’s work is of high value; and value, in a capitalist economy, is real only if it is quantifiable in dollars and cents (or francs). Dupin does not care about the money; there is no sign that the acquisi42

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tion of 50,000 francs in any way alters his manner of living. The analyst at once disdains the mercenary character of the society from which he has withdrawn and demands tribute from that society in the only currency that the society respects.17 Finally, it may be noted that while the society pays the tribute to the genius of the analyst, it never comprehends the genius. Society’s representative, the prefect of police, brings the problem and, receiving the solution, writes the check; he never listens to Dupin’s exposition; Dupin explains his ingenious reasoning only to his fellow isolato, the narrator, and then only after the prefect has departed their timeeaten and grotesque mansion. Society wants answers — wants them badly, and will pay hugely for them; it does not want methods. Dupin acts to amuse himself, to repay a personal friend, to receive the world’s acknowledgement of his genius. “The Purloined Letter” adds two final motives. One is revenge; the villain, Minister D ——, had once done Dupin “an evil turn.” The tale ends with Dupin’s personal satisfaction in setting up the self-destruction of a personal enemy. The other, penultimate motive is chivalry; Dupin declares he has acted “as a partisan of the lady concerned” (697). But the indiscreet lady, whom Minister D —— has been blackmailing for 18 months, is apparently the queen. In referring to his rescue of her, Dupin advises the narrator, “you know my political prepossessions” (697). And this would seem, on the final page of the final Dupin story, to introduce a public motive for the detective’s detection. Dupin is descending into the marketplace, betraying the disengagement that had defined his relation to Paris. That he acts as a royalist, not as a card-carrying member of a political faction of the sort that issues membership cards, may qualify his engagement; Poe may well have regarded royalism as a patriotism that is above politics; but the allusion to “my political prepossessions” is gratuitous, and suggests that Dupin has policy differences, even party differences with Minister D ——. Dupin sets up the minister’s downfall not merely to relieve a queen’s embarrassment, nor even to penalize a blackmailer, but also to disempower a politician with whose views on important issues Dupin disagrees. The hint is too slight to make this a “j’accuse” moment, but Dupin’s acknowledgement of “political prepossessions” does open the possibility of detectives whose social conscience reaches beyond the crime and punishment issues immediately before them. 43

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v It was, however, a possibility that the mainstream of the detective story would pursue. Perhaps because executing justice — especially executing it with a nod to one’s political prepossessions — had too much an air of American individualism (even American vigilantism), the European detectives who were the principal heirs of Dupin confined themselves to the detection of crime and left judgment and punishment to the magistrate and, in England, to 12 good men and true. They would be somewhat (or a great deal) more moderate in their rejection of the social arrangements of their time. They would be clever reasoners, but they would not be highbrows. Emile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq, Dupin’s first important heir, for example, follows a version of Dupin’s analytic method, but is not a detached intellectual. He is a sharp reader of signs, but he has not studied Epicurus’s atomism or Laplace’s nebular cosmology. He does not, for all his Gallic heritage, allude to Molière, Cuvier, Rousseau, Seneca, Rochefoucauld, Machiavelli, Pascal, or Crebillon fils. He is a young man, happily immersed in his society. The dimensions of the novel give Gaboriau room to develop Lecoq’s personal history in some depth (and with some inconsistency). Like Dupin, Lecoq has been orphaned and left destitute. But instead of rejecting the world, and retreating to a dilapidated mansion, Lecoq energetically engages with the society in which he finds himself, eventually apprenticing himself to an astronomer for five years of mental labor (“solving bewildering and intricate problems,” 14) before finally deciding to subcontract his talents to the gendarmerie. Lecoq is a thorough worldling; in his third adventure, Dossier no. 113, he is motivated by the desire to renew an erotic relationship with a demimondaine, a motive inconceivable in Dupin. Gaboriau’s adjustment of Poe’s formula thus abandons the retreat-from-the-world and the fabulously-well-read elements that characterized Dupin, while retaining the marvelous analytic genius which empowered him. Having thus eliminated two of the three features of the detective that Poe had foregrounded in the first pages of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Gaboriau added social texture to the novellength narrative, making the story rather than the detective the vehicle of social commentary. He models his romans policiers on Balzac’s Comèdie Humaine, intending them to comprise a representation and a critique of 44

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French culture in the 1860s and 1870s. The critique emerges from this representation and not from the articulated social views of the detective. The greatest of Dupin’s European heirs was, of course, Sherlock Holmes. And Conan Doyle accepted much of Gaboriau’s revision of the paradigm. Holmes, like Lecoq, does not presume. He detects; he does not judge.18 Nor does Holmes allude to his political prepossessions. In the course of four novels and 56 short stories, Conan Doyle allowed his detective a few political gestures: Holmes uses a pistol to inscribe V.R. (Victoria Regina) on a plastered wall in 221B Baker Street, and he does not object to Watson hanging a portrait of Chinese Gordon on the wall, but as indicators of Holmes’s views of monarchy and empire, these are faint indications. Holmes does, in “The Naval Treaty,” offer a short encomium of board-schools (“Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future!”) that appears to be an expression of late Victorian liberalism, but it hardly identifies Holmes as a partisan of Mr. Gladstone. Sherlock Holmes never dedicates himself to a “programme” of reform. In the introductory novel of the Holmes series, Conan Doyle inserts an explicit disavowal of any pretense to highbrow-ism in Holmes. In the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson catalogs his new companion’s limitations. They are considerable. Of literature, philosophy, and astronomy, Holmes seems to know nothing, and to desire to know nothing: “you say we go round the sun. If we went round the moon, it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work” (3.34). This is catchpenny lowbrow indeed. A pennyworth for Copernicus?19 Watson rates Holmes’s knowledge of politics as “feeble,” presumably because at least he keeps up on those corrupt or corruptible politicians who might play a part in a criminal case that he might be called upon to investigate. Holmes will, to a significant degree, be marked as different from the community of his contemporaries, but the markers will be cocaine, chemical researches, and violin-playing, not intellectualism. His knowledge of “serious” literature is nil; his knowledge of “Sensational Literature” is “immense.” He knows what he needs to know; he does not — as Dupin seems to — know everything.20 Holmes (and Conan Doyle) would have the reader believe that the detective’s intellectual power resides in his method — the scientific method — not in his erudition. Immediately after itemizing his new roommate’s deficiencies, Watson excerpts a paragraph 45

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in which Holmes had outlined the virtues of “the Science of Deduction and Analysis.” That science, and that science alone, underlies Holmes’s authority as a detective. When, in “The Cardboard Box,” Conan Doyle has Holmes imitate the mind-reading performance with which Poe had introduced Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the train of thought which he traces is considerably less spectacularly highbrow. Dupin had to follow a movement from pavement stones to sterotomy to Epicurean atomism to nebular cosmology to magazine criticism to a line of Latin; Holmes must follow Watson’s mind from General Gordon to Henry Ward Beecher to the American Civil War. The sequence is less esoteric; though impressive, it is more realistic. The classical detective in the wake of Holmes is superhuman only in detection; he is brilliant in his ability to know, but altogether human in his judgment of quotidian affairs. Some of them, like Martin Hewitt or Inspector French, seem militantly pedestrian. In his methodicalness, then, Sherlock Holmes is the direct heir of C. Auguste Dupin, though he substitutes a late 19th-century scientific method for Dupin’s romantic synthesis of poetry and ratiocination. But Holmes never approaches Dupin’s militant alienation. In his character, he is an earnest Victorian — an earnest Victorian with a genius for detection, and with ornamental eccentricities that earnest Victorians tolerated, at least in men of a certain class. Eventually Conan Doyle would play down the cocaine element of Holmes’s bohemianism and, in compensation, nudge his brow a bit higher, with those references to polyphonic motets and Chaldean roots, bringing his character a bit closer to Dupin’s. But Holmes and his epigones are essentially diurnal creatures; they belong to daylight (or gas-lit) London. And because they are Englishmen, they enjoy what the Young Americans took to be the peculiarly English option of cultivated dissent. Harold Stearns, in his article on “The Intellectual Life” in Civilization in the United States (1922), observed that “Mr. Balfour can speak the same language as Mr. Bertrand Russell, even when he is a member of a government that puts Mr. Russell in gaol” (146).21 By contrast, Stearns could not imagine a conversation between President Harding and Eugene Debs, the man that Harding’s government sent to jail for his protests. Sherlock Holmes does, in fact, converse with the prime minister (in “The Adventure of the Sec46

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ond Stain”), though without the frisson of having opposed the government’s policies. Holmes is, as far as the reader can tell, satisfied with his queen and with the governments that she accepts, and without reservation he accepts the commissions which they proffer him. Dupin can converse with Minister D ——, but only with a superficial politeness that by both men is presumed to gloss a profound antagonism. The animosity which Dupin feels for Parisian society in general and for Minister D —— in particular is completely absent in the classical detective. The classical detective never opposes any government and never hates anyone. Despite his idiosyncrasies, he belongs to the establishment. There is a debate among the Baker Street Irregulars concerning Holmes’s alma mater — Oxford or Cambridge? There is no debate about his being a university man, and whatever his eccentricities, that Oxbridge accent, at least in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, identified a person as an acceptable, educated gentleman. And that is the status Conan Doyle designed for his detective: good family (“my ancestors were country squires,” I.636) and good education, with a genius for scientific detection and moderately bohemian lifestyle. Holmes frequently resorts to disguise, and the disguises are usually proletarian in character — a common loafer, a plumber, a French ouvrier [i.e. laborer]. Holmes’s ability to impersonate lowbrows is testimony principally to his virtuosity as an actor, but implicit in that virtuosity is Holmes’s common touch; he can converse with plumbers as well as with prime ministers. The classical detectives thus combine an extraordinary mastery of method with all-too-ordinary social and political views, always with a veneer of eccentricity. They are always somewhat aloof from their community — signified most obviously by the celibacy that nearly all of them embrace — but they are always unrestive members of their commonwealth. In a crisis, they may even reveal themselves as positively chauvinistic. When England goes to war in 1914, Holmes enlists and, in “His Last Bow,” becomes an undercover agent who exposes a German spy ring. He ends that story with a peroration about the cold and bitter east wind of war that will leave “a cleaner, better, stronger land” lying in sunshine. It is not a programme, but it is a large step away from withdrawal and alienation. And while other classical detectives are rarely called upon to expound their patriotism in such a horatory mode, it is their tacit assumption. They 47

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assume that they belong to a good, clean, strong culture. Although the premise of the detective story is that a social relation has gone fatally wrong, it has frequently been observed that the classical form of the genre is essentially conservative in its political implications. The homicide is an anomaly; in W.H. Auden’s words, “it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet” (19). And the classical detective believes that clean drawing rooms are fundamentally good; they are worth preserving. Whatever distinctions separate him from the community — his Catholicism, his blindness, his immobility, his Belgian reflex to ejaculate “Mon Dieu!” or “Sapristi!”— he lives comfortably within the manners and morals of his fellow citizens. He does not need a program, because, whatever the immediate dislocation, God’s in his heaven and, aside from a baffling homicide, all’s right with the world. Between 1910 and 1925, then, there was an extraordinary fluorescence of the detective story in England. The period saw the maturity of Sherlock Holmes (two novels and three volumes of short stories) and the emergence of Dr. Thorndyke, who had first appeared as early as 1908, as well as the debuts of detectives who lived long and storied lives: Inspector Hanaud (1910), Father Brown (1911), Phillip Trent (1913), Hercule Poirot (1920), Anthony Gethryn (1920), Reggie Fortune (1920), Inspector French (1920), Peter Wimsey (1923). All of them were brilliantly infallible as detectives, but moderate as intellectuals. The American detective story writers of the period were less inspired. Anna Katherine Green, who had begun writing about New York police inspector Ebenezer Gryce in 1878, would publish two final Gryce novels in 1911 and 1917, but “portly, comfortable” Gryce was never a commanding detective. The appeal of Green’s novels, like that of Wilkie Collins’s detective novels, lay less in the person of the detective than in narrative of the mystery and its impact on the full cast of characters. Similarly, Mary Roberts Rinehart, who was the best-selling American writer in the genre between 1900 and 1925 and also wrote in the Wilkie Collins vein, offered a popular mixture of romance and suspense, humor and mystery, but no memorable series detective. The most popular American series detective was Arthur B. Reeve’s Craig Kennedy, who was greeted with enthusiasm upon his debut in 1910, but who was always overshadowed by the machines — seismographs, selenium switches, plethysmographs, ondometers, etc.— that do the real work of detection in 48

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the stories. Kennedy, nominally a professor at Columbia University, never acquires enough character to have a measurable brow. His knowledge of science is accurate; his knowledge of technology is immense; his knowledge of anything else is unknown. The two most significant American detectives of the 1910–1925 period were Jacques Futrelle’s Professor F.X. Van Dusen, who appeared in 45 stories between 1905 and 1912 (when Futrelle went down with the Titanic), and Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner, who appeared in 22 stories between 1911 and 1928. Uncle Abner is the detective as anti-intellectual. A backwoodsman in early 19th-century western Virginia, Abner is brilliant at reading clues and characters, but he acknowledges only one source for ideas: the Bible which he always carries with him. And he is carefully unoriginal in his reading of that single text. Professor Van Dusen (PhD, LLD, FRS, MD, MDS) is, on the other hand, clearly presented as an intellectual.22 He is a world-famous scientist with a laboratory at America’s Oxbridge, “Yarvard University.” He wears, the reader is told on the first page of the first story, a No. 8 hat; he is “The Thinking Machine.” But although Futrelle’s stories are clever enough in characterization and plot to have remained readable, as Reeve’s stories have not, Futrelle gives little more character to his professor than Reeve gave to his. This was a deliberate gesture, as the epithet “Thinking Machine” suggests. Futrelle does not want a “Thinking Man”; though Van Dusen will have his minor eccentricities, by making him an organization man (on the faculty of Yarvard University) and by denying the professor personal views on any matters other than the solution to the problem at hand, Futrelle keeps his status as intellectual inoffensive. In “The Problem of the Stolen Rubens,” Van Dusen admits, “Personally I know nothing whatever about art”; what he does know is “the logic of the thing” (113). Though the professor is in some respects a reversion to the Dupin model of a highbrow detective, Futrelle was not Poe, and did not attempt a sterotomy-to-Epicurus hero.

vi In the introduction to his 1927 anthology of detective stories, Willard Wright cited Professor Van Dusen first in his list of “the purely intellec49

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tual detective.” The Thinking Machine is, Wright says, “what might almost be termed the reductio ad absurdum of this type of super-sleuth” (Great Detective Stories, 19). The others whom Wright included in the intellectual super-sleuth category were, with one exception, English and were, with the same exception, men comfortable in their society. This exception was Philo Vance.23 (Wright had not, at this time, revealed his own authorship of the Vance novels.) Philo Vance is not comfortable in his society. On the one hand, he affects an English air — he employs an English butler, Currie, and has himself lived long enough in England to drop his “g’s” (amazin’, provokin’), elide syllables (pos’tive, mod’rate, categ’ry), ejaculate (eh? what?), and pronounce “eat” “et” in an English manner; on the other hand, he cannot enjoy that English option of cultivated dissent. He is not happy with the culture of his country. Wright, in his introduction, identifies S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, who had at the time of writing appeared in two novels, as “a young social aristocrat and art connoisseur.” This is surely how he intended Philo to be viewed: a highbrow (“art connoisseur”) with breeding. Where Futrelle would timidly revert to Poe, Wright would out–Poe Poe. Philo would be a polymath, equipped to speak with decisive and uncontroverted expertise on all topics — on art, of course, but also on tropical fish and pedigree dogs, poker and chess, the untranslated fragments of Menander and Egyptian dynasties. He would be, in a phrase S.S. Van Dine employs in The Bishop Murder Case, “a man of cultural ardencies” (7). Philo Vance constantly makes judgments, and his judgments have consequences: when he judges a painter worthy, he buys his water-colors; when he judges a killer unworthy, he facilitates the killer’s suicide, or even facilitates the killer being murdered. And none of these judgments are played for humor; Vance is right about the Cézanne water-colors, right about the killers, and right about killing the killers. Dupin and Vance embody their authors’ fantasy of the intellectual’s crucial job of work. But Dupin lives what for Poe is an unattainable ideal: Poe might imagine himself possessing Dupin’s analytic powers, but Poe could not live in Paris, could not have a companion to buy him a dilapidated mansion, could not, in Jacksonian America, have royalist prepossessions (though as a Virginian, he could, and did, defend aristocracy (breeding). Poe deliberately removes Dupin from the life Poe himself led, 50

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with its immersion in journalism, literary quarrels, marriage, and economic privations, and sets him in a fantasy Paris, with its Rue Morgue and its government minister who is an anti–Dupin. Wright sets Vance in Wright’s world, the world of 1920s New York City. When the success of the Vance stories permitted him to do so, Wright purchased a two-floor penthouse of the sort he had assigned to Vance, and he filled with it paintings, books, Chinese ceramics, and aquariums (Loughery, 225–26). Even if Poe had enjoyed sudden prosperity, he would not have chosen to become a nocturnal flaneur in Paris; Wright was happy to live in the manner of his detective. Professor Van Dusen was, for the journalist Futrelle, merely an artifact; August Dupin was, for the journalist/poet Poe, an enhanced projection of himself ; Philo Vance was, for the aesthetician/belletrist Wright, an enhanced memory: he lives the life that Wright ought to have been able to live. And so Vance, like Dupin, lives in the top two floors of “an old mansion,” but far from dilapidated, Vance’s building on West 38th Street has been beautifully remodeled, and his rooms are well-lit to display his paintings (Italian primitives to Cézanne), drawings (Michelangelo to Picasso), Chinese and Japanese prints, and objets d’art from Egypt, Africa (French Guinea, Sudan, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Congo), China, etc. Vance is apparently possessed neither of living ancestors nor siblings; the only relative ever mentioned is the wealthy Aunt Agatha, whose death endowed her nephew the means with which to accumulate works of art and the leisure to enjoy them, and also the means to afford a lawyer to manage his finances, as well as a butler to prepare his costumes. His isolation, then, is not the result of having been “reduced to poverty”; it is not a forced withdrawal from worldly pleasures. Vance is, as District Attorney Markham more than once describes him, a sybarite. Philo Vance’s erudition is immense.24 He is introduced as a man who, as a freshman, was already intimidating his Harvard professors as well as his Harvard classmates. Van Dine does not inventory his “limits” as Watson does Holmes’s; on the contrary, he lists the courses that Vance enrolled in as indices of his friend’s universal knowledge: “the history of religions, the Greek classics, biology, civics and political economy, philosophy, anthropology, literature, theoretical and experimental psychology, and ancient and modern languages” (Benson, 12). The implication is that there 51

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are no limits at all to his knowledge; on no topics does his knowledge appear “feeble” or “nil.” As needed, Wright endows him with unequalled erudition in virtually any specialist field: archery, chess, quantum physics (Bishop), Egyptology (Scarab), gemology (Kidnap), horse-racing (Garden). In the course of his first investigation, Vance makes knowing allusions to Berkeley, Descartes, Erasmus, Goethe, Nietzsche, Spengler, Spinoza, Terence. He immodestly displays his mastery of languages — French, German, and Latin — and a footnote informs the reader of his view that “culture ... is polyglot” and that he reads “omnivorously” in languages other than English. He is, of course, especially knowledgeable in the arts. He is a collector of discriminating but not parochial taste. He has corrected the attribution of a painting from Titian to Giorgione; he can deliver a brief lecture on the superiority of Chinese drawing to Japanese (lifted from paragraph 32 of Wright’s The Creative Will); and he is, of course, a connoisseur of contemporary European painting, visiting an exhibit of the pointillists and interested in buying Cézanne watercolors and Nadelmann statuettes. (Van Dine reports that the Nadelmann statuette that Vance is interested in is being displayed “at Stieglitz’s.” Stieglitz did exhibit Nadelmann at his 291 gallery in December 1915, but Stieglitz himself would dismiss Nadelmann’s work as “Brancusi for the genteel” [Whelan, 353].) He attends opera, and postpones the exposition of his solution to the problem of Alvin Benson’s murder in order to attend a performance of Franck’s Symphony in D-minor at the Philharmonic. But knowledge of high culture alone does not make a highbrow, though it certainly is a marker. It is also, as Brooks argued, a matter of ignorance: the highbrow disdains the catchpenny marketplace. He is, to reverse Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic, a man who knows the value of everything and the price of nothing.25 And where Dupin was, in this respect, something of a shadowy highbrow, retreating into his intangible mansion located in an intangible Paris, Wright sets Philo Vance as a sunlit highbrow residing in a concrete midtown Manhattan. Endowed by his creator with great resources and no responsibilities, Vance makes no compromises with the dernière garde that constitutes the bottom 99 percent of Manhattan society. He does not care to know their values, and does not intend to include their experience in his judgment of the world.26 Willard Wright doubtless wanted to establish Philo Vance as an 52

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extraordinary man, a Nietzschean figure who effortlessly lives above the mentality of the herd; and he doubtless also recognized the advantage of an unaltered protagonist in what he projected to be a six-novel series of cases that emphasized complex plots. But he was also making a statement about his hero’s essential character. Early in The Benson Murder Case he has Philo Vance repudiate the famous line from Terence: “I cannot say with Terence, ‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,’ because I regard most things that are called human as decidedly alien to myself ” (66).27 This explicit disavowal of a shared humanity goes well beyond Holmes’s cold-bloodedness; it goes beyond even Dupin’s disconnection with his Paris. Even Poe, in the final Dupin story, gave his detective a sympathy (with the royal personage) and an antipathy (for Minister D ——); Dupin actually recognizes key elements of his own genius in the character of D ——. Though he interacts happily with his Manhattan — he belongs to a club,28 something unthinkable for Dupin — Vance asserts that he shares little in common with the mass of his fellow citizens — those, at least, who cannot see the superiority of Chinese prints to Japanese. This assertion is not an isolated expression, and it is not significantly modified in the later novels of the Vance series. It is implicit in Vance’s “languid” response to D.A. Markham’s news of Alvin Benson’s murder: “‘Really, now,’ he drawled. ‘How messy!’ But he no doubt deserved it. In any event, that’s no reason you should repine. Take a chair and have a cup of Currie’s incomp’rable coffee” (14). Or in his equally “offhand” reception of Markham’s report that Margaret Odell had been murdered in The “Canary” Murder Case: “The base enemies of law and order are determined to chivvy you most horribly, aren’t they, old dear? Deuced inconsiderate of ’em! ... Excuse me while I seek habiliments suitable to the occasion” (23). It was conventional in the Golden Age to minimize the likeability of the murdered person. The detective story was a comedy that ended happily with the discovery of the murderer; undue sympathy for the suffering of the victim (or for the suffering of those touched by the loss of a beloved victim) would distract from the narrative of investigation. It is, thus, proper for Alvin Benson and Margaret Odell and the rest of the murdered persons in the Vance saga to be disagreeable characters; it is proper for no one to really mourn their deaths. But Vance’s cavalier reaction is shocking. And it was meant to be. Philo Vance’s contempt for the pieties of 53

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American life was a calculated literary tactic as well as a measure of the height of his brow. When Maxwell Perkins passed the suggestion from some readers at Scribner’s that Wright tone down his detective’s offensive disregard for polite thinking: “People here disliked Philo Vance and his mannerisms and so I argued that matter with him, though I felt somewhat differently.” Wright responded to Perkins that “the point was not whether people liked Vance, but to make him distinctive, so that they could not forget him” (Perkins, 214). Perkins was passing this anecdote on to a writer whom he hoped, in 1942 (three years after Wright’s death), might write a murder mystery for Scribner’s; it was, he clearly thought, an effective tactic. Vance’s verbal affectations and his conspicuous rejection of the ordinary decencies certainly made him distinctive. But Philo Vance’s supercilious pose also clearly marks him as an intellectual who has chosen to insulate himself from the world of commerce and Tammany Hall — Van Wyck Brooks’s lowbrow world of business, humor, graft, and slang. He has not, however, like Brooks’s highbrows, vaporously drifted into a realm of transcendental idealism; he has simply recognized that the lowbrows, chained as they are in their caves, cannot possibly see the truths that are visible to the superior eye of the true aesthete. They will hang Cézanne watercolors upside down (as the art dealer Kessler has done [Benson, 6]), they will attribute a painting by Giorgione to Titian (as the curator of the Louvre has done [115]). And in matters of criminal investigation, they will trust the wrong methods; they will fix upon innocent suspects. They are fallible in their judgments upon all things. Philo Vance is infallible in his judgments about everything. He is right about art and he is right about crime. He knows how to dress and how to travel. He cannot be all men — Philo Vance disguised as a common loafer, a plumber, or a French ouvrier is unthinkable; but he can talk to all men. When neither the upper-middle-browed District Attorney Markham nor the low-browed policeman, Sgt. Heath, can draw useful responses from housekeepers or actresses, loquacious colonels or chivalrous captains, Vance can. He may profess not to share their humanity, but he knows the levers that move them. If, on the one hand, Vance sets himself apart —“He held himself severely aloof from the common world of men. In his manner there was an indefinable contempt for inferiority of all kinds” (9)— on the other hand, he asserts a full and effective knowledge of their motives. Again, in 54

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both respects he is more extreme than M. Dupin or any of M. Dupin’s heirs. Dupin separated himself from his fellow Parisians, and presumably (and justifiably) felt himself their superior in ratiocination. He did not disparage their humanity, nor suggest that his nature was, “in most things,” “decidedly alien” to theirs. Dupin claimed that his analytic method could reason from objective effect to objective cause. From the debris of an apparently senseless and apparently impossible murder, he deduced an orangutan. But Dupin’s method did not depend upon reading human characters. When he does read a mind, it is the train of thought of the narrator, his already well-known friend; it is his prior familiarity with the narrator’s prejudices and readings that enables him to make his subtle reading of the silent movement of the narrator’s ideas. And when Dupin uses his reading of Minister D ——’s character to infer the location of the purloined letter, he is reading a character that he knows well because it is a mirror image of his own. Philo Vance makes a much larger claim. What, Markham asks Vance, is this “infallible method of detecting crime” that he had advanced? Vance answers, “I referred to the science of individual character and the psychology of human nature” (105–06). “The expert psychologist [can] analyze a crime and tell you who committed it — that is if he happens to be acquainted with the person —, or else can describe to you, with almost mathematical surety, the criminal’s nature and character” (107). Philo Vance, as an expert psychologist, knows human nature, even if he regards “most” of it as “decidedly alien” to himself. And this makes him the very model of one type of the modern highbrow. Philo Vance asserts that his discriminating mind both sets him radically apart from other humans, and also enables him to fully comprehend the workings of their undiscriminating minds. And as for his irritating mannerism of dress and speech: Socrates pointed out to Glaucon that should a mind exposed to the sunlit truth return to the cave, it would be “blinded by the darkness.” “And if he had to discriminate between the shadows, in competition with the other prisoners, while he was still blinded and before his eyes got used to the darkness — a process that would take some time — wouldn’t he be likely to make a fool of himself?” (Plato, 320).29 Perhaps, with his monocle and his “eh, what’s” and his provocative irreverence, and with his “infallible method of detecting crime,” Philo Vance is the very model of the mod55

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ern Platonic guardian. He is certainly an intellectual of the type extolled by Julien Benda: dedicated to his researches into esoteric fields of knowledge that are folly to the layman, he will, when the necessity (a baffling murder) forces itself upon him, condescend to employ his genius to enlighten the benighted. It is also noteworthy how often Vance frames his interventions as saving someone : saving Muriel St. Clair from being charged with Alvin Benson’s murder, saving D.A. Markham from making an arrest that will embarrass him, saving Mrs. Paula Banning from the public exposure of her affair with Leander Pfyfe. Vindicating the innocent and demonstrating their innocence is the achievement of all detectives; it is in some ways even more important than the fundamental object of identifying the guilty. But Philo Vance emphasizes this aspect of detection to an uncommon degree. And, correspondingly, he downplays catching the villain. In The Benson Murder Case, there is little to recommend the killer, but in most of Vance’s cases, he seems to find the murderer a more interesting human being than the victims or the suspects. And to an amoral aesthete, “interesting” is a desideratum. This is perhaps why Vance frequently acts to facilitate the demise of the killer: society will exact some dull punishment; a sudden death is the gift of a detective genius to an interesting villain. Philo Vance is, thus, the ne plus ultra of the highbrow detective, infallible in taste and erudition, as well as in detection. He is the ultimate fulfillment of Poe’s prototype, and his unparalleled popularity in the late 1920s and the subsequent swift decline of his fortunes are revealing. Willard Wright was a highbrow, infallible in taste and erudition, but not in detection — not in applying his infallibility to the moral problems of the middle-brow, book-buying public. By adding that element — that moral application — to Philo Vance, he presented a version of himself that delighted his audience. It was a perverse delight. Philo Vance was a highbrow of the sort Van Wyck Brooks had identified as the intellectual half of the crisis that was fatally dividing America: he is “the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept, unpalatable virtue.” His superiority is unpalatable (“People here disliked Philo Vance and his mannerisms”), but it is not inept. Not only did readers find him able to read characters and clues and solve murders, they expected him to do so. He first appears “attired in a surah silk dressing-gown and grey suede slippers, 56

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with Vollard’s book on Cèzanne open across his knees.” And his first words are, “Forgive my not rising, Van.... I have the whole weight of the modern evolution of art resting on my legs. Furthermore, this plebian early rising fatigues me, y’ know” (Benson, 5). He is quite evidently not one of us. Vance’s attire and speech are, of course, not to be taken entirely seriously. Wright is in some degree — some small degree, one suspects — mocking the wearer of the surah silk dressing-gown and grey suede slippers; Vance may be mocking himself, in some small degree, with his “the whole weight of the modern evolution of art resting on my legs” and his “y’know.” But superior know-it-alls who mock themselves are little less offensive — if at all — than those who do not. But before they see and hear him, readers will have read the title, The Benson Murder Case, and probably an advertisement or a blurb, and they know that he will not be inept; however “superior” his manner, he will detect the murderer. He can be forgiven knowing everything (and knowing that he knows everything ), because he knows the crucial thing: whodunit. The formula of the detective story thus provided a peculiar sort of “genial middle ground” (Brooks’s phrase) where the “superiority” of the highbrow can be forgiven because he exercises it, however superciliously, for the immediate benefit of the lowbrow “good fellows.” But the intellectual arrogance of Philo Vance was unsustainable. Wright had exhausted the vein well before the Vance novels ended. Not only did the inventiveness of his plotting grow thin, he increasingly let Philo Vance’s reputation as a highbrow suffice to mark his brow as high: there are fewer occasions when Vance actually demonstrates his “unpalatable” virtue. Conan Doyle, in a similar fashion, let Sherlock Holmes’s reputation for scientific methodology substitute for expositions of that method; but Conan Doyle was a great storyteller, and reputation was enough. Philo Vance’s decline was as precipitous as his rise. The final six novels, published in the 1930s, were notably weak, and while the best of his contemporaries are still read today, Philo Vance has faded to a curiosity. The example of Ellery Queen is revealing. When two 23-year-old cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, decided in 1928 to ride the Philo Vance vogue, they created a detective who was quite clearly a plaster Vance. The first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), 57

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opens, like the first Vance novel, with a report that the detective, having retired to Italy, has been persuaded to release the account of his investigation, with the one proviso that his name be changed. The regular cast of the Queen novels parallels the regular cast of the Vance series: earnest, official DA Markham is matched by earnest, official, Inspector Richard Queen, police detective Sgt. Heath by police detective Sgt. Velie, medical examiner Doremus by medical examiner Prouty, butler Currie by houseboy Djuna. Ellery Queen, like Philo Vance, lives in a Manhattan bachelor apartment. Like Vance, Queen possesses an athletic physique, but asserts his intellectuality by affecting a “rimless pince-nez” (in lieu of Vance’s monocle). Lest the reader miss the clue, Queen’s brow is explicitly high: “But the brow above, the long, delicate lines of the face, the bright eyes were those of a man of thought rather than action” (31). If Philo Vance is introduced to the reader as an aesthete preoccupied with acquiring Cézanne watercolors, then Ellery Queen is introduced as a bibliophile preoccupied with acquiring “a priceless Falconer first-edition” (31). But Vance’s aestheticism is intrinsic to Wright’s conception of his detective, and is reiterated throughout the series. Ellery Queen’s bibliophilia is ornamental. Ellery is intelligent, and would not object to being labeled intellectual; but he is not, even in his beginnings, a zealot in the fashion of Philo Vance, and in the novels after 1932, Dannay and Lee were comfortable letting him evolve in new directions. Moreover, even in The Roman Hat Mystery, Ellery Queen shows no signs of alienation. If he has, like Vance, removed himself to exile in Italy, he has been joined by his father — and by his wife. In fact, his Italian household even includes a son (though the wife and son will, in fact, slip into oblivion as the Queen series moves forward). Although Wright was, in his final years, willing to make almost any compromise to keep his readership (and — much the same thing — to please Hollywood), he knew he could not give Vance a father, a wife, or a child. Because Ellery Queen is, aside from being reliably clever at solving very complicated plots, a nice fellow, Dannay and Lee were able to sustain his career over more than four decades (1929– 1971), and even to make quite significant changes in his character and his milieu. According to Alice Payne Hackett, between 1930 and 1939, as Willard Wright was vainly struggling to recover Philo Vance’s audience, 58

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Dannay and Lee’s more likeable detective was featured in ten best-selling novels.30

vii Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan carried likeability a step further. Charlie Chan’s Chinese heritage makes him the great detective with the most cause for alienation from the American culture that surrounds him, yet he is, in some respects, the least alienated. Charlie Chan is happily married, and though his wife and 11 children receive only a few paragraphs of attention per novel, those paragraphs are important. Chan’s family members are not, like Ellery Queen’s wife and son, negligible epiphenomena. Charlie Chan is rooted in his commitment to his wife and his children; he misses them when separated from them, and he is proud of their achievements.31 He lives successfully in two worlds — the private Chinain-exile of his house on Punchbowl Hill and the public America of Honolulu and California — and thus, he embodies the trans-national American that Randolph Bourne celebrated as the corrective to the coercive and, to Bourne’s mind, effete project of the “melting pot.”32 Charlie Chan’s Chinese character also makes him a safe intellectual. The Confucian worldview provides him with a venerable tradition that famously valued the pursuits of a scholar. It is a conservative tradition, one that devoted itself for millennia to the refined interpretation of a set of classic texts. The Confucian highbrow was not a disturber of the peace; he could not, as Willard Wright did, promote himself as the Nietzschean herald of an avant garde or, as Philo Vance did, assert his moral independence against the docile follies of his fellow citizens. Earl Derr Biggers, despite his Harvard degree, never set himself up as an intellectual; he rarely attempted directly to move the American public on a social or political issue.33 When he imagined a heroic thinker, it was a thinker who thought with deference. His detective would not even display the mild egoism of a Poirot or a Wimsey. The closest parallel to Charlie Chan in this respect is Father Brown, who attributes his insights to wisdom of the church (in the early 20th century a church still represented a mistrusted minority in England). Charlie Chan’s Confucian heritage provides a similar warrant 59

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for his insights. Chan does not quote Confucius often in the novels, but, like his family, Confucius is always there in the background. The foreignness of the Chinese intellectual tradition to the American reader means that proof of the fineness of his erudition and his judgment can be satisfied by the occasional citation of Confucian (or pseudo–Confucian) aphorisms. Earl Derr Biggers did not need to demonstrate (and doubtless could not have demonstrated) his detective’s mastery of the millennia of Chinese ethical and aesthetic thinking; he did not need to have Charlie Chan drop names or deliver brief dissertations on obscure topics in the manner of Dupin and Vance. It is enough for Chan to embody a sage-like serenity and occasionally cite a wise aphorism to establish him as a Chinese highbrow. And this enables Biggers to assert an intellectual excellence without having to resort either to tiresome demonstrations or to obvious evasions (“little grey cells”). Charlie Chan could be wise, rather than clever. His intelligence only solves problems; it does not also threaten to overthrow the existing moral regime. Earl Derr Biggers seems to have enjoyed his life. His genial humor seems the quality that he was most remembered for. He was far less driven by ideas than either Willard Wright or Dashiell Hammett. His decision to write a humor column, his career as the writer of comic melodramas for the New York stage, his efforts to write for the movies: all testify to his lifelong desire to please — not to challenge — the popular audience. Wright despised himself for submitting to the demands of Hollywood in the late 1930s. Hammett showed his uneasiness about writing to cinematic formulas by accepting MGM’s money and spending it on alcohol and women. Biggers appears to have taken Hollywood as he took The Saturday Evening Post or Broadway or The Boston Transcript: as an opportunity to do an honest job of work by entertaining a wide, middlebrow audience, always with a genial touch of comedy. He was never tempted to analyze the practices — artistic or political or economic — of his society and to propose remedies for its defects. He might write an occasional letter to the editor, advocating progressive reform or warning against extreme remedies, but none of his fiction appears to comment upon current events or to espouse a militant position on any issue. He might create a plump, happy Chinese hero as an antidote to the thin, malignant Chinese antihero — and that is certainly a creditable a gesture — but he would never be 60

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a radical critic of his time. His detective hero would know his place, and would know it as a great, good place.

viii “Genial” is not a word anyone seems to have ever applied to Willard Wright. Egoistic, mendacious, arrogant, corrupt, but not genial. Nor is “genial” commonly applied to Dashiell Hammett, even though Hammett, unlike Wright, was widely admired in his lifetime and after. Hammett was not openly a highbrow; though he carried himself with elegance and enjoyed the pleasures money could buy, he always saw himself in some respects as a proletarian, the man who had been “a freight clerk, a stevedore, a time-keeper in a machine shop, a yardman, a cannery worker, a junior clerk in an advertising agency ... a nail-machine operator in a box factory” (Nolan, 6) and, between 1915 and 1921, a detective for the Pinkerton agency. Hammett never graduated from high school, but he read voraciously, and his letters, especially those to his daughters, are those of a man who has read widely and thoughtfully. The Appendix to Selected Letters lists well over 100 books to which Hammett refers, including works from W.H. Auden to Earl Browder, from e.e. cummings to Karl Marx; it includes novelists both high (Brontë, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Proust, Stendahl, Tolstory) and low (Cleve Adams, H.L.V. Fletcher, Mary Roberts Rinehart). Indeed, Hammett’s willingness to make judgments — apparently well-informed judgments — matches that of Willard Wright. The difference between Hammett’s intellectual pronouncements and Wright’s lies less in the erudition behind them than in the orientation and the flavor of their expression. Hammett was preoccupied with politics (and with the economics that drive politics); Wright focused his energies upon aesthetic issues (and upon the social factors that affected the reception of art). And where Wright saw himself as one of an international band of avant garde individualists who, by fulfilling their private ambitions, would move art (and thus humanity) forward, Hammett saw himself as one of an international band of men and women who, by sacrificing their individual aspirations, could move forward a social revolution that would finally result in an end to the corrupt and destructive inequalities that prevailed under capitalism. 61

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Thus, if Wright aimed at the model of intellectual integrity advocated by Benda, Hammett, in his way, was committed to a model of the sort Van Wyck Brooks was imagining. Having experienced the underbelly of America’s catchpenny realities with an intimacy that most writers have not — certainly not Bourne or Brooks, not Biggers or Wright — Hammett also educated himself in the social and political sciences as well as in the literary culture of his America. Both men sought to change what they took to be a misguided nation — Wright by arranging exhibitions and writing treatises, Hammett by giving time, money, and above all, loyalty to the Communist Party and its front organizations. And though Wright’s highbrow activism preceded the writing of his detective stories and Hammett’s followed his, traces of their intellectual commitments can be discerned in different ways in those stories. Wright simply made his detective the mouthpiece for Wright’s own views. Despite the touch of parody, Philo Vance is, in the main, a Wrightean aesthete liberated from the necessity to earn a living or to trim his convictions for a public. Wright himself wanted to change the world in order to make it a suitable place for men of his disposition; Philo Vance, insulated from the world by his Aunt Agatha’s bequest (and by the improbable subservience of his friend, who commands the prosecutorial power of the state), does not need to change a state of affairs which he deplores — he can, in the end, escape to Italy. He, like Dupin, chooses to act in it only at intervals and for his own pleasure. He asserts his values, and does not mind if the world ignores (or abhors) them. Hammett’s Continental Op does mind. Solving crimes is his vocation, not his avocation. It is his daily chore, not an occasional self-indulgence. He does not, like Vance and Dupin, posit his peculiar set of values against those of his society. This is in part because he is not a highbrow, or even a middle-brow; he is not at all articulate about ideas. But it is in part because his unexamined values are those of his society. He assumes what his fellow citizens, both law-abiding and law-breaking, assume: there are rules which generally should not be broken — do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet neighbors’ wives, do not kill — because they are wrong and because violating them leads to unpredictable and unhappy consequences. And there are rules — do not consume alcohol, do not gamble, do not shoot ladies — which only those who know what they are doing 62

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should break. It is a fuzzy ethic that sometimes requires improvised distinctions. Some sorts of greed or lust are excusable, while others are not. It would not satisfy a highbrow who wants to base his judgments upon sharp-edged principles and rational inferences. But it reflects the way the Op’s fellow Americans muddle through the business of separating the sheep from the goats. As a result, the Op is superficially less alienated from his world than is the classical detective: nothing human is alien to him. There are no human appetites he does not possess; there are no Americans from millionaires to Wobblies, from cops to crooks whose moral idiom he does not speak. The classical detective, even the modest classical detective, always distinguishes himself from the masses — the humble Father Brown by his faith, his celibacy, and his cassock; Charlie Chan by his orientalisms. The Op does not distinguish himself at all. His namelessness signifies as much. Like all fictional detectives, he is necessarily an infallibly successful investigator, but he has no other quality that divides him from his fellow citizens. He offers no individualist views; he makes no pronouncements; he appears completely oblivious to the aroma of highbrow culture.34 The client whom he understands least well appears to be the closest thing to a highbrow that he encounters: the poet Burke Pangburn in “The Girl with the Silver Eyes,” and with his ineffectual maundering over the disappearance of his fiancée, Pangburn is not a model for emulation. The hero who can effectively solve the poet’s problem is an altogether common man. And his method is that of a common man: it is virtually no method at all. As the Op tells Dinah Brand in Red Harvest, “Plans are all right sometimes.... And sometimes just stirring things up is all right — if you’re tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top” (75). There is, emphatically, no “programme” in the Op’s approach to solving social problems in Personville. He brings not a highbrowed system of reform to the city, but rather a private motivation — he has been shot at twice and wants to retaliate — and that private code of behavior that hard-boiled men observe to preserve their own integrity in a corrupt world. The highbrow detective applies, or is presumed to apply, an objective intellectual method to crime detection; the hard-boiled detective applies himself. The first method might be learned in the laboratory of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where Sherlock 63

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Holmes tested poisons or in Hugo Munsterberg’s class in criminal behavior at Harvard University; it is scientific, and implies that other scientific, highbrow systems of thought — programmes — might solve other social problems equally reliably. The second method is extemporized in a given situation; it depends upon the character of the individual and cannot be generalized. Van Wyck Brooks (and Willard Wright) had hoped that a new generation of intellectuals, with new, more relevant systems of thought, might develop a conversation with the lowbrow masses that would enable those masses to appreciate the improvements in the quality of life that would follow from adoption of the systems (programmes) that the intellectuals were offering. Hammett’s fables suggest that the improvements will be limited (the Op leaves Personville “all nice and clean,” but also “ready to go to the dogs again” [176]), and that they will come from the improvisations of the lowbrow who comes to restore order to the world of the highbrow.35 The Op never fails in the end to explain everything — even hardboiled detectives explain in the end. They too know. But their knowledge does not depend upon an intellectual methodology; it depends upon their being tough enough to survive. As a result, the detective’s authority is not validated by his ability to reorder ancient Egyptian chronology or to recite Confucian aphorism; it is extended by his ability to hold his liquor, talk tough, and shoot straight — abilities that any man might (though most do not) possess. He is the master of the American “catchpenny realities”— business ethics, American humor, Tammany Hall, pavement slang — that Van Wyck Brooks set against the American “transcendent theory” (university ethics, American culture, good government, academic pedantry). Philo Vance deprecated even the possibility of Brooks’s “genial middle ground”; he gloried in his difference from the mob. Charlie Chan found himself in a Chinese American middle ground that was at once a source of pride and pleasure, but also a source of alienation — from China, from America, and even from Chinese Americans. But while his ambivalent personal identity makes him a somewhat less egregious highbrow, there is little doubt that confronted with the division between catchpenny realities and transcendental theory, Chan too is a transcendentalist who has little traffic with business ethics, American humor, Tammany Hall, and pavement slang. 64

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The Op, of course, is all about business ethics, American humor, Tammany Hall, and pavement slang. His authority derives precisely from his immersion in these destructive elements. He understands the ways of American commerce (the “legitimate” commerce of capitalists like Elihu Wilsson as well as the illegitimate commerce of bootleggers and gamblers); he is the master of the wisecrack; he knows how to manipulate corrupt politicians and policemen; he speaks the language of thugs and grifters. And yet, in the end, he achieves knowledge as certain as that reached by the much higher-browed detectives. Indeed, given the Byzantine expositions that the great detectives were often compelled to propound as they unraveled the turns of event that constituted the Byzantine murder plot, the Op’s knowledge more often seems probable as well as true. The detective story was the pre-eminent genre of popular literature in America in the 20th century. The final three-quarters of the century demonstrated conclusively that the common reader was more entertained by fables in which social crises were resolved by strong-willed workingmen (and, in the century’s final quarter, by strong-willed working women), rather than by cultivated Chinese or by over-cultivated aesthetes. There would, of course, remain a significant audience for highbrow or quasi-highbrow detectives. More than 80 years after his debut, Hercule Poirot remains a steady seller. But in the marketplace of detective fiction, tough-guys have prevailed. They may have lost some of their loneliness and some of their machismo — they are, in fact likely now to be females, but even if they are Chinese (or African American, or American Indian), they are still fundamentally street smart; they know all about business ethics, American humor, Tammany Hall, and pavement slang. They advocate no advanced system or program; they improvise. The man who could save the community from destructive confusion used to be a highbrow, but look at him — or her — now.

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No Chinaman Ethnicity and the Detective in the 1920s In 1924, the year before Charlie Chan debuted in The Saturday Evening Post, Ronald A. Knox first published his nine rules for detective stories.1 Rule Five declared: “No Chinaman must figure in the story.” As Father Knox explained, “This principle, I admit, is one merely derived from experience; I see no reason in the nature of things why a Chinaman should spoil a detective story. But as a matter of fact, if you are turning over the pages of an unknown romance in a bookstall, and come across some mention of the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, avoid that story; it is bad” (190). This no–Chinaman principle is perhaps the most often cited of Knox’s rules; it has some wit, some truth, and, we would now say, some racism. “Chinaman” is not now an acceptable epithet; as Charlie Chan explicitly tells us, it was not an acceptable epithet in the 1920s. But England in the 1920s was still more imperial than multicultural, and, after all, the Chinese characters who did appear in popular fiction of the 1920s were slit-eyed Chinamen, preternaturally sly, conspiratorial, opium-addicted, etc. The first of the sinister oriental villains was Dr. Yen How, the half–Chinese, half–Japanese protagonist who plotted the overthrow of the occidental hegemony in M.P. Shiel’s 1898 novel, The Yellow Danger. Other slit-eyed masterminds of greater or lesser ambition appeared until, in 1913, Sax Rohmer rolled them all up into the grand figure of Dr. Fu Manchu: “the yellow peril incarnate,” as he is described when Denis Nayland Smith first introduces him in The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu (Rohmer, 13).2 Preternatural evil, especially preternatural evil of visibly foreign extraction, had no useful place in the classical detective story, where, after all, the game 66

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depended upon obscuring the line between good and evil until the last chapter. Chinamen were outwardly, unmistakably malign. And it was the creed of the classical detective story that Father Knox was proclaiming. Father Knox himself became a luminary of the second rank in the Golden Age, publishing his first mystery novel in the same year that Earl Derr Biggers produced The House Without a Key. His decalogue, which emphasizes rules of fair play, provides a reasonable synopsis of the essence of the somewhat flexible genre: no secret passages, no “hitherto undiscovered poisons,” no “accidents” or “intuitions,” no unpreparedfor twin brothers, no clues concealed from the reader. The Golden Age writers were expected to present the reader with a limited cast of interesting characters, each of whom has had the motive and the opportunity to commit the murder with which the narrative opens, but only one of whom did. Clues of various sorts are presented as a detective — usually a “great detective” (a man of preternatural intelligence and eccentric habits, and usually of English descent)— conducts an inquiry and then assembles an irrefutable reconstruction of events at the end, pointing accurately to the guilt of a single individual. Earl Derr Biggers was clearly drawing up this classical detective story formula when he produced A House Without a Key, though he seems not, at first, to have intended Charlie Chan as a great detective. The primary investigator of the murder of Dan Winterslip is Dan’s nephew, John Quincy, and John Quincy Winterslip’s detective acuity is a one-time exercise undertaken to prove himself worthy of the love of Carlota Egan. Charlie Chan functions as the cooperative official detective, a good deal more able than Lestrade or Gregson, but is not, apparently, the featured player. That the American police sergeant is of Chinese extraction adds a touch of exotic color and was, as well, an intentional rebuttal of the villainous Chinaman.3 Because Chan worked so well in the particular narrative in which he was placed, Biggers was inspired to make him the protagonist of five more novels. Though he never practices the flamboyant sort of ratiocination favored by the central Dupin-Holmes-Poirot school of great detective, Charlie Chan does grow into a commanding presence; he is expected to know all in the end, and invariably, by an rational analysis of clues, he meets the expectation. And while he is not a nocturnal isolato, nor a bohemian cocaine user, nor a Belgian with extravagant moustaches, he is Chinese. 67

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i Following its defeat of Russia in 1905, Japan had ominously begun to expand its influence in the northern Chinese provinces of Manchuria (which led, in 1932, to the creation of the “independent” state of Manchukuo). In 1925 China was, as a result, largely the object of American sympathy. In Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India, Harold R. Isaacs calls the period 1905–1937 the Age of Benevolence (it followed an Age of Contempt, 1840–1905, and was succeeded by an Age of Admiration, 1937–49, and then by Ages of Disenchantment and Hostility). Charlie Chan thus was born at the height of the American sense that Chinese culture was interestingly exotic yet safely inferior. The overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the declaration of the Republic of China in 1912, building upon the recent past of America’s somewhat self-serving but noble-sounding open door policy and the evangelical and educational successes of the Protestant missionaries, had served to raise China’s stature in the popular American view. As long as the Chinese remained in China, they had the goodwill of most Americans. Pearl Buck, the daughter of missionaries, would publish The Good Earth to high praise and high sales in 1931. Between 1920 and 1941, The Saturday Evening Post averaged six stories and one serialized novel a year with significant Asian settings or characters (Hawley, 133). But the Chinese who chose to emigrate to the United States or its territories were a different matter. The 1920s saw a widespread concern for the continuity of the Protestant Anglo-Saxon hegemony that was taken to be the essential character of the United States of America. The melting pot ideal (which was generally understood to mean melting the conspicuously non–Protestant, non–Anglo-Saxon edges off of every immigrant) appeared to be collapsing under the pressure of a tremendous wave of immigration. These immigrants — especially Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe — were finding large communities of compatriots in American cities where they could keep their unWASPish accents relatively sharp. A few intellectuals like Randolph Bourne repudiated the melting pot and embraced what Bourne called a “Transnational America” (1916) in which the country’s wealth would derive precisely from the diversity of subcultures that it included. But the louder voices were those of 68

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men like Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race, 1916 [4th edition, 1921]) and Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color, 1920), who warned of the imminent submergence of the Anglo-Saxon city on a hill beneath the babbling flood of immigrants. In six of the ten years between 1905 and 1914, the number of immigrants exceeded a million. With the First World War, it dropped to under 200,000 per year, but by 1920 had risen again to over 400,000 and it reached 805,288 in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1921, with the two largest ethnic groups being identified as Southern Italians (195,037) and Hebrews (119,036). In a panicked response, Congress passed the first generally restrictive immigration act, the Emergency Quota Act, which set a quota for every nationality equal to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born citizens from that nation living in America at the time of the 1910 census. Total immigration was limited to 357,000 per year. The Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) was even more stringent, reducing the percentage to 2 percent and employing the census of 1890, with its more Nordic character, and totally excluding all Japanese and most Asians. The Chinese, however, had been singled out for restriction long before 1921. Chinese laborers, mostly from the Pearl River delta in Guangdong (Canton), had been drawn to America in the second half of the 19th century, working most notably on the transcontinental railroads. But by the 1880s, the undigested Chinatowns of California and elsewhere in the west were troubling the white voters and the white politicians. Agitation in California led, in 1882, to the passage of the Exclusion Act prohibiting Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. The effect was drastic. In 1882 39,579 Chinese immigrants were accepted; in 1887, the number was 10 (Lee, 43). In 1888 the prohibition was extended to all Chinese. It was renewed for ten years in 1892, and in 1898 was extended to the new territory of Hawaii. It was renewed for another ten years in 1902 (and extended to the Philippines), and finally, in 1904, it was made permanent. Thus, when Earl Derr Biggers introduced Charlie Chan to the readers of The Saturday Evening Post in 1925, he was, in a decade of revulsion against ethnicity, introducing a hero whose ethnicity had been officially declared undesirable in America for more than four decades. The racial issue was to some degree mitigated by the Hawaiian setting, more than 2,000 miles from the mainland, in an island territory that was, after all, only 20 percent Caucasian; the 23,507 69

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Chinese residents of Hawaii constituted 9.2 percent of the territory’s population in 1920 (Glick, 257).4 Even in Hawaii, however, the American anti–Chinese sentiment was felt. Hawaiians of Chinese extraction were required to obtain special temporary visas whenever they proposed to visit the mainland, a restriction that led to protests in 1924 and 1926. Having thus secured its borders from the Yellow Horde, middle America felt safe to indulge its appetite for oriental affairs. The Saturday Evening Post’s regular diet of Asian-centered stories in the 1920s and 1930s exploited this appetite. And the most famous of these stories were, of course, those that featured the Chinese detective, Charlie Chan.

ii A long series of B movies, nearly all of them produced after Biggers’s early death, have made his detective immortal. Charlie Chan may be almost as widely recognized as Sherlock Holmes. But the celluloid Charlie Chan rapidly evolved into an autonomous creature, with cinematic ornaments that were only indistinctly traceable to the original. As portrayed by Warner Oland (16 films, 1931–38), and then by Sidney Toler (22 films, 1938–47), and then by Roland Winters (6 films, 1947–49), Charlie Chan was refined into a manageable and entertaining stereotype which could be efficiently (up to three times a year) reenacted on film. There would also be a series of radio shows (1932–1948), a comic strip that ran from October 1938 to March 1940, and 39 episodes of The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957–58) with J. Carrol Naish as Chan. The familiarity of the simplified formulas helped to secure audiences for three decades. By the end of the 1940s, however, the Chan formula was exhausted, partly by the declining quality of the later productions, and largely because audiences were now looking for a different sort of detective and a different sort of story. But there was also a growing awareness that the Chinese detective was being played by occidental actors, speaking lines written by occidental screenwriters and directed by occidental directors. And by the 1990s, an aphoristic, portly, deferential Chinese detective with a number one son was not only passé, he was politically incorrect. Charles Rzepka, author of one of the most recent scholarly treatments of Charlie Chan, is doubtless correct to assert that “white academic 70

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critics generally agree with their Asian American colleagues that Chan is a humiliating racialist, if not racist caricature” (Rzepka, 1465). Although Biggers’s novels are still popular enough to remain in print and the Charlie Chan movies are popular enough to circulate widely on DVD and to justify three “companions” (Hanke, 1989; Mitchell, 1999; Berlin, 2001), there is a consensus that a white author ought not to have imagined and a white actor ought not to have portrayed a Chinese protagonist.5 A new generation of self-conscious Asian American writers saw the inoffensive Charlie Chan — the insistently inoffensive Charlie Chan — as an unspeakably orientalist construction. Jessica Hagedorn’s pioneering 1993 “anthology of contemporary Asian American fiction” was entitled Charlie Chan Is Dead, seeming to identify the Honolulu detective with the Wicked Witch of the East. The introduction chortles: “Charlie Chan is indeed dead, never to be revived. Gone for good his yellowface asexual bulk, his fortune-cookie English, his stereotypical Orientalist version of “the [Confucian] Chinese family” (xiii).6 The animus against Charlie Chan has perhaps been most aggressively expressed by the editors of another pair of anthologies of Chinese American and Japanese American literature: Aiiieeee! (1974), edited by Frank Chin et al. and The Big Aiiieeeee! (1991), edited by Jeffrey Paul Chan et al. The introduction to the first anthology identifies Earl Derr Biggers as “a distinctly non–Chinese, non–Chinese American, and subtly racist writer” (Chin, ed., xvi); the introduction to the second presses the case further: Charlie Chan, it asserts, embodies the oriental man who, in the face of occidental imperialism, tamely surrenders his manhood: “It is an article of the white liberal American faith that Chinese men, at their best, are effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan and, at their worst, are homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu” (Chan, ed., xiii).7 The charge is that Charlie Chan purchases his authority through a radical and humiliating submission to an American political and cultural system. In order to exercise power — and as a detective who, by generic convention, will in the end infallibly declare one white man or woman guilty and many white men and women innocent, he is powerful — Charlie Chan must affect a meekness (effeminacy) that sugarcoats his racial difference from those white men and women upon whom he delivers judgment.8 He cannot indulge in the self-assertive arrogance that other great detectives (such as Philo Vance) exhibit.9 71

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And if masculinity is essentially related to physical intimidation and aggressive self-assertion, this does diminish Charlie Chan’s masculinity. Charles Rzepka has pointed out that Chang Apana (1864–1933), the actual Chinese detective in the Honolulu Police Department from 1898 to 1931, who is often cited as the prototype of Charlie Chan, was the opposite of plump and cerebral (1475). He was the sort of manly Chinese detective that Biggers could not permit himself to imagine. Apana (born Chang Ah Pin) was, in fact, a very tough detective, “rough and ready — rough with suspects and ready with a blacksnake whip for loiterers, toughs and hoodlums whenever he might meet them” ( Jardine, 40). Though thin and only five feet tall, Apana’s intimidating presence made him an effective detective when he moved to that division of the force in 1916 (he was promoted to detective 2nd grade in 1925 and detective 1st grade in 1928). His police chief said of him, “As an officer, Chang Apana was fearless and energetic. He possessed one of the best records in the police force and as well was known for his ability as an investigator. He carried many scars on his face and body as a result of encounters while performing his duties” (O’Donnell, 18). With the precedent of such a physically imposing figure, Biggers might have introduced a manly Chinese detective. But Biggers was not inspired by such a physically imposing figure. As he explained on several occasions, he did not meet Chang Apana until 1929, when he returned to Hawaii during the filming of The Black Camel.10 He had, however, learned of Apana’s existence while reading the Honolulu newspapers in the New York Public Library as he prepared The House Without a Key: “In one of the dailies I came across a small, unimportant item to the effect that Chang Apana and Lee Fook, Chinese detectives on the Honolulu force, had arrested one of their countrymen for being too friendly with opium” (NYT, 22 March 1931:VIII.6). Chang Apana was, for Biggers, a notion, not a man. He represented a possibility — a Chinese detective — that Biggers then fleshed out with some gestures toward AsianAmerican authenticity, but with more attention to the tradition of the Great Detective. And Great Detectives rarely wield blacksnake whips; they are none of them — Dupin, Father Brown, the Thinking Machine, Hercule Poirot, Reggie Fortune, Peter Wimsey — masculine in the Chang Apana, scarred-body, whip-wielding manner. There are, however, curious parallels, coincidences, between Charlie 72

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Chan and Chang Apana: Apana had ten children in three marriages (to Chan’s 11), both had a daughter named Rose, and Apana lived for a time on Punchbowl Hill, where Chan resided permanently (Hyung-Chan Kim, 19). Charlie Chan, in The Black Camel (1929), has been on the Honolulu police force for 27 years; Chang Apana had been on the force for 31 years in 1929. Apana “was fluent in Hawaiian, Chinese, and Pidgin English” (Kim, 18); Charlie Chan speaks only Chinese to his wife; he tutors John Quincy Winterslip in Hawaiian; but while Biggers has Chan mangle his verb tenses and number, he does not have him speak pidgin. Indeed, when he must briefly adopt pidgin English to execute his role as an illiterate cook in The Chinese Parrot (“You ac’ lazy bimeby you no catch ’um bleckfast”), Charlie Chan makes an explicit protest: “Silly talk like that hard business for me” (76). Charlie Chan’s broken English — a matter of verb tense and number, not pidgin — has frequently been cited as a mark of his author’s racist construction of an oriental detective.11 Biggers was sensitive to the charge of the inauthenticity of the idiom he assigned to his detective. In a letter to a friend in 1929, he wrote, “I am sorry if Honolulu is still distressed by Charlie’s way of putting things. As I told you, if he talked good English, as he naturally would, he would have no flavor, and if he talked pidgin, no mainland reader would tolerate him for one chapter.” The solution, Biggers decided, was to build Charlie Chan’s diction upon that employed in letters he received from his own Chinese cook and from letters written by Chinese boys to a friend of Biggers. These letters, Biggers observes, “are flowery, elegant, and have some amazing turns of phrase” (Biggers, ms. letter to Gessler, 17 July 1929).12 Biggers did not construct Charlie Chan’s voice from the existing literary representations of “Chinese English,” neither from the low pidgin of Brete Harte’s laundryman, Ah Ri —“You wantee debbil? All lightee; me catchee him” (“Wan Lee, the Pagan,” 220)— nor from the elegant phrasings of Fu Manchu —“His English was perfect, though at times his words were oddly chosen; his delivery alternately was guttural and sibilant” (The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, 84).13 Instead, Biggers sought to provide an honest “flavor” of the English that might be spoken by an educated man of Chinese origin. In the end, of course, “flavor,” not authenticity, was what Biggers was 73

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aiming at. The child of Robert J. and Emma E. Derr Biggers of Warren, Ohio, did not pretend that his plump, effeminate, ungrammatical, aphoristic detective could introduce the readers of The Saturday Evening Post to the deep realities of the Chinese experience.14 He would probably not have agreed with Charles Rzepka that “white writers” are forbidden “to define Asian humanity,” (1463); Biggers would have assumed that if “white” readers are to have any understanding of any non-white “humanity,” it would properly come through “white” writers writing in a “white” language. But Biggers was not, in any event, exercising that misguided prerogative. He was merely proposing that non-white humanity might exercise a form of moral excellence that, in American popular fiction, had hitherto been the exclusive province of white men. It was enough to make Charlie Chan persuasively non-white. He needed to seem to be Chinese; authenticity is a red herring. Biggers’s pursuit of a Chinese “flavor” meant precisely that he would deal in superficial stereotypes: admirable stereotypes — good manners, flowery language, loyal service (and, of course, masterful detection)— intended to counter the less admirable stereotypes — the sinister villain, the opium addict, the dragon lady, the comical laundryman, the coolie — that prevailed in the literature of the yellow peril. Offensive caricatures may be countered more effectively by inoffensive (or, as with Charlie Chan, admirable) caricatures; readers whose definitions of Asian humanity have been constructed upon images from the Heathen Chinee and Dr. Fu Manchu might be brought to rethink their views by probing ethnographic studies of the Chinese character written by Asians, but it is perhaps more likely that they will be moved by detective novels and detective films written by non–Asian novelists and screenwriters. There is another dimension to Biggers’s decision to make the final arbiter of innocence and guilt in The House Without a Key Chinese. If Biggers could not know what it meant to be a person of Chinese descent living in a mid–Pacific city that was rapidly modernizing into an American metropolis, he could know what it meant to be a person of late–19th-century mid-west–American descent, living in a west coast city that was rapidly modernizing into an American metropolis, an American Babylon. Biggers depicts Charlie Chan as caught between two worlds: the China which he and his wife left as children, and the new America which seems 74

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to have seduced his children with its slang and its cinema and its sports, but which has also opened to them its modern universities: his daughter Rose is attending college in California in the final novel, The Keeper of the Keys. Charlie Chan’s mother spoke Chinese; his wife speaks pidgin English (“All time chillum make talk”); his children ask him, “Well, what’s the dope?” and exclaim, “Gee — I thought Shelah Fane was swell” (The Black Camel, 167, 168). In the final novel of the series, Chan encounters Ah Sing, a stereotypical loyal servant who has lived in California longer than Chan has lived in Hawaii, yet who still speaks pidgin. Biggers has Chan reflect on his own life: “I traveled with the current.... I was ambitious. I sought success. For what I have won, I paid the price. Am I an American? No. Am I, then, Chinese? Not in the eyes of Ah Sing” (The Keeper of the Keys, 87). Charlie Chan is caught between his old Chinese self, which is irretrievably lost, and his new Chinese American self, which sits uneasily on a man who cannot quite forget the old or quite embrace the new. Many of Earl Derr Biggers’s readers in the 1920s may have sensed something of the same dilemma in their own lives. It might obviously resonate with that mass of “Southern Italians” and “Hebrews” (and other recent immigrants) who found themselves in Charlie Chan’s position. But the detective’s unhappily divided identity, expressed as the conflict between the values and the manners of millennia-old Chinese culture and the dynamic values of American entrepreneurial capitalism, might also resonate with those native born readers who were uneasy with the radically new directions that the Jazz Age seemed to be moving in, even if they located their lost past in an ethnically homogeneous, agricultural, pre–Model T, pre-cinema America rather than across the Pacific in China. The special appeal of Charlie Chan to readers of The Saturday Evening Post may lie less in their savoring his Chinese “flavor” than in their embrace of his core values, which, despite the Confucian ornaments, are essentially mid–American. The patriarchal household over which Charlie Chan placidly presides, the simple integrity with which he approaches challenges, his honesty, his humility, his diligence: these are all aspects of the Protestant ethic as it was popularly defined. The central cultural conflicts in the Charlie Chan novels may not lie between East and West, but between the irretrievable old and the unsettling new. Perhaps the cru75

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cial Orientalist stereotype exploited by Biggers is not the asexuality of the Chinese, but the timelessness of China: the 3,000 years of continuous culture that resisted innovation until European (and then Japanese) gunboats forced radical transformations. Charlie Chan embodies that timeless culture. His aphorisms may be “fortune-cookie English,” but they emphasize that he relies upon a wisdom which is not his own individual achievement, but rather the inherited wisdom of a culture. If Philo Vance wants always to startle the reader with übermenschliche bon mots expressing his disdain for the sentiments of the booboisie, Charlie Chan’s proverbs are a constant reminder that he is only the humble transmitter of thoughts accumulated over millennia. And, as he is all too aware, the transmission may now be interrupted: as he investigates murders on Waikiki, he is faced with the new spirit of Americans pursuing profit and self-fulfillment in “an eighth carbon copy of Babbittville, U.S.A.” (House Without a Key, 120). Even more troubling, as he surveys his own household on Punchbowl Hill, he sees the survival of the past in the furnishings (Chinese paintings, carved stands, vases, lanterns), but he also sees his children adopting American accents and American games, and American careers. A key theme that runs through all of the Charlie Chan novels (and through many of Biggers’s non–Chan novels and stories) is the conflict between the generations. This conflict was, of course, one of the standard themes of the fiction of the Jazz Age. But Biggers places a special emphasis upon it. The Charlie Chan novels always have a pair of bright young lovers to supply the romantic interest that was stock in trade in Biggers’s arena of popular fiction. But they often also include relicts of the older generation: men and women who knew Hawaii when Kalakaua was king. The first Chan novel, The House Without a Key, sets the contrast between two generations of Winterslips: the protagonist is young, proper John Quincy, sent west to recall his wayward aunt back to her Boston proprieties. In San Francisco he encounters his wayward uncle, Roger, and upon his arrival in Honolulu is faced with the murder of his most wayward uncle, Dan. The last Chan novel, The Keeper of the Keys, opens with Charlie Chan encountering a pair of young, married, and entirely assimilated Chinese Americans. It ends with the title character, Ah Sing, returning to China. Ah Sing is the aged Chinese servant who, in 60 years of service to 76

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an American family, has never accepted American culture or learned fluent American English. As he departs for home, Charlie Chan remarks, “I envy you. You will walk again the streets of the village where you were born” (192).15 Biggers, it is clear, is inclined to celebrate the virtues of both those members of the rising generation who are open to adventure and those members of the older generation who have survived adventures. The young Winterslip has intelligence, integrity, and an openness to grow and to love; the older Winterslips were capable of heroic, reckless, and sometimes immoral actions. The young Chinese couple are model Americans: hardworking, considerate, bright, and in love; Ah Sing is unwaveringly loyal to his American employer and to his Chinese culture. And Charlie Chan is placed in the middle: in every novel, he smoothes the path for the young lovers; in every novel, he responds respectfully to the figures from the past. Charlie Chan frequently expresses his uneasiness at his midway position in space (between Canton and San Francisco) as well as in time (between his mother and his children). But it is not an uneasiness that he embodies. Physically he is plump; in manner he is placid. And in detection he is unerring. On the one hand, he is suspended between the tradition-minded culture of his origins and the dynamic culture of his present (and of his children’s future). He can send Ah Sing back to his village and he can send his daughter to a California college, but he cannot solve his own identity. On the other hand, he can walk the streets of Honolulu and of California with a sense of confidence and integrity: he is Charlie Chan, the police detective who unerringly solves homicides. A readership that sees the greatness of a lost inheritance (any inheritance: that of the Old South or of the New England way, as well as the inheritance of more recent immigrant communities) yielding to an age of automobiles, radios, and movies may share Charlie Chan’s dismay, and be reassured by the equanimity with which he nonetheless masters the crises that the disturbing new world of the 1920s sets before him.

iii Designed for the Post’s middle-class market, Biggers’s first Charlie Chan story begins with a young, very proper, very safe Bostonian, John Quincy Winterslip, undertaking a diplomatic mission to recall his way77

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ward Aunt Minerva from her overlong dalliance in the South Seas.16 On his way, he encounters first the improper, risky west of San Francisco and then tropical, romantic far west (almost East) of Honolulu. His romance with the lovely (one-quarter Portuguese) daughter of a disreputable hotelkeeper, while it offends his Boston proprieties, moves forward with a steady inevitability. His moral growth is measured in sharp, melodramatic terms. In an early chapter, a raffish uncle who abandoned Boston for San Francisco defines real living: Have you ever forgot to go to bed because of some utterly silly reason — because, for example, you were young and the moon was shining on a beach lapped by southern seas? Have you ever lied like a gentleman to protect a woman not worth the trouble? Ever made love to the wrong girl?... Ever run for your life through crooked streets in the rowdy quarter of a strange town? Ever fought with a ship’s officer — the old-fashioned kind with fists like flying hams?...” [3.26].

John Quincy, of course, replies with prim negatives, and, of course, he does all of these things before the novel ends, and by doing them learns that there is more to life than Boston’s philosophy has dreamt of. In the end, he is granted a neat escape from his informal engagement with the approved Back Bay debutante, Agatha Parker, neatly marries the daughter of the hotel-keeper (whose complete respectability has been neatly restored), and decides to settle in San Francisco as a sort of neatly middle–American station between the Boston where he was raised and the Honolulu where he grew up. It is neat. But Biggers was playing with serious themes. As he travels westward on his mission to recover his aunt, Winterslip consciously thinks that “if one must travel, there was Paris” (2.16). That is the Jamesian thought; but Biggers sends his hero in a counter–Jamesian direction. He wants to confront his young Easterner not with the complex decadence of Europe, nor even, à la Owen Wister, with the rawness of the Wild West, but rather with the peculiar condition of Hawaii in 1925. It is a place of timeless natural beauty: an anti–Puritanical paradise, with a luxurious climate and flora, and without seasons to remind its inhabitants of winged chariots. But it is also a place that is emerging into history. Hawaii in 1925 was in the midst of its transition from independent kingdom to American state. Waikiki, regarded as a swamp prior to the recommendation of an 1898 78

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commission that it be dredged and filled, had seen its first grand residence, the Hotel Moana, opened in 1901; the Royal Hawaiian Hotel would open in 1927, and the string of private beach-houses that constituted Winterslip’s romantic Waikiki would soon be transformed into blocks of high-rise rooms with a view. Biggers several times has characters refer to the way things were in the 1880s, when “old Kalakaua” was sitting on his “golden throne.”17 Winterslip’s Aunt Minerva recalls, “It was such a colorful, naive spot then.” Her cousin, Dan Winterslip, observes: “It’s been ruined.... Too much aping of the mainland. Too much of your damned mechanical civilization — automobiles, phonographs, radios — bah!” (1.9). Honolulu, still overpoweringly seductive to a newcomer is, one old hand declares, fading “into an eighth carbon copy of Babbitville, U.S.A.” (12.120). Biggers exploits the thematic value of these contrary impressions of Hawaii: the eternal garden and the modern city; the timeless East and the progressive West. John Quincy Winterslip begins the novel as the complacent inheritor of establishment American culture. He first appears carrying a silk top hat in its conspicuous hatbox. (And his first sign of rebellion is to toss it from the ferry into San Francisco Bay.) John Quincy is a businessman, and a busy man; he is a bond-trader; in his first conversation with his aunt, he instructs her that they will leave Hawaii in three days. He will learn to enjoy the tropical world, though he will never completely yield to the languorous charms of the Hawaiian garden; he will never become a beachcomber. But he will move far enough in that direction to be able to give up his safe place as a bond trader in the family’s Boston establishment to build his own life in San Francisco. John Quincy’s choice provides the neat ending of the novel. He has discovered a new world and a new self. The encounter with Hawaii has been the main engine of discovery. But an encounter with murder — the murder of his Uncle Dan — and his initially uncomfortable association with the police investigation of that murder has also forced him to reevaluate himself. Instead of following family instructions, he must begin to make his own decisions and his own judgments. Uncle Dan was the sort of man a Winterslip becomes when a Winterslip goes wrong. Biggers portrays Dan largely as an attractively romantic rogue, especially in comparison to his priggish brother, Amos. The contrast between the two brothers is sharply drawn in the first chapter, and sets the pattern for the diverse 79

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moral polarities that characterize the structure of the novel. These polarities are fairly well-defined; they may involve persons (Dan Winterslip vs. Amos Winterslip, Carlota Egan vs. Agatha Parker), space (West vs. East, Honolulu vs. Boston), and time (old Hawaii vs. new Hawaii, malahini vs. kamaaina, timeless nature vs. modern busyness). Biggers does not overwork these contrasts, and most of the characters seem happily to tolerate both poles (with the priggish Amos Winterslip being the notable exception); Biggers does not force his characters to chose.18 The one important choice that John Quincy must make is an easy one: pallid, off-stage Agatha is no competition for the vivacious, present Carlota. But his decision to live with Carlota in San Francisco, midway between Boston and Honolulu, is emblematic of the preference for compromise. There John Quincy can have both romance and business, can be less self-repressed than Uncle Amos without being as licentious as Uncle Dan. Some minor contrasts, such as that between the malahini (newcomer) and the kamaaina (old-timer), are played primarily for humor. One of them, however, led to an unexpected result. The novel’s protagonist is John Quincy Winterslip, and his discovery that he possesses the intelligence and initiative to investigate the murder of his uncle is an important part of his evolution into full selfhood. But there must, of course, be an official detective to provide John Quincy with a realistic associate. Biggers naturally thought again in terms of a contrasting pair, and so he created Mr. Saladine, a private detective, and Sgt. Charlie Chan, a police detective-sergeant. Meek, toothless, little Saladine is played entirely for comic effect, and it seems possible that the contrastingly rotund (“very fat indeed”) Charlie Chan was originally intended as a balancing joke (and, as well, a jovial inversion of the saturnine Dr. Fu Manchu). But though he may have begun as an amusing novelty, Charlie Chan seized for himself a larger role in the narrative. As Biggers told The New York Times in 1931, “Charlie appeared in the Honolulu mystery, starting as a minor and unimportant character. As the story progressed, however, he modestly pushed his way forward, and toward the end, he had the lion’s share of the spot light” (“Creating Charlie Chan,” 6). Charlie Chan’s forwardness was possible because his Chinese heritage resonated so clearly with several of the themes that Biggers had already established to map John Quincy Winterslip’s moral development. 80

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As the inheritor of a very ancient tradition, a tradition that expresses itself in Confucian and Confucian-like aphorisms, Charlie Chan represents one side of a cultural division that is considerably wider than that between the 1880s and the 1920s, or between the old Winterslips and the young. Chan’s equation of Boston’s “civilization” with China’s (“Mere words ... can not express my unlimitable delight in meeting a representative of the ancient civilization of Boston” [8.74]) is, doubtless ironic, though Chan will later listen with apparent interest and acquiescence as John Quincy dilates upon the comparability of the 300-year-old Bostonian culture and the 3,000-year-old Chinese culture. Charlie Chan raises the topic: “Gentleman I meet once say Boston are like China. The future of both, he say, lies in graveyards where repose useless bodies of honored guests on high. I am fogged as to meaning.” John Quincy explains: “He meant both places live in the past.... Boston, like China, boasts a glorious history” (20.212). Biggers may never have realized the actual dimensions of China’s “glorious history,” and for his purposes, they do not matter.19 It is enough that Chan’s Chinese culture is conservative and patriarchal in its understanding of family. His life is anchored in his house on Punchbowl Hill, a house which is, to its non–Chinese American visitors, explicitly an alien, Chinese space. John Quincy Winterslip observes, “On other elaborately carved teakwood stands distributed about the room were blue and white vases, porcelain wine jars, dwarfed trees. Pale golden lanterns hung from the ceiling; a soft-toned rug lay on the floor. John Quincy felt again the gulf between himself and Charlie Chan” (19.193). It is a cultural gulf— elaborately carved teakwood stands, blue and white vases, porcelain wine jars, dwarfed trees, pale golden lanterns — not a political gulf. Biggers connects Charlie Chan to Confucius, but not to Sun Yat-sen or the other revolutionaries who had overthrown the Qing dynasty in 1911, and, since 1912, had been attempting to form a republic against a background of Chinese warlords and Japanese invaders.20 In Biggers’s occidental eyes, the Chinese American retains a sentimental bond to his great homeland, but his political loyalties are naively dedicated to American democracy. The turmoil that afflicted China in the 1920s is irrelevant in the happy Hawaiian/Californian world that Charlie Chan inhabits — a world whose happiness he must restore when it has been disturbed by a murder. 81

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Charlie Chan thus appears never to be alienated, either from traditional China or from modern America. Situated on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, he is the contented intellectual who respects his honorable Chinese ancestors and appreciates his busy American contemporaries. The house on Punchbowl Hill, with its Chinese furnishings, is the emblem of Chan’s rooted Chineseness. It is depicted in all three novels that are set in Honolulu: The House Without a Key (Chapter 19), The Black Camel (Chapter 13), and Charlie Chan Carries On (Chapter 14). He feels its pull most strongly in Behind That Curtain, as a murder investigation in San Francisco keeps delaying his return. On the one hand, he is a Great Detective and does not return, twice postponing his departure in order to complete his case; on the other hand, he is torn, as no other Great Detective is, by the desire to return home to a domestic world, a world just increased by the birth of an 11th child. The young Americans cannot understand his conflict. He explains to a young woman lawyer, “We Chinese are different. Love, marriage, home, still we cling to unfashionable things like that. Home is a sanctuary into which we retire, the father is the high priest, the altar fires burn bright” (7.114). This explanation is complex. There is some irony in Chan’s “unfashionable”: if à la mode Americans have abandoned “love, marriage, and home,” so much the worse for America. But “sanctuary,” “high priest,” and “altar fires” are also ironic: Biggers, in all his fiction, is quite aware that the times have changed; the post-war generation has indeed altered its view of things. The young American women in the Chan novels, for example, are not just self-reliant and daring; they are professionals: they scout sets for the film industry; they are district attorneys; they are film stars, or film stars’ assistants. They do not worship at their fathers’ altars. Nor, for that matter, do the young Chinese women raised in America. The Chinese patriarchy is also being undermined by the new fashions. Charlie Chan’s wife is a plump, sheltered, unworldly Chinese woman, “a dumpy little figure in black silk” (Charlie Chan Carries On, 15.205) who still speaks pidgin, but Chan’s children are increasingly caught up in the rhythms of American culture. By time of The Black Camel, his daughter Rose is warning him not to take “too much time out for Oriental meditation” (13.511), and later advises him that “a little American pep” wouldn’t hurt his investigation into the death of a movie star (21.557). In the next 82

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novel, Charlie Chan Carries On, Rose has left Punchbowl Hill and Honolulu and is studying at a college on the mainland. Chan’s cousin Willie, who is “captain all Chinese baseball team and demon back-stopper of the Pacific” and greets people with “Pleased to meetchu” (The House Without a Key, 15.156) also illustrates the threat to the traditional ways. In an act of filial piety, Charlie Chan brought his mother to Hawaii, and he carefully tends to her grave; but it is clear that the next generation of Chans will be as American as they are Chinese. Biggers develops the Chinese element in the Charlie Chan novels by regularly including other Chinese characters in minor roles. Once again, he uses contrast to develop his theme. In the two San Francisco cases, The Chinese Parrot and Behind That Curtain, Chan visits Chinatown, calling upon his cousin Chan Kee Lim, head of the Chan Family Society. Though he lives on the mainland and welcomes his island relation, Kee Lim Chan is not divided in his loyalty. He deprecates Charlie Chan’s profession: “The foreign devil police — what has a Chinese in common with them?” (The Chinese Parrot, 3.34). Living in a completely Chinese neighborhood, Kim Lee Chan can avoid the division that increasingly troubles Charlie. (Kim Lee Chan cannot, however, avoid the generational problem: his own daughter has gone to American schools, works for the phone company, and speaks colloquial English.) Two Chinese servants provide the most pointed contrasts to the Chinese detective. The Chinese cook is a familiar stereotype, and Louie Wong in The Chinese Parrot is the epitome of the type. He is loyal and long-suffering; he drinks, and he says things like “San Flancisco no good.... All time lain dlop on nose” (9.144). He is precisely the demeaned oriental that Charlie Chan is not. And he is what Charlie Chan must become in order to complete his inquiry into the affairs of Louie Wong’s employer, the financier P.J. Madden. Chan plays the role of Ah Kim, an itinerant cook who agrees to fill Louie Wong’s place, and as a result, must shuffle and cringe and say things like “Tomallah nice day, you bet” (5.73). The arrogant American detectives — Captain Bliss of homicide and Sheriff Cox — completely misapprehend the situation, and at the end of the novel attempt to arrest Ah Kim/Charlie Chan. Chan can then cast off the subservient mask and, as great detective, can expose equally the guilt of the real villains and the incompetence of the constabulary. 83

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Biggers could not know that Keeper of the Keys would be his last novel, but the title’s echo of the first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key, seems almost prescient. And the role of Ah Sing, the aged servant of the novel’s central figure, Dudley Ward, provides a peculiarly elegiac element in the novel. Ah Sing also fits the long-suffering and loyal stereotype, and he speaks in pidgin, but he does not drink and is not played for laughs. In the middle of the novel, Charlie Chan looks at Ah Kim and is “overwhelmed with sadness.... Why? Because he, though among Caucasians many more years than I, still remains Chinese. As Chinese today as in the first moon of his existence. While I — I bear the brand — the label — Americanized” (7.87). There is surely a poignancy to this recognition. And Biggers arranges the action to recall the theme at the end of the novel. Charlie Chan makes special arrangements to allow Ah Sing to escape the unhappiness of the denouement. He is, in fact, enabling a key witness to escape the country, and he experiences a radical conflict between his identity as a detective and as a Chinese. The Chinese (the human) side wins, and he escorts the old servant to the train which will take him to the ship which will take him back to China, to see, as Charlie Chan says, his native village, “to walk upon the soil wherein [his] bones were some day to rest” (17.189). Charlie Chan, indelibly “Americanized,” will never be able to undertake the same journey himself.

iv The last lines of the last Charlie Chan novel are an exchange between an American girl and the Chinese detective. She declares: “You really are a great detective, aren’t you?” Charlie Chan replies, “Three things the wise man does not do. He does not plow the sky. He does not paint pictures on the water. And he does not argue with a woman” (Keeper of the Keys, 20.216). The girl is right: Charlie Chan has become a Great Detective. But he was not born great. Biggers was not, when he wrote The House Without a Key, intending to create a master detective whose analytic genius would unravel any tangled skein, and he was largely content to finesse the methodology of the police detectives whom he had to recruit to support John Quincy Winterslip’s investigation into the murder of his uncle. As 84

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Sgt. Charlie Chan pushed himself forward, and the novel moved toward the classical formula, Biggers did have to make a gesture toward assigning his detective a distinctive technique. It is an odd gesture: “I am believer,” Chan tells John Quincy, “in Scotland Yard method — follow only essential clue” (10.96–97). There is, perhaps, a deliberate irony in having a Chinese detective appeal to a Scotland Yard method. But as Charlie Chan acquired the mantle of great detective, a mock–English method would no longer do, and Chan had to acquire his own Chinese approach to detection. The “essential clue” is not employed in the second novel, which does not center upon the investigation of a murder, but it reappears as a key term at the beginning of the third novel, Behind That Curtain, as Biggers inaugurates Charlie Chan’s career as a series detective who solves murders. He gives Chan the opportunity to ask an actual Scotland Yard inspector (ret.), Sir Frederic Bruce, about the “essential clue” method. “Such,” Sir Frederic acknowledges, “is usually our custom” (2.23). It is, of course, not much of a method. It worked, rather weakly, in The House Without a Key; it works not at all in Behind That Curtain. The essential clue in the first novel was the watch with the defective luminous dial that Aunt Minerva happened to see on the wrist of the murderer. The wearer of the watch was, undoubtedly, the villain. The middle of the novel was occupied by pursuing a number of various non-essential clues to their dead-ends; the action concluded when Charlie Chan and John Quincy Winterslip finally refocused their attention on the watch. In Behind That Curtain, Sir Frederic Bruce follows his admission that the Yard employs the method with a further admission that the Yard’s occasional failures may be ascribed to an “obsession” with the essential clue, and he proceeds to cite an example from his own career of one of these failures. Charlie Chan points out that a clever murderer, knowing about this methodological obsession, might well exploit it by furnishing “gladly one essential clue which has no meaning and leads no place at all” (2.25). This proves to be exactly the situation in the example which Bruce of the Yard could not solve, and which Charlie Chan, now not obsessed with the Scotland Yard method, can solve. What Chinese technique can be offered in place of Scotland Yard’s discredited method? Biggers might ambitiously have attempted to ground 85

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Chinese detection in the Chinese worldview. He might, that is, have attempted to present a radically different approach to understanding the dynamics that underlie both the commission of the crime and its investigation. This is what the best of the later writers of ethnic detective stories have aimed at. But Biggers was not so ambitious. He was now preoccupied with translating an inadvertent invention into a well-made formula. Charlie Chan had indeed been conceived as radically different; it was his radical difference that made him fit into and then dominate The House Without a Key, which was a novel about radical differences. As Charlie Chan was establishing himself as a breadwinning series protagonist, his differences needed to be tamed. Biggers would continue to insist upon his cultural distinctiveness as a man, and he never allowed Chan to decline into a Confucius-quoting caricature in the novels. But he also could not make Charlie Chan profoundly alien as a detective. Biggers knew that the audience for detective stories had been trained to accept eccentricity in its heroes’ characters, but to expect a satisfyingly regular approach to their investigations. They should practice some sort of scientific method, examining evidence and producing decisive demonstrations of innocence and guilt. And this is what Charlie Chan does. To provide a Chinese tint to this process, Biggers develops two possibilities, both based on stereotypical Chinese qualities. The first is oriental intuition. In The House Without a Key, Charlie Chan announces, “Chinese most psychic people in the world” (10.97), a claim he will repeat, often more than once, in every novel. It is without merit. The Golden Age form preferred ratiocination as its ideal method; even the less rigorous detectives, whatever their practice, claimed to be rational. Intuition was derogated, and “psychic,” if it means anything, suggests an extreme form of intuition. Although Sax Rohmer might produce a curiosity in his Morris Klaw “Dream Detective” series of stories, a genuinely psychic detective is a sport in the genre. And, in fact, Charlie Chan never actually relies upon psychic powers. His inexplicable mistrust of circumstances in The Chinese Parrot does come close to a “psychic” intuition, but his inability to ground his suspicion in any evidence throughout the middle of the novel is distinctly felt as a flaw in the narrative. Biggers seems to have used the “Chinese are very psychic people” line to add an oriental veneer to the conventional rationality of Charlie Chan’s investigations. 86

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But a second methodological pronouncement, repeated almost as frequently as the “psychic” phrase, has a more substantial value. Near the end of The House Without a Key, as he pushes himself forward as the main detective, Chan advises John Quincy, “Patience are a virtue” (19.194). The patience of “the calm, cool Oriental” is another stereotype (the passive Taoist East opposed to the active Faustian West), and like “psychic,” it misrepresents Chan’s practice. Charlie Chan, unlike another famously fat detective, is, in fact, a quite active, quite mobile investigator, always on the move, examining fingerprints and interviewing witnesses. Biggers never depicts him in a meditative posture, solving a three-pipe problem in the solitude of his own thoughts. But patience is indeed Charlie Chan’s peculiar — peculiarly Chinese — virtue as a detective. In the second novel, The Chinese Parrot (1926), he elaborates on his methodological aphorism: “Patience ... are a very lovely virtue. Through long centuries Chinese cultivate patience like kind gardener tending flowers” (12.182). He continues, “White men leap about similar to bug in bottle. Which are better method, I inquire?” (12.182). Later in the novel he adds, “Chinese knows he is one minute grain of sand on seashore of eternity. With what result. He is calm and quiet and humble. No nerves, like hopping, skipping Caucasian” (16.228). This cultural polarity, which lies at the core of the Chan novels, is repeated in Behind That Curtain, as Chan declines to “leap” at a chance to stay in San Francisco and complete his investigation of the murder of Sir Frederic Bruce: “I have watched the American citizen. His temples throb. His heart pounds. The fibers of his body vibrate. With what result? A year subtracted from his life” (5.77). The “calmness” of the Oriental, which he is defending here, is somewhat undercut by the fact that he does stay in San Francisco and does complete his investigation of the murder of Sir Frederic Bruce. But Charlie Chan is aware of this irony: not only does he see his cousins and his children adopt the American ethos of pep, he even admits, “Mostly when I talk of patience, I am forcing it on others” (11.175). Nonetheless, at the end of the novel, he reasserts the value and the Chinese-ness of his special virtue: “Patience.... As the Chinese say, ‘In time the grass becomes milk’” (19.303). In The Black Camel, patience is specifically identified as a Confucian virtue (“the philosophy of the patient K’ung-fu-tsze” [7.492]), though again it is more honored than practiced.21 87

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The juxtaposition of the oriental and western worldviews epitomized in the “patience” motif seems to have fascinated Biggers, and is perhaps, in a sense, the main reason why Charlie Chan “modestly pushed his way forward” in The House Without a Key and why he became the protagonist of the series of novels that followed.22 The series of novels which followed The House Without a Key are not structured in thematic dichotomies in the way that the original novel is, though a sort of momentum does seem to carry through in the second and third novels. The Chinese Parrot employs a couple of key polarities: old business, which operates with gentility and trust (the jewelry firm of Meek and Eden), is contrasted with new business, represented by the ruthless financier, P.J. Madden; and the old West of gold mines and ghost towns is contrasted with the new West of movie locations and fanciful new desert townships. In the third novel, there is an important juxtaposition of English experience (Scotland Yard, empire) and American (newspapers, lawyers), but the main impression is now of the coherent scene of the crime. Biggers has moved toward the classical model of Auden’s “great good place”: a circumscribed location with a circumscribed cast of characters, all tainted with suspicion until the great detective finally separates the many sheep from the single goat. Such a construction leaves the writer little room to play with thematic oppositions; his or her ingenuity is entirely engaged in designing each character to be interesting and distinct, and, as well, potentially guilty and (with one exception) actually innocent. Plot takes priority over theme in defining the uses of character and scene. Even in the final three novels, Biggers manages to raise significant side issues. But after The House Without a Key, the principal thematic contrast will be the obvious one: the patient Chinese Charlie Chan confronting the “bug in a bottle” activities of non–Chinese Americans. Behind That Curtain is the novel in which Chan asserts himself as a homicide detective (he was subordinate in the first novel, and the second novel is not, primarily, a murder investigation). The eminent Scotland Yard detective, Sir Frederic Bruce, who has built a career on the essential clue method, welcomes a conversation with the novelty of a Chinese detective, observing, “A Chinese should make an excellent detective. The patience of the East, you know” (1.10). But patience is not included in Sir Frederic’s short list of detective virtues. “Varying portions of hard work, 88

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intelligence and luck” are, Sir Frederic argues, the ingredients of successful detection, and of these three virtues, he adds provocatively, “luck is the greatest by far” (1.4). By omitting “patience” and downplaying “intelligence,” Sir Frederic seems to disparage the very qualities that comprise the Chinese Great Detective. Charlie Chan expresses agreement with Sir Frederic’s sentence, and in some degree he acts according to it: he works hard; he is intelligent; and he is often lucky, sometimes more lucky than he ought to be. But he is mostly intelligent. Intelligent and patient. At the end of Behind That Curtain, a second Scotland Yard official, Inspector Duff, reviews Charlie Chan’s conduct of the investigation into the murder of Sir Frederic. Duff repeats Sir Frederic’s trinity of detective virtues —“intelligence, hard work and luck,” and then, rejecting Sir Frederic’s priority, adds: “in my opinion, in this instance, the greatest of the trinity was intelligence” (20.316). Charlie Chan treasures the compliment. To the extent that his success results from intelligence, he is a Great Detective; to the extent that it results from patience, he is a Chinese detective. When Duff returns to the series two novels later, however, he uses a different trinity of virtues to characterize Charlie Chan’s method: “Perseverance — that was Chan’s method. Patience, hard work, and perseverance” (Charlie Chan Carries On, 7.93). Hard work is the only repetition. Patience, the Chinese virtue, now receives its due priority, and luck, a necessity, but no virtue in any detective story, is wisely omitted. But intelligence has been replaced with perseverance. The peculiar strength of the great detective has been replaced by the peculiar strength of the hardboiled detective. It is an odd substitution. Charlie Chan is not becoming tougher; and indeed, his solution of the case depends upon a close reading of the evidence and the execution of a clever stratagem calculated to make the villain reveal himself. Close readings and stratagems are staples of the Golden Age form; Charlie Chan is never more the great detective than he is in Charlie Chan Carries On. In the end, Charlie Chan escapes the categories. He is not, nor is he meant to be, fully “great” or fully Chinese. Biggers was interested in writing good (and saleable) stories and was neither overly subservient to generic prescriptions nor excessively attentive to cultural realities (or to ethnic sensibilities). The Charlie Chan novels are probably the more successful 89

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because of these insensitivities. Precisely because neither his background nor this technique is over-studied, Charlie Chan emerges as a coherent Chinese American character and a plausible detective. The later ethnic detectives will almost always be more authentic, and they will often be better investigators, but very few of them have acquired the devoted following that the near-great, near–Chinese Charlie Chan has.

v Philo Vance and the Continental Op were, for a 1920s American readership, ethnically unmarked; that is, they were evidently white AngloSaxon Protestants. Racial and religious identity was not a matter of great consequence in the worlds in which they found themselves. Victims, suspects, killers, and police all tend to have white faces and all tend to speak clear American English. (Vance himself affects an Anglicized English and the Op expresses himself in fluent vernacular, but these are not ethnicallydefined variations.) Nonetheless, if it is not the central issue that it is for Charlie Chan, problems of racial identity are not totally absent in the worlds of Philo Vance and the Continental Op. The Harlem Renaissance was at its peak when Philo Vance first appeared in New York, but Vance’s Manhattan appears not to extend beyond 125th Street. He will occasionally encounter a mulatto maid, but he never ventures into neighborhoods; he never has to deal with black New York, or Jewish New York, or Italian New York. He does, however, on occasion come into contact with Chinese characters. In the late Kidnap Murder Case (1936), Vance is attacked by a small, black-pajama-clad “Chinaman” trained in the martial arts (a training easily countered by the butt of Sgt. Heath’s revolver). More interesting are Vance’s exchanges with Liang Tsung Wei, the cook in the household of Archer Coe in The Kennel Murder Case (1933). Here too Wright indulges in racial stereotyping. “Chinamen,” Vance informs Sgt. Heath, “are not like Occidentals. When they make up their minds to remain silent, there is no known torture that can force them to speak” (122). Laing himself will say, “In my country the senses are more acute than in the Occident” (286). These ethnic attributes are, perhaps, more offensive than Charlie Chan’s professions of oriental patience and psychic sensitivity. 90

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Liang’s first words, “Me cook,” suggest that he may be cut from the same mold as the pidgin-speaking Louie Wong in Biggers’s The Chinese Parrot, but Wright was not interested in that stereotype. Liang soon reveals himself to have been educated at the Imperial University at Tientsin and at Vance’s own Oxford University. He has been disappointed by political developments in China, and has chosen for two years to exile himself from China until his homeland is restored to the “spiritual and intellectual equilibrium” by a renewed commitment to Taoist philosophy. Liang Tsung Wei is, thus, clearly a more sophisticated character — a more sophisticated Chinese character — than Charlie Chan. He knows China. He quotes Laotse and he can discuss fine points of Chinese ceramics with Vance (Vance, naturally — an expert who has “written various articles for Oriental and art journals on the subject of Sung and Ming monochrome porcelains” (17). More importantly, he has been directly engaged in China’s recent history. He acknowledges having joined the Ta Tao Huei, which S.S. Van Dine’s footnote translates as “The Great Sword Society.” The Ta Tao Huei was an offshoot of the I Ho Ch’uan (The Righteous Fists of Harmony, commonly known in the West as the Boxers). The Boxer Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty and against the intrusions of Western and Japanese forces into China ran its course from June 1900 to September 1901. The Western powers defeated both the Boxers and the Qing (who had attempted to co-opt the rebellion), and the humiliating “Boxer Protocol” that they imposed upon China does provide a telling motive for Liang’s presence in New York City. But it is an oddly out of date motive. The Boxer Rebellion failed in 1901, and a great deal of Chinese history had intervened between then and 1933. In 1911, the Qing dynasty was finally overthrown, and in 1912 the Chinese Republic was declared, initiating a period of conflict between Chinese warlords, Japanese expansionists, and English, French, German, and American interests. Wright might have made Liang a disappointed member of Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary League, or of the Kuomintang, headed by Chiang Kai-shek after Sun’s death in 1925, or of the Chinese Communist Party founded in 1921. By attaching Liang to the Ta Tao Huei, Wright achieves two goals. He attaches Archer Coe’s cook concretely to Chinese history, and he renders that attachment innocuous: 30 years ago Liang was a Chinese activist; now, wiser (a Taoist), he waits and cultivates 91

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his appreciation of porcelain. Philo Vance can respect Liang’s commitment to his nation’s independence as well as his appreciation of his nation’s art and philosophy without himself taking a position on the status of China in world politics in 1933. How Liang has spent the intervening decades, and why a “scholarly-looking Chinaman of about forty” (111) has served as a cook for two years (and what service a child of perhaps seven could render to the Ta Tao Huei) are questions that remain unanswered. In his first exchange with Liang, Vance, as a connoisseur of Chinese ceramics, asks a sensitive question: how does Liang feel about “the rare ceremonial pieces of Chinese art that have been pilfered from your temples and graves”? Liang replies mildly that the Chinese, of course, “regret their loss” (112). As Vance himself has acquired a collection of objets d’art “pilfered” from China, Greece, Italy, England, Spain, French Guinea, the Sudan, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and the Congo, the issue of Western appropriation of non–Western cultural artifacts is raised, but not developed. In an earlier novel, The Scarab Murder Case (1930), the question had also been raised and evaded. In that novel, it is a private collection of Egyptian antiquities that is the scene of the crime. The collector, Benjamin Kyle, has sponsored expeditions to retrieve artifacts from the tomb of the pharaoh Intef, and has accumulated a museum’s worth of relics. He has also taken in the half–Egyptian daughter of an archeologist and “a Coptic lady of noble descent who traced her lineage from the last Saite Pharoahs” (Chapter 5) and her wholly Egyptian retainer, Anupu Hani. Hani is the interesting figure. Like Liang, he is expert in the traditions of his oriental culture, and he expresses more than “regret” at the depredations perpetrated by Westerners: “For many generations the sacred tombs of our forefathers have been violated by the treasure-seeking Occidental. But the gods of old Egypt were powerful gods and protected their children” (Chapter 4). Throughout the novel, Hani speaks on behalf of the old gods and against the casual sacrileges of the imperial West. In the end, Vance and Hani reach an understanding in which Vance prompts the Egyptian to punish the villain in a case where the rules of American law would have been powerless to do so. Both Liang and Hani emerge as admirable others. Neither one of them, of course, is a match for Philo Vance. No one is. But they do receive 92

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Vance’s esteem, and are thus distinguished as models for emulation. Both are emphatically oriental. They dress and speak in a foreign style, and Sgt. Heath of the NYPD, Wright’s epitome of the common man, casts a suspicious eye on Liang and Hani precisely because they are so apparently un–American. Vance, however, measures them by their knowledge of high culture — high Chinese or high Egyptian — and by their pride in that culture. Willard Wright was, it seems, at least as racist as the average white American in the 1920s. John Loughery relates an ugly incident in which Wright shocked a dinner party in a hotel dining room with his abuse of the black waiters (183). But he was willing to accord respect to people of color who take an informed and dignified pride in the artistic products of their native cultures.

vi Race plays only a small role in the fiction of Dashiell Hammett.23 The Continental Op encounters a largely white America. The Op’s only significant exchanges with non-white Americans are with Chinese. The mastermind of the criminal gang that he meets in “The House on Turk Street” (1924) is “a short fat Chinese, immaculately clothed in garments that were as British as his accent” (CS, 132). Tai Choon Tau is clever as well as elegant, in contrast to his accomplices: the urban thug, Hook; the elderly, well-armed deceivers, the Quarres; and the greedy, seductive young Elvira. All five prove equally eager to betray the others; three (Hook and the Quarres) are shot and killed; one (Elvira) escapes; Tai stands out only as the gang member who faces trial, is convicted, and is hanged. Hammett does appeal to one stereotype —“The Chinese are a thorough people; if one of them carries a gun at all, he usually carries two or three or more” (142); by living up to this stereotype, Tai enables the Op to survive the case. Chinese play a central role in “Dead Yellow Women” (1925), a long short story in which the Op’s client, the murder victims, and the murderers are all Chinese.24 Shan Ai Ho, now Lillian Shan, is the daughter of a Manchu provincial authority who, in 1912, after the revolution, fled to America with his wealth and his daughter. Lillian Shan, a “modern Chi93

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nese American from the flat heels of her tan shoes to the crown of her untrimmed felt hat,” has attended an American university, won a tennis championship, and written a scholarly book on an esoteric topic. The book makes her Philo Vance’s sort of Oriental; the university and the sports make her someone Charlie Chan’s children could easily relate to. But Hammett adds two dimensions to his portrait of the Chinese in the 1920s that divides his portrait radically from Wright’s and Biggers’s characters: he ties the Chinese directly to contemporary Chinese political history, and he eroticizes Chinese women. The political context emerges as the Op investigates the murder of Lillian Shan’s Chinese maid and cook. Her Chinese chauffeur and houseman have vanished. The Op eventually connects the crimes to Chang Li Ching, a criminal mastermind who operates from a dark room in a warren with a door on Spofford Alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown.25 Chang has been using Lillian Shan’s estate on the Pacific Ocean to smuggle guns to the Chinese forces that are opposing Japan’s advances into Chinese territories. He is in fact, she declares, a leader of the anti–Japanese movement, carrying on the work of Sun Wen (“or Sun Yat-Sen, as he is called in the south of China and here” (443). The story was published in November 1925; Sun had died only seven months earlier in March. This current events detail brings Lillian Shan’s and Chang Li Ching’s China far closer to actual China in the 1920s than Liang’s lapsed membership in the turn of the century Ta Tao Huei in The Kennel Murder Case, or Charlie Chan’s indefinite memories of a childhood in Guangdong.26 In the end, Lillian Shan’s romantic notion of Chang’s patriotism is undercut: if he is smuggling guns out of the States, he is not doing it through her house, and he certainly is using her house to smuggle in Chinese laborers excluded from legal entrance by those harsh immigration laws of the Exclusion Act. But the politics do matter even to Chang: when he discovers that his non–Chinese accomplice has apparently received a commendation from the Japanese, Chang has him summarily executed. The contemporary political context plays a functional role in the narrative. The second new thing Hammett brought to the portrayal of the Chinese lies in his description of two women, Lillian Shan and Hsiu Hsiu, a “slave-girl” in the service of Chang Li Chang. Hsiu Hsiu plays an equivocal role: she seems to help the Op at one point, and later, when he needs 94

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silence, she squeals as loudly as she can. But she is consistently exquisite: “She wasn’t four and a half feet high — a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy around the temples” (428). The description continues for several sentences, including a reference to her “bound-small feet.” She is, clearly, an object of desire.27 Lillian Shan, when a client in the Continental Detective Agency offices, with her tan shoes and untrimmed felt hat is described as almost mannish. But when the Op encounters her in Chang’s territory, she is transformed into a Manchu princess wearing a butterfly-shaped headdress and a multi-colored, filigreed gown. “Hsiu Hsiu was a perfect a bit of feminine beauty as could be imagined.... Then comes this queen of something — and Hsiu Hsiu’s beauty went away” (440). The erotic charge leads to nothing: Garthorne, the Anglo with whom Lillian Shan is infatuated, does not reciprocate her feelings, and the Op does not act on his own response to the beauty of either Chinese women. The epilogue to the story doesn’t mention Lillian Shan and mentions Hsiu Hsiu only to report that the Op doesn’t know anything about her. The epilogue’s focus is on the charged relationship between the Op and Chang Li Ching. It is the aura of the passive/aggressive male Chinese antagonist, not that of his sensual, seductive female Chinese allies, that finally occupies the Op’s attention. Nonetheless, the striking beauty of Lillian Shan and Hsiu Hsiu emphasizes the absence of the erotic in the Chinese worlds of Charlie Chan and Philo Vance. The Chinese in Biggers’s novels appear solely as domesticated married couples (old — Chan and his wife, or young — the couple in The Keeper of the Keys) or as unsexual children (including Chan’s college-age daughter). Wright’s Chinese are also unsexed. He portrays no women at all, and Liang’s energies, like those of all the truly admirable characters in Wright’s fiction, are funneled into aesthetics, not erotics. Hammett’s willingness to see Chinese women as objects of desire makes him neither more nor less of an orientalist than Biggers and Wright. Each writer chose from different pages of the popular menu of orientalist clichés. It is certainly possible to judge the choices of all three as reprehensible. If they must play with clichés, as of course they must, perhaps writers of popular fiction should stick to the clichés of their own race, their own religion, and their own gender. But perhaps by playing with clichés — and 95

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Biggers, Wright, and Hammett, however cleverly or clumsily, are playing with clichés, not naively accepting or malignantly deploying them — writers of popular fiction may make a small contribution to the broadening of their readership’s cultural horizons. That, at least, is what they may have thought they were doing.

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Ripped from the Headlines Translating Sensational Crime Fact into Popular Crime Fiction in the 1920s i When Willard Wright met his Harvard classmate, Maxwell Perkins, for lunch in January 1926, he brought with him three 10,000-word outlines for a series of detective novels featuring Philo Vance. (His regular practice would be to compose a 10,000-word outline, develop this into a 30,000-word draft, and finish with a 50,000-word novel.) Perkins may have recalled crossing paths with Wright at Harvard; in any event, after reading over the outlines, he resolved that Charles Scribner’s Sons, publishers of Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Harding Dana, Thomas Nelson Page and, more recently, of F. Scott Fitzgerald,1 Ring Lardner, and Ernest Hemingway, would undertake publication of the murder cases of Philo Vance. By the time the third case was published in 1928, the Philo Vance phenomenon had made Wright rich and Perkins, if not gay, grateful. As Perkins would explain to Ernest Hemingway in 1933, the annual Philo Vance novel was an important factor that enabled Scribner’s to do “a good deal better” than other publishers in that Depression year (Bruccoli, 173). Philo Vance’s continuing popularity and profitability was an important element in the viability of the Scribner’s publishing house. The debut of Philo Vance was, in one respect at least, unprecedented in the history of the genre. Willard Wright planned an initial sequence of three novels, the first two of which would be recognizable fictionalizations of recent celebrated and unsolved New York City crimes, while the third 97

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would launch the detective into Wright’s version of the Golden Age detective novel, with the circumstances of the crime clearly contrived to facilitate a complicated plot and — Wright’s personal touch — to evoke a particular theme (family pathologies, modern physics, Egyptology, etc). Poe had attempted to fictionalize a recent New York City crime in the middle of his three Dupin tales. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (November 1842–February 1843) would, in fact, be both more scrupulous in following the details of the murder of the cigar girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, in New York City ( July 1841) and more serious in proposing actual solutions to the actual crime (Poe has Dupin decisively dismiss some solutions, but cautiously has him only tentatively sketch his own conclusions) than would Wright’s Philo Vance novels. But “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” would also be more openly fantastic in its translation of each New York detail into a faux–Parisian vernacular: the characters are clearly Gallicized puppets re-enacting the murder of Mary Rogers. Wright would thus be more realistic than Poe — his recreations of celebrated New York City crimes would be set in the streets of New York City — and rather less real: he would definitely adjust details and would propose definite solutions that would not presume to apply to the actual, never-solved crimes. The first of the recreated crime narratives that Wright submitted to Maxwell Perkins in January 1926, The Benson Murder Case, drew upon the five-and-a-half-year-old murder of the celebrated New York City bon vivant, Joseph Bowne Elwell, and the second, The “Canary” Murder Case, drew upon the two-year-old murder of the celebrated New York City chorus girl, Dot King. Philo Vance’s debut would be played against two of New York City’s most notorious crimes of the early 1920s. He would investigate versions of two homicides that only recently had been played across the front pages of the New York (and other) newspapers. Money and sex had figured prominently in both cases; Elwell was a wealthy philanderer, and King was a grasping demimondaine, and these were types that drew especial attention in the unsettled 1920s when new wealth and new sexual freedoms were troubling phenomena. The murders of Elwell and King were, in January 1926, still unsolved, and they remain unsolved today. Though the New York City district attorney’s office and the New York City police department (and, above all, a battalion of New York newspaper reporters) pursued dozens of leads in 98

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the two cases, there was never even a leading suspect in either investigation.2 The author of detective stories could succeed where the authorities could not. The murderers of the wealthy philanderer Alvin Benson, and of the grasping demimondaine Margaret Odell, would be identified by Philo Vance within days of the commission of the their crimes, and both would face the consequences of their transgressions. The illusion of factuality — an illusion that Scribner’s exploited as it promoted the novels3— serves an important function. Vance himself is the stuff Willard Wright’s dreams were made of— a self-sufficient, post–Nietzschean aesthete of independent means, settled in a marvelously art-filled mansion on East 38th Street. But if the detective is fantastic, the crimes that he explicates are not just like crimes that might happen in New York City; they are like crimes that did happen in New York City. Philo Vance is a hothouse flower; Alvin Benson and Margaret Odell, like Joseph Bowne Elwell and Dot King, appear as garden variety New Yorkers. They are, to be sure, typical not of the mass of the population of the outer boroughs or even of the mass of the population of Manhattan, but they are typical of the sort of New Yorkers that New Yorkers and other Americans like to think are typical of the city: fast-living and talented young people who come from somewhere else and exercise their talents and do their fast living on the ever-lit streets and avenues of Manhattan. Having given his exotic detective plausibility by presenting him with two novels worth of quasi-actual murders, Wright was then free in his third Philo Vance novel to match the crimes to the detective. In The Greene Murder Case, he turned decisively away from headline-based fiction and provided Vance with a maniacal killer who, with wicked cleverness, murders in rapid succession her sister, her brother, her second brother, and her mother, and is prevented from utterly annihilating all her kinfolk only by the intervention of Philo Vance. And all the crimes take place within the walls of the derelict Greene mansion on 53rd Street. There have doubtless been family massacres in Manhattan (“pogrom” is the word Vance uses), but none like this. To sustain some credibility, Wright has Vance devote much of his summation at the end of The Greene Murder Case to quotations from Hans Gross’s Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter (with the German original often supplied in a footnote), demonstrating that the insane Ada Greene “took all her ideas from Gross” (364). Gross’s instances 99

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of bizarre murder schemes from Central European history prove that there were — somewhere, sometime — actual precedents for each of the techniques Ada employed; they do not make more probable the sequence of murders within the Greene mansion. In The Benson Murder Case, Wright had fictionalized an actual crime and had his implausible detective provide a plausible solution; in The “Canary” Murder Case, he again fictionalized an actual crime, but this time the detective’s solution — involving a specially-made phonograph recording — was rather less plausible; in The Greene Murder Case, the crime, the solution, and the detective were all equally removed from the realities of New York City. The remainder of the Philo Vance murder cases would take place in Philo Vance’s New York City, a wonderland of mansions and penthouses within whose walls strange pursuits and strange psychologies might press “reality” in improbable directions. But first, Philo Vance had to demonstrate his mastery of everyday New York City in the Roaring Twenties.

ii The murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell early on the morning of Friday, 11 June 1920, provided the newspapers with a summer’s worth of headlines. It occupied the columns of the front page of The New York Times from the initial report on 12 June to the end of the month, and there were almost daily updates through the end of July. Interest finally began to trail off in July and August, though there would be another burst of reporting when the case was reopened in April 1921. The same pattern could be observed in other American papers: the Chicago Tribune, for example, ran 18 articles on the Elwell murder between 12 June and 27 July 1920, and five more in April 1921; the Los Angeles Times provided its readers with 12 articles between 15 June and 27 July, and also reported the reopening of the case in April 1921. In the years following, the Elwell case would be mentioned when new unsolved mysteries made the headlines. The celebrity of the crime can be laid to several factors. Elwell did not belong to the highest circles of New York society. He was not even an established figure in the somewhat broader circles of new wealth. Though regularly identified as a millionaire, with a stable of valuable racehorses, a 100

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portfolio of valuable stocks, parcels of valuable real estate on Long Island and in newly fashionable Palm Beach, Florida, a yacht, Ming vases, and a Rembrandt painting (“Christ Carrying the Cross”), his estate would eventually prove at something under a quarter million dollars. But, as the author of The Principles, Rules, and Laws of Auction Bridge (1911) and other books on whist and bridge, Elwell was an acknowledged expert at a game which had come to be widely in vogue. He joined with young Harold Stirling Vanderbilt (a Vanderbilt of the highest social circles who, in 1925, would pioneer the scoring changes which would create modern Contract Bridge) in a triumphant bridge partnership. The game seems to have appealed especially to the wives and daughters of the new rich, and Elwell, from the very first accounts of his murder, was depicted as a man who had exploited the access to these under-attended-to women that his card-playing expertise gave him. (According to his estranged wife, he had for years refused to divorce her because his married status at once encouraged husbands to believe that his attentions to their wives and daughters were professional and, at the same time, discouraged the wives and daughters from believing that his attentions could ever lead to permanent relations.) Elwell was, then, immediately categorized not merely as a rake, but as a seducer of proper women — of middle- and upper-middle-class women —“the wives of prosperous businessmen” (NYT, 13 June).4 The number 50, initially proposed by Elwell’s secretary William Barnes as an estimate of Elwell’s liaisons, was repeated regularly in the press. Elwell, the Times reported, “was extremely discreet and rigidly observed the code of ethics of his class in insuring against scandal the women who trusted him” (15 June). The papers reported on a succession of respectable and more-than-respectable women who had had some connection with Elwell: a Palm Beach woman who became hysterical when Elwell told her that he must break off relations due to the suspicions of her husband; a Lexington, Kentucky, girl who had danced with him; the Countess Szinawska, held briefly as a German spy during World War I (with, by some accounts, Elwell as the informant who denounced her); the girl from Asbury Park who called him the day before his murder to arrange a meeting on the 11th; the “short, dark, handsome young woman about 24” who attempted, hours after the murder, to enter the apartment and recover some garments; the “little, short, fat girl with dark hair and a gray dress, trimmed with 101

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fur at the bottom” who had dined with Elwell the Tuesday before he was murdered. Elwell was evidently quite the voluptuary. And the consistent implication of the newspaper coverage was that Elwell’s murderer was a man acting under the aegis of the “unwritten law,” a husband, a father, or perhaps a brother vindicating the virtue of his wife/daughter/sister by putting a bullet in the middle of her seducer’s head. The coarse cigarette found on the mantelpiece of the room in which Elwell was shot militated against such a hero, but the cigarette was not revealed until late in the investigation. Elwell’s stable of racehorses provided another source of notoriety. He was, in fact, holding a letter from his head trainer in Lexington, Kentucky, reporting on the condition of some of his horses, when he was shot. He was a familiar figure at New York racetracks, and apparently a heavy gambler, at the tracks and off. William Barnes, Elwell’s valet and secretary, reported seeing his boss “lose as much as $50,000 without the slightest emotion” (NYT, 12 July 1920); four days later, when Elwell’s brother Walter said that he too had seen his brother lose $50,000, Barnes raised the stake, claiming to have seen Elwell lose $200,000 in a single day “without losing a hair” (NYT, 16 July 1920). These claims, presumably exaggerated, helped to make Elwell a most colorful victim. The circumstances of the murder provided an additional source of interest. Elwell’s housekeeper reported that when she arrived at 244 West 70th Street at 8:55 A.M. on the morning of Friday, June 11th, she found her 44-year-old employer sitting in an upholstered chair in his first floor drawing room, still breathing, but with a bullet hole in his forehead. A .45 caliber cartridge was found on the floor; the bullet had exited the back of Elwell’s skull and struck the wall behind him, three inches above his head. The house was double-locked, and because a break-in the previous year had led Elwell to change the lock, only he and Mrs. Larsen possessed keys. Most remarkably, Elwell was sitting in the chair in his pajamas, without either the toupee or the false teeth that he always wore in public. There was no indication of anything missing, so robbery was not obviously a motive. Police did discover a pink silk negligee, from which a woman’s initials had been cut. It was hidden in a closet; Mrs. Larsen would eventually admit that she had attempted to conceal it. Variations in Mrs. Larsen’s testimony would complicate the case in several details. 102

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Elwell’s activities on the final night of his life added the final fillip of interest. He had spent Thursday evening partying with Viola von Schlegel (née Kraus), who was celebrating the final decree in her divorce from her husband, Victor von Schlegel, a vice president with the United Rubber Manufacturing Company. Viola’s sister, Mrs. Walter Lewisohn, and her husband had invited Viola, Elwell and Octavio Figueroa to a celebratory dinner at the Ritz Carleton Hotel. There, apparently by coincidence, they encountered von Schlegel, who was in the company of a “young woman in black.” Elwell exchanged a brief pleasantry with Von Schlegel (or, according to other witnesses, did not exchange a brief pleasantry with Von Schlegel). Elwell’s party then moved to the roof garden of the New Amsterdam Theatre, where they were to enjoy the Ziegfeld Midnight Follies. The party broke up at 1:30 A.M., with the Lewisohns, Viola Kraus, and Octavio Figueroa leaving in a chauffeured car (though whether there were three or four passengers was disputed); Elwell set off on foot alone at 1:45 A.M., reaching 244 West 70th Street by 2:30 A.M., when he received a phone call from Viola Kraus. At 3:45 a neighbor noticed a racing car leave the entrance to Elwell’s house. The police eventually reconstructed the events of the morning: at 6:15 the milkman made his usual delivery. At 7:10, the mailman made his delivery (he “pressed the doorbell twice — two short rings” [Carey, 200]). The morning’s mail was found in Elwell’s hand. Marie Larsen arrived at 8:10–8:15 (not 8:55, as she originally claimed). Sometime between 7:25 and 8:15, Joseph Bowne Elwell had been shot in the head from a distance of one to three feet. He was not more than eight feet from the sidewalk of West 70th Street. His brother, Walter Elwell, called for “an eye for an eye justice” (NYT, 14 June: 1), but the killer was never caught. As early as Wednesday of the week after the murder, the district attorney was quoted as saying, “Boys, it’s the murder of the century” (NYT, 16 June: 1). A few final clues tantalized the police. The stub (“still moist”) of a cheap cigarette of the sort Elwell would never be seen smoking was discovered on the mantelpiece of the room in which he was murdered. And Mrs. Larsen declared that she had smelled cigarette smoke in the vestibule as she entered. The exact number of keys to the front door also remained in doubt (the Times would note on 19 June that “keys figured in the investigation as mysteriously and frequently as in ‘The Seven Keys to Baldpate’”). 103

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In April 1921, nine months after the murder, a lawyer for Elwell’s brother and mother went on record to assert the family’s satisfaction with the unsuccessful efforts of District Attorney Swann and the police to solve the crime. There were, the family’s lawyer admitted, simply too many suspects: he could take “any one of seven or eight persons” in the case and make a strong circumstantial case against him or her, and then could make an equally strong case against the next person (NYT, 2 April 1921: 11). In May 1920, just prior to Elwell’s death, Willard Wright had returned to New York. As the Elwell murder filled the newspapers, Wright was living on cinematic dreams (such as preparing a film treatment of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyat) and the resources of friends. In April 1921, he was living in Greenwich Village and working on the manuscripts of two novels that he would eventually abandon and upon a script of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” He was not yet ready to take up the hint, but the lawyer’s statement about the seven or eight viable suspects may have inspired the surfeit of suspects in The Benson Murder Case: Muriel St. Clair, Captain Philip Leacock, Leander Pf yfe, Mrs. Platz, and Major Anthony Benson are successively the objects of well-developed proofs of culpability. Arthur Carey, captain of New York City’s homicide squad in the 1920s and a chief investigator of the Elwell murder, was dismissive of the sevenor-eight-eminent-suspects-approach. He presented his professional conclusion about the slaying of Joseph Elwell in his 1930 autobiography, Memoirs of a Murder Man. His chapter on the Elwell murder, “Glamorous Background,” disparages the sensational press coverage. His own explanation: “The slayer of Elwell, in my opinion, was an invader, most likely a type of thief known as an unoccupied house-worker or possibly a letter thief ” (Carey, 223). “An unoccupied house-worker” might have been deceived by the Elwell’s small establishment: with his irregular hours, and his single housekeeper, and with the disrepair of the building’s façade, Elwell’s establishment might have been thought untenanted. (Its owner was, in fact, in the process of selling it, and had asked Elwell to prepare to vacate.) “A letter thief ” was one who followed the mailman on his route, seeking opportunities for a quick entry and exit. Such a thief, slipping in after the postman’s double ring, might have surprised Elwell in his drawing room. Carey had no use for theories of outraged fathers/husbands/ 104

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brothers or jealous mistresses. Elwell’s death was, simply, a matter of sitting in the wrong chair at the wrong time.

iii The Benson Murder Case is not set precisely in any year, or even any decade. S.S. Van Dine places all of Philo Vance’s adventures in homicide investigation firmly in the four-year term of Vance’s good friend, District Attorney John F.-X. Markham, elected on the Independent Reform Ticket “during one of the city’s periodical reactions against Tammany Hall” (15). A footnote explicitly places the end of Markham’s term of office several years before the Friday, 11 June 1920, murder of Joseph Elwell (61). Van Dine’s meticulous date-keeping places the murder of Alvin Benson at 12:30 A.M. on the morning of Friday, June 14. The possible Friday June 14ths are those of 1918 and 1912. But in neither of these years was a Reform ticket elected. New York City’s mayors of the first third of the 20th century were, with one exception, all elected with the endorsement of Tammany Hall.5 That exception was John Purroy Mitchell, the “Boy Mayor,” elected on a Fusion ticket in 1913 and serving from 1914 until 1917. There is no reason to associate Markham with Mitchell, and, indeed, no reason to perform Baker Street Irregular tactics in order to align Vance’s cases with the actual calendar. Philo Vance’s New York was, in fact, clearly the New York of Mayor James J. “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker, who was elected in 1925 and who served from 1926 until 1932, thus presiding over the city during the publication of Vance’s first five cases.6 Walker was the mayor of the Jazz Age. He was openly reprobate. He drank; he awarded himself a substantial pay raise; he winked at corruption, tolerated bootlegging, proposed a casino for Central Park; he left his wife for a showgirl. But he also fought successfully to keep the subway fare at five cents. He was popular enough to win re-election in 1929, but in 1932, under pressure from a committee investigating corruption in his administration, Walker resigned. In 1934, the reform Republican, Fiorello LaGuardia, was elected mayor, and Tammany Hall never regained its eminence. Philo Vance’s New York is the New York of Jimmy Walker, and of Joseph Bowne Elwell. The parallels between the two cases are undisguised.7 105

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Alvin Benson, like Elwell, is discovered on a Friday by his housekeeper, sitting in his living (or drawing) room chair, having been shot in the head. Both victims are missing the toupees and false teeth with which they always faced their public. Benson holds a book in his hand; Elwell held a letter from his Kentucky racehorse trainer. In both cases, the shell of a .45 caliber bullet lies on the floor, and the murder weapon has been removed. There is a significant trace of a woman (gloves and a handbag for Benson, a negligee or kimono for Elwell), and there are unexplained cigarette butts (in the fireplace [Benson], on the fireplace mantle [Elwell]). A neighbor noticed a car outside the building in the early hours of the morning (a Cadillac [Benson], a racing car [Elwell]). Benson’s building is located on 48th Street; Elwell’s residence was on West 70th Street, but the layout of the two row houses is identical: a vestibule leads to a hallway which has a door to the drawing room on the right and a dining room to the rear. In both instances, the murdered man’s chair is placed with its back to the street-side wall; in both there is a fireplace to the right of the seated man. In both instances, the murdered man’s brother presses for a solution to the crime. Wright’s New York readers are invited to revisit a celebrated crime about which they knew every detail but the identity of the killer. And what the contingencies of real life could not provide, the conventions of the detective story will supply: there is a guarantee that the murderer of Alvin Benson will be identified, his motives exposed, his method explicated. Even in parts of the country where the Elwell case fell quickly from the front page, the assimilated details from the actual crime inevitably gave The Benson Murder Case a verisimilitude. Of course, Wright omitted much of the Elwell story, and altered some important details. Many of the omissions streamlined the story. Elwell’s estranged wife and 16-year-old son might have added plausible additional suspects, but having contrived cases against five suspects already, Wright must have regarded the discarded wife as supererogatory (and, also, as something that might humanize the victim, thus making Vance’s flippancy too offensive). Elwell’s diverse habitats — Long Island, New York; Palm Beach, Florida; Lexington, Kentucky — are also discarded as superfluities. Elwell’s 50 women are rolled into Muriel St. Clair, and her relationship with Benson has not, by her account, been consummated. (There is a brief reference to Alvin Benson’s sexual intemperance: Major Anthony Benson 106

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admits that “his brother’s relations with women were of a somewhat unconventional nature” [64]. The New York Times of 1920 was considerably more open about these matters than Wright’s novel of 1926.) And Captain Philip Leacock, Muriel’s chivalric southern lover, must stand in for the fathers, brothers, and husbands who were the presumed villains in Elwell’s murder. Muriel and Philip, however, prove to be nobly chaste; she is dedicated to her career as a singer, and insists on being in bed by midnight; he is dedicated to vindicating her virtue, even to the point of confessing to a murder he believes she committed. (In April 1921, a young man confessed to killing Elwell; a ten-day investigation concluded he was mentally unstable.) The titillating accounts of abandoned pink negligees and indiscreet letters from young girls and that “woman in black” who accompanied the ex-husband of Joseph Elwell’s final female companion — none of this enters the novel. The ex-husband did eventually marry the “woman in black” (who was revealed to be a young woman from Minnesota, studying music in New York), and Van Dine’s report at the novel’s end that Captain Leacock and the musically adept Muriel St. Clair are happily married may be an echo of this incidental detail of the Elwell case. Some details in The Benson Murder Case are altered for tactical reasons. The bullet hole in the wall behind Benson’s head is, for example, 18 inches lower than the wound, not three inches higher, as in Elwell’s case. This reversal prepares for the chapter in which Vance calculates the killer’s height by reconstructing the geometry necessary to achieve that result and concluding that the killer must have been between 5'10" and 6'2" tall, standing erect, and holding the pistol 5' 6" from Benson’s forehead. The investigators in the Elwell case could come to no such helpful conclusion. The upward angle of the bullet’s course and the closeness from which it had been fired (1 to 3 inches) compelled them to assume that the killer, whatever his or her height, must have been sitting or kneeling directly in front of Elwell. Some of Wright’s additions to the plot simplify matters. Elwell’s housekeeper, Marle Larsen, lived out; Anna Platz lives in. Wright gives Mrs. Platz a daughter, and places that daughter as a secretary in the firm of Benson and Benson. This provides Vance with the occasion to surprise Markham, Van Dine, and the reader with the revelation that the helpful secretary is Mrs. Platz’s daughter, thus providing Mrs. Platz with a possible motive for killing Alvin Benson. 107

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Other alterations provide additional red herrings. Leander Pfyfe, to whom Wright assigns the car reported to have been parked outside Benson’s house on the night of his murder, is made a much more suspicious character than his prototype in the Elwell case. He is the unfaithful husband of a wealthy wife. He has forged Benson’s name to a check and then has unwisely used his mistress’s jewels to secure a delay in Benson reporting the forgery. (The recovery of these jewels in the safe of Major Anthony Benson is one of the decisive proofs of the major’s guilt. Jewelry valued at $7,000 played a somewhat different role in the Elwell case: finding the jewels in Elwell’s bedroom helped to convince the police that robbery was not a motive in his death.) Colonel Bigsby Ostrander is an entirely unprecedented character, created as a convenience to supply useful information about the characters of the Benson brothers and about the practices of their Wall Street brokerage; he also becomes one more individual against whom Vance — with some straining — can make a prima facie case. The connection of the Benson brothers with Wall Street is a suggestive one. Elwell was, in fact, thought to have speculated in the stock market, but it was the speculation, not the market that was emphasized. Elwell was a bon vivant, not a businessman. He made and lost money on real estate, on card games, and on race horses as well as on stocks. Other than royalties from his books on bridge and fees for bridge lessons, he seems to have had no permanent source of earned income. His net worth was a puzzle to his friends, who evidently greatly overestimated it. One report had him making $750,000 in a single speculation in cotton in 1917, and said that by 1920 he had a million dollars in bonds as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate and racehorses. Ultimately the Elwell estate proved at a respectable $225,000. Though Wright is indefinite about the precise wealth of Alvin Benson, the crime turns on the fact that while both Alvin and Anthony Benson have abused their fiduciary trusts as stockbrokers, Alvin has successfully recouped his losses and Anthony has not. Alvin’s refusal to advance his brother $50,000 precipitates the murder. In the mid–1920s, the stock market was still in its spectacular upward swing that would culminate in the crash of 1929. Stocks rose over 200 percent between 1925 and 1928, and the boom that began in 1922 would not collapse until October 1929 (Geisst, 175). It was real estate that supplied the mid–1920s with its notorious example of financial excess and col108

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lapse: the Florida boom and the Florida bust. Joseph Elwell had participated in that phenomenon. But Wright chose to associate the victim and the villain of his novel with Wall Street. Alvin Benson is, like Elwell, unlovely as man — the false teeth and the toupee — but where Elwell clearly had a certain magnetism that apparently attracted men and, especially, women, Wright makes Alvin Benson explicitly not attractive. Leander Pfyfe explains: “Alvin was not a man who possessed the personal characteristics that women hold attractive.” As a result, Benson “used certain — ah — methods in his dealings with women” that Pfyfe would never use. “He used underhand methods, as it were” (149). Alvin Benson is physically unappealing, he takes “unfair advantage” of women, and he is a corrupt Wall Street stockbroker. This gratuitous animus against Wall Street may be Wright’s revenge for the Manhattan business district’s disregard for Manhattan’s art world during the decade and a half that an impoverished Wright was battling on behalf of art in Manhattan. The motive does not appear to be personal. John Adams Thayer, the philistine who hired Wright to edit The Smart Set and then fired him, had made his fortune as a publisher and was never connected to Wall Street. In the years immediately prior to the birth of Philo Vance, Wright had the most cause to resent the neglect of the Hollywood moguls who failed to perceive the genius in his film scenarios. Associating the Benson brothers with Wall Street serves simply to make them hollow men: even had they been honest brokers, they would have been men who made money from money, not by producing any goods. Alvin Benson is even worse than his brother Anthony. Anthony is inept as well as corrupt. Not only does he cheat his clients, he invests his stolen gains in worthless securities. There is, perhaps, a contrast between the creative Paul Cezanne and the destructive Anthony Benson: the novel opens with Vance contemplating the purchase of an artist’s watercolors and ends with him exposing the defalcations of a stockbroker. But Anthony is, above all, a fratricide. The central appeal of refashioning a celebrated unsolved mystery into a fictional one is that in the world of fiction there can — there will— be a solution. Joseph Elwell was murdered in his drawing room, attired in his pajamas and sitting in his favorite upholstered chair. The Times noted that pedestrians on the sidewalk outside the house would not have been more than 12 feet from Elwell 109

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when he was shot (14 June). And Captain Carey’s conclusion that the killer was “an unoccupied house-worker or possibly a letter thief ” who happened upon an opportunity provides little comfort. Elwell’s death was, for a few weeks in the summer of 1920, a memento mori to all New Yorkers: there but for the grace of God sat they. Alvin Benson’s death was not. It was not unsolved, and it was not random. It was, in fact, primal. Alvin is not Abel, and Anthony is not Cain, but there is a parodic echo of Genesis in Philo Vance’s first case. The Benson brothers were cheating clients, not making sacrifices to God, but Anthony’s anger is because Alvin’s cheating was better rewarded than his own. Joseph Elwell’s brother, Walter, had exhibited a touch of Old Testament morality in his statement to the press on 13 June: “We believe in ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’” (NYT, 14 June 1920, p. 1), but there was never any thought that he might be implicated in his brother’s death. Wright chose to bring the murder home to the most basic and basest of motives. The murder of Alvin Benson was not a random act of violence in a Sodom of gambling and divorce, bootlegging and seduction, Midnight Follies and Ladies in Black. A slight scent of Elwell’s sulfur may remain in Benson’s lechery and his peculations, but Wright has actually scrubbed much of the scandal from the situation, alluding to impropriety more than depicting it. The Benson murder case is, in the end, a family affair.

iv When, in retirement, Arthur Cary reviewed his nearly 34-year career as a homicide detective, he followed the chapter on the murder of Joseph Elwell with one entitled “Magnetic Butterflies.” The “Butterflies” were the attractive and free-spirited young girls who discovered that, if one was attractive enough and free enough, one might make a very comfortable living in the demimonde of theatres and restaurants, shows and revues that constituted the Broadway of the 1920s. Chief among Carey’s Broadway butterflies was Dot King, whose unsolved murder occurred in 1923, two years before Willard Wright would use it as the source for his second Philo Vance novel. 110

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Dorothy “Dot” King had been born an Irish caterpillar named Anna Marie Keenan in 1896. In 1912 she married a chauffeur who seems to have vanished after a couple of years. In 1921 when, over the objections of her brother, she had her hair bobbed, she was encouraged to leave her mother’s house. In 1922 she secured a divorce, having discovered the rewards of being born attractive and achieving freedom and she began to pursue a career as, in the delicate phrasing of the Times, “Fifth Avenue modiste’s model” (NYT, 17 March 1923, 1) or “a night club hostess” (NYT, 17 December 1923, 33). She claimed to have danced in the Ziegfeld Follies. The police inquiry suggested that she soon put her model’s figure to other lucrative uses. Her principal admirer at the time of her death was a wealthy, 60-year-old Bostonian, whom the police and the press discreetly identified only as “Marshall.” With his younger companion, Mr. “Wilson,” Marshall would visit Dot regularly in the fifth-floor apartment on 144 West 57th Street in which he had installed her. Marshall lavished furs, jewels, and money upon her. And Dot then lavished money and jewels upon Albert Guimares. Newspapers described Guimares as a financier, and reported that he was under indictment in Massachusetts for stock fraud (Dot King posted his bail); later accounts describe him as a gangster. And though not so lavish in his gifts as Marshall was to Dot, or Dot to Albert, Al Guimares was evidently paying his regards to Mrs. Aurelia Fischer Dreyfus. The police also discovered that Dot King was apparently supplementing Mr. Marshall’s generosity with a blackmail scheme designed to produce income from her former beaus. A number of men had been approached with an offer to purchase letters which they had written to Miss King. Among the more prominent of these men was Draper M. Daugherty, the son of Herbert Hoover’s attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty. But it was Messrs. Guimares and Marshall who saw Dot on the day before her death, and upon whom attention was focused. Guimares had spent the first half of the week, Sunday through Wednesday morning, with Dot at a Broadway hotel. On Wednesday morning, he had accompanied her to her appointment with a chiropodist, and then left her, knowing that she had an “appointment” for the evening. The appointment was with Mr. Marshall, who picked her up at noon, returned her to her apartment at 7:30, and then paid a midnight-to-2:30 A.M. visit to her 111

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there. His nighttime arrival and departure were confirmed by the elevator man, John Thomas. Dot King’s body was discovered at 11:30 A.M. the following morning, Thursday, 15 March 1923, when Dot’s maid, Billie Bradford, found her dead on her bed, with burns around her mouth, and a four-ounce bottle of chloroform by her feet. The apartment had been ransacked, and money, jewels, and furs worth $15,000 were missing. The time of death was estimated at 7:00–7:30 A.M. Marshall and Guimares were the obvious suspects, but Marshall was respectable, and Guimares had an alibi. Marshall’s respectability was not challenged, but Guimares’s alibi —“a mysterious blonde”— turned out to be the Mrs. Dreyfus whom Guimares was courting when he was not attending to Dot. Mrs. Dreyfus’s testimony would eventually be rendered suspect: she died in a fall at the Potomac Boat Club in Washington, D.C., a half year after Dot King’s murder, but not before signing an affidavit confessing that her testimony in the King case had been false. There was, however, insufficient evidence to indict Guimares. Though he had been arrested for violating the Sullivan Act by carrying an unlicensed pistol in New York City, Guimares was not otherwise charged in the King murder. Nor were any of the other men whom the police could connect with the Broadway Butterfly. Captain Carey’s final conclusion: “Dorothy King was probably slain by a professional thief or thieves, possibly a gigolo type of thief. The crude manner in which the chloroform was administered is typical of thieves” (223). The chloroform is one of the details that Wright altered, but the murder of Margaret Odell, “a scintillant figure who seemed somehow to typif y the gaudy and spurious romance of transient gaiety” of the “bohemian demi-monde of Broadway” (10), clearly echoes that of Dot King. Both young women live alone in an apartment, and are attended by black maids. Both have had a succession of lovers, and both, at the time of their deaths, are mistresses to men of wealth. Both spent the night prior to their deaths in the company of their lover. And in both instances, the discovery of the body was accompanied by the discovery that the victim’s valuable collection of jewels was missing. Once again, Wright made some necessary simplifications in transforming the fate of Dot King into that of Margaret Odell. Odell’s family and early life are unrecovered; she did not, as Dot King did, ever try mar112

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riage; her moment of celebrity is greater than that of Dot King — Margaret Odell was, for a season, the “première danseuse” in the Follies, and she counted among her lovers “one or two obscure potentates in the backwashes of Europe” (10), and she is more unequivocally corrupt than Dot King: Margaret Odell systematically extorted money from her cast-off lovers. There is no parallel to Dot King’s doting relationship with Albert Guimares. The absence of a Guimares means that Captain Carey’s fallback explanation of Dot King’s murder is eliminated from consideration in the murder of Margaret Odell: Margaret Odell is not paying for the pleasure of any man’s company. That relationship may have made Dot King more corrupt in the eyes of her contemporaries — not only does she sell illicit sexual favors to “Mr. Marshall,” she betrays Marshall by using the profits to obtain illicit sexual favors from Guimares. But it also serves to make Dot King a victim as well as a victimizer, and to imply that the real evil may not lie in King, “Marshall,” or Guimares, but in a society where sexual favors can be commercial commodities. Wright provides his “Canary,” Margaret Odell, with no mitigation. She is, on the one hand, a purely erotic object. The white and yellow satin Follies costume that is the source of her sobriquet emphasizes that it is her physical beauty that constitutes her identity. That she has never even tried marriage implies that she has single-mindedly pursued a life based on the rewards of widely distributed sexual favors. And on the other hand, she is apparently remorseless in extorting money from her former lovers. Dot King was evidently not above this sort of blackmail, but Margaret Odell seems to have made it a habitual practice. In a judgment that no one disputes, one of her victims describes her as “the shrewdest, coldest-blooded blackmailer it’s ever been my misfortune to meet” (86). Most importantly, Wright makes Margaret Odell’s murder a classic puzzle. He omits the chloroform, which might have provided the red herring of suicide (as it briefly did in the Dot King case), but he does turn the scene into a locked-room situation in which the layout of the apartment building and the testimony of uninterested witnesses means that no one could have been in her apartment with the Canary during the half hour when the murder must have taken place, and yet in which other evidence demonstrates that she must have been in the company of two men. Wright also transforms Dot King’s rooms, reported to be “in perfect order” 113

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(NYT, 16 Mar 23, p. 3), into “a scene bordering on wreckage” (27). The furniture of Margaret Odell’s living room has been systematically ransacked, and debris has been scattered everywhere. The disorder serves a plot function — Vance draws significant inferences from what has been upset and what has not — but it also serves the symbolic function of so many disorderly murder scenes in Golden Age detective novels. Because the classic detective story assumes that murder is an exceptional violation of the customary pastoral happiness of a normally safe and sane world, the murder scene is often presented as extraordinarily grotesque or extraordinarily chaotic. The bald and toothless bon vivant provided a touch of the grotesque in Alvin Benson’s death (and, as well, in Joseph Elwell’s actual death); in The “Canary” Murder Case, Wright invents the chaos. The most significant change that Wright makes is, again, in the identity of the murderer. The unknown thief who throttled Dot King, even had he been caught, would not have been a satisfying villain. Wright transforms another celebrated case of random murder into an example of a carefully planned crime. Dot King’s Bostonian lover was soon exonerated by the police; Margaret Odell’s lover, Kenneth Spotswoode, “a typical New England aristocrat” (96), is also immediately exonerated: he could not have re-entered the apartment, and Margaret Odell was heard to speak to him through her locked door as he left. But, as Philo Vance finally proves, it was indeed the proper Puritan who cleverly committed the crime. When the Canary demanded too much — not money, but marriage — Spotswoode plotted to kill her. Vance, sympathizing with Spotswoode’s action (“Spotswoode, I’d say, is merely a rational animal with the courage of his convictions” [247]), arranges an opportunity for “the poor Johnny” to commit suicide. Both The Benson Murder Case and The “Canary” Murder Case thus come to satisfying conclusions. In the first instance, the brutal, greedy, fratricidal major responds to being charged with the murder by knocking down two policemen before an elegant judo move by Vance pinions him. After a vigorously contested trial and an appeal, the major eventually receives a sentence of 20 years to life in prison. And with Benson’s guilt vindicating their innocence, Muriel St. Clair, Captain Leacock, Leander Pfyfe, and Colonel Ostrander are free to pursue unshadowed existences: Van Dine devotes several paragraphs at the end of the novel to a synopsis of the happy lives they have enjoyed. Kenneth Spotswoode, a more 114

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admirable murderer, declines to fight his fate with fists or with lawyers. His neat suicide again serves to clear the name of the other suspects. The failure of the non-fictional investigators to identify the killers of Joseph Elwell and Dot King had many unhappy consequences: the puzzle was left unsolved, the guilty man or woman was left unpunished, innocent persons would always remain tainted by their association with the crime, and the general public had one additional reason to fear random violence in the anonymous metropolis. The fictional New York City of Philo Vance is a much safer, saner place. People are killed by intimates, not by strangers; by brothers and lovers, not by “unoccupied house-workers” or “letter thieves.” The villains are identified, caught, and removed from the streets. And the innocent can go on about their affairs; they marry, they move, they turn the murder into grist for their anecdotage.

v Neither Earl Derr Biggers nor Dashiell Hammett made comparable use of historical crimes as foundations for their fictions. Hammett, as Raymond Chandler famously put it, “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols” (989). One of Hammett’s central endeavors was to restore — more accurately, to introduce — a measure of this sort of plausibility to the genre. But he proposed to do so not by having the Continental Op or Sam Spade or Nick Charles investigate real crimes, but by having them use realistic techniques to investigate fictional crimes in realistic settings. And Earl Derr Biggers never proposed “realism” of any sort as a desideratum. He was, always, a romancer. Realistic detail was always a welcome element, but Biggers concentrated upon clever plotting, clever characterization, clever dialogue. Nonetheless, both Biggers and Hammett each did once link a detective novel to a particular historical crime. Biggers’s instance reveals interesting parallels between his approach and Wright’s; Hammett’s use of history is of a radically different nature, and suggests one more element of the revolution in the genre that he was leading. Charlie Chan’s close encounter with an actual, celebrated murder occurs in the fourth novel, The Black Camel. The novel constitutes Big115

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gers’s attempt to exploit his experiences in Hollywood by centering the mystery on a movie crew that is stopping in Honolulu on its way back to Los Angeles after filming in the South Seas. The lead actress, Shelah Fane, is murdered in a pavilion on Waikiki Beach. Suspects include the male lead, a supporting actress, the director, and a Hollywood fortune-teller. Early in the novel, Charlie Chan happens to mention two unsolved Hollywood murders, one of them actual —“the Taylor case” (“haie, it is still a mystery”)— and the other the fictional murder of “Denny Mayo, famous actor of handsome countenance” (28). As the action develops, the threeyear-old murder of Denny Mayo proves to be a key factor in the death of Shelah Fane. As with S.S. Van Dine’s footnote distinguishing Alvin Benson’s murder from Joseph Elwell’s, Charlie Chan’s mention of the Taylor case alerts the reader to an historical parallel. But the murder of William Desmond Taylor is not parallel to that of Shelah Fane; it is parallel to a crime that is the origin of the murder that Charlie Chan must solve. Taylor’s death was one of two scandals that rocked Hollywood in the early 1920s. The other was the series of three trials of the comic actor, Fatty Arbuckle, charged with a sexual assault upon an actress, Virginia Rappe, that led to her death in September 1921. (The first two prosecutions ended in mistrials; the third vindicated Arbuckle. Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton agent assigned to work on Arbuckle’s defense for the second trial, which was taking place when Taylor was murdered.) William Desmond Taylor (born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner) was an Anglo-Irishman who came to America in 1889 to be educated at a new school on a ranch in Kansas; after a variety of experiences — including acting, selling furniture, marriage to Ethel “Effie” Hamilton, a “night-time theater dancer” (Higham, 32) in New York City, and (after abandoning Effie and their daughter) a brief stint in the Yukon — he had emerged as an actor and finally as an eminent director in Hollywood. He was evidently an active bisexual; among his female conquests were the famous comedienne, Mabel Normand, and the rising ingénue, Mary Miles Minter. Normand (a co-star with Fatty Arbuckle in three dozen short films) had been an intimate companion of Taylor’s for many years and was the last person to see him alive at 7:45 on the evening of 1 February 1922. Mary Miles Minter, aged 20, was being groomed as the next Mary Pickford, and had just signed a $1,300,000 contract with Famous Players–Laskey. She had recently become infatuated with 116

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Taylor. On the morning of 2 February 1922, Taylor’s houseman discovered the director’s corpse neatly laid out on the floor of his bungalow, with a single .38 caliber bullet wound. Normand and Minter were both regarded as suspects by the press, but the police and the district attorney’s office never indicted anyone for the crime. (Other suspects included Minter’s mother, Taylor’s houseman, Taylor’s never-located brother, and pressing further afield, possible connections to the Hollywood drug scene, the Hollywood homosexual scene, and even to Chinese secret societies.) The fictional Denny Mayo was an Irish actor. He spent some time on a ranch (in Australia, not Kansas); he left his wife (a dancer) in London (not New York) to pursue success as an actor in Hollywood; he lived, as Taylor had, with one servant. Three years prior to the opening of The Black Camel, his servant returned one night to discover Mayo, like Taylor, lying dead on the floor. He had, like Taylor, been shot at close range, and a revolver lay by his side (the gun in the Taylor case was missing). The police were baffled. Mayo had been associated with two actresses: Rita Montaine, who at the time of his death was engaged to another man, and Shelah Fane, who had professed to love him. Rita Montaine had been questioned, but she and her fiancé had given each other alibis for the entire evening; Shelah Fane was never suspected. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Denny Mayo had a younger brother, Arthur. Vowing to avenge Denny’s death, Arthur has transformed himself into Tarneverro, fortune-teller to the Hollywood set. To further his inquiries, he has recruited Denny’s wife, Anna (whose dancing career has been cut short by a broken ankle), to serve as Shelah Fane’s maid. When Shelah confesses to Tarneverro that she had shot Denny Mayo three years ago, Tarneverro informs Anna. Anna stabs Shelah to death, and both Anna and Tarneverro attempt to draw red herrings across the trail that leads to her. William Desmond Taylor did have a younger brother, Denis, and he did marry a dancer. But Denis Cunningham Deane-Tanner had disappeared in 1912, after abandoning his wife. Though there had been a rumor of his appearance in 1921, his wife had succeeded in having him declared dead in 1924. And Taylor’s dancer-wife, Ethel (“Effie”) Hamilton, far from hungering for revenge upon Taylor’s killer, had remarried in 1914 and had destroyed all photos and letters that might have recalled Taylor. (Indeed, it was only their daughter, Ethel Daisy Deane-Tanner, who appeared to mourn Tay117

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lor’s death.) Biggers thus elected an improbable pair of detectives to solve his version of the William Desmond Taylor mystery. The occult disguise he imposes on the vengeful brother is far more theatrical than plausible; Biggers was presumably thinking of the eventual motion picture possibilities (Tarneverro would be played by Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film version).8 But the identity of Mayo’s/Taylor’s killer is not so improbable. Shelah Fane appears to be a straight actress — a star, not a comedienne or an ingénue. She might be Biggers’s version of either Mabel Normand or Mary Miles Minter. Having lived in the Hollywood community throughout the 1920s, Biggers was certainly aware of the rumors that connected both actresses with the crime. A couple of details suggest that he may preferred the Minter rumors. Shelah Fane admits to coming to Hollywood six years prior to the murder of Mayo; Mary Miles Minter came to Hollywood in 1915, six years before the murder of Taylor (Normand, the bigger star, had come west in 1912). And a little over a year after the crime, in March 1922, Mary Miles Minter and her grandmother made an extended visit to Honolulu, staying at the Moana Hotel. Shelah Fane stops in Honolulu on her way back to California from filming in the south seas, and it is three years after the murder of Mayo; but the parallel is suggestive.9 But Biggers is certainly no more accusing Mary Miles Minter of murdering William Desmond Taylor than Willard Wright was accusing Walter Elwell of murdering his brother. In both instances, the writer constructs a satisfyingly melodramatic solution, with unambiguous motives and definite guilt. But where Wright was exploiting an actual sensational murder in order to ground his sensational detective story in “reality,” Biggers never, in any of his novels, tried to sell sensation. The initial seeds of the first Charlie Chan novel were a scene — the Honolulu Biggers had discovered in 1919 — and a plot device — creating an alibi by swimming to shore from an arriving ocean liner off Diamond Head, committing a murder, and then swimming back to the liner. Where Wright indulged the Golden Age detective story’s seemingly insatiable appetite for exotic methods of committing murder (“hand-wrought dueling pistols”), Biggers was always more pedestrian. He would develop unfamiliar locales — Honolulu, the California desert, Lake Tahoe — and he would come to indulge a degree of extravagance in his plots as the Charlie Chan novels progressed — he was not completely immune to the Golden Age tolerance of contrived situations. 118

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But Biggers did not base the appeal of his novels on their ability to startle readers with the amoral aestheticism of his detective and the bizarre pursuits of his casts of characters. Wright needed an initial springboard of the real; Biggers did not. But as Charlie Chan developed from a supporting player in a mystery/romance that was realistically set in exotic Honolulu to a featured detective in an annual novel, Biggers was pushed in the direction that Wright was leaping toward. The second Chan novel, The Chinese Parrot, had a very thin plot that stretched to novel-length only through Charlie Chan’s intuitive refusal to accept appearances. Its young lovers are typical Biggers young lovers — somewhat above the standard of the time — and the California desert scene is not without interest; but aside from Charlie Chan, it is not a novel of any distinction. The third novel, Behind That Curtain, imports a Scotland Yard inspector to San Francisco and stipulates a complex and improbably motivated backstory that began 18 years earlier, and moved from London to Afghanistan to Paris to the east and finally the west coast of the United States. Again, without Charlie Chan, the narrative falls to the level of competent Golden Age mystery. The Black Camel, in this context, becomes the reintroduction of Charlie Chan, returning him to Honolulu with the difference that now he is, as he was not in The House Without a Key, the great detective. The cinema and theatre provided a milieu with which Biggers was personally familiar and with which his audience was fascinated. Biggers might have played up some of the sensational aspects of the murder of William Desmond Taylor; Charlie Chan might, like Philo Vance, have proven his detective credentials by achieving a certainty that had eluded the police and the district attorney. But Biggers deliberately subordinated the mystery of “Who killed Denny May/Desmond Taylor?” to the mystery of “Who killed Shelah Fane?” It is the second mystery that the reader cares about and that Charlie Chan solves; the first crime, committed three years prior to the action of the novel, merely supplies the motive for the second (and with a great deal less strain than the 18-year-old London murder that set off the global trek that constituted the backstory of Behind That Curtain). It may also evoke the emerging image of Hollywood as a Babylon, providing a subsidiary source of interest. But Biggers was not using Hollywood crime to establish a world for his detective to play in. Wright, in the Benson and The “Canary” Mur119

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der Case, was establishing such a world, and Philo Vance would continue to flit about it, even after the Great Depression had consigned it to history. Biggers was just enriching the novel at hand. Dashiell Hammett, unlike either Wright or Biggers, knew American crime firsthand. Aside from his small role in the second Fatty Arbuckle trial, he seems not, during his career as a Pinkerton operative, to have been involved in any celebrated cases, and he appears never to have contemplated using an actual headline crime to add either realism or sensationalism to his narratives. Hammett did not avoid extravagance entirely — the Temple of the Holy Grail in The Dain Curse and the Order of the Hospital of St. John and their falcon in The Maltese Falcon suggest a willingness to reach beyond the mean streets of the big city — but one of his principal ambitions was to move the detective story away from the exotic plots, characters, and scenes that the Golden Age formulas encouraged, and to move it toward the sorts of criminal activities that appeared more routinely in the newspapers and that he knew from his professional experience. He was dismissive of great detectives like Philo Vance, even when Vance was investigating a version of a true crime. In his review of The Benson Murder Case (in Saturday Review of Literature, 15 January 1927), Hammett concentrates on the great detective’s approach to his problem: “There is a theory that anyone who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory: he manages always, and usually ridiculously, to be wrong. His exposition of the technique employed by a gentleman shooting another gentleman who sits six feet in front of him deserves a place in a How to be a detective by mail course” (qtd. in Haycraft, 382–3). In his own fiction, technique was what Hammett focused on. How things are done matters enormously in his fiction: how a detective tails a suspect, or follows a lead, or rolls a cigarette — getting these details right matters. Another thing that matters to Hammett is milieu: getting the scene right. His stories try to get the locality of the action right — the buildings and the politics, the clothing and the idioms. And in the one instance where Hammett does seem to allude to historical events, it is in service of the authenticity of the milieu. Poisonville, the ugly mining town that is the setting of the first Continental Op novel, Red Harvest, has always been associated with Anaconda, Montana, the ugly mining town 25 miles 120

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west of Butte. In August 1917, Hammett was one of a group of Pinkerton agents assigned to break up a strike organized by the International Workers of the World. He was, he said, offered $5,000 by the company to kill a union leader named Frank Little. Hammett declined, but Little (along with three others) was nonetheless soon afterward lynched at a railroad crossing (Nolan, 13–14).10 But although Poisonville does look like Butte, and one of the Op’s first encounters is with Bill Quint, an organizer for the I.W.W., the miners play almost no role in the action of the novel. Organized crime, not organized labor, is the matter of Red Harvest. There is an historical prototype for Elihu Willsson, the man who owns Poisonville “heart, soul, skin and guts” (9). Willsson presides over the mining company, the bank, and the only two newspapers, and he has an interest in most other businesses. Willsson’s original was Marcus Daly, the industrialist who ran the Anaconda mines, founded the town (which he wanted to call Copperopolis), built a railroad (the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific), ran the Copper City Commercial Company (which sold his workers everything from groceries to hardware), controlled the city’s newspaper (the Anaconda Standard), and maintained an opulent hotel for visitors. He also ensured that his city had water and sewer lines, paved and lighted streets, boarding houses, parks, and street cars. He was “ruthless and shrewd and often broke the law” (Mercier, 13). In his virtues and his vices, he was the very model of the turn of the century American robber baron.11 Daly arrived in Butte, Montana, in 1876 and began Anaconda in 1883. He died in 1900, having begun the process of transferring ownership of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company to a consortium of New York financiers (executives of Standard Oil), who then consolidated it with other properties into the Amalgamated Copper Company. In 1915, a further reorganization which merged the three great Montana mining companies, led to the resumption of the Anaconda name. The company, then, which was fighting the August 1917 strike with Pinkerton agents, was not the paternalistic and inescapable presence that Marcus Daly’s city had known. It was a corporation with its headquarters in New York, more interested in monopolistic control of the international metals market than in running every aspect of a company town. But when Hammett decided to revisit his Pinkerton experience in Montana through the eyes of the Continental Op, he chose to revive the extinct model of the robber baron who 121

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lived locally and took a personal interest in the exercise of his nearly absolute power in his domain. The action of the novel depends upon this anachronism. A committee of industrialists in Manhattan would not hire the Op to clean up their town, and certainly would not be vulnerable to the sort of blackmail the Op uses to compel Willsson to carry the cleansing to the end that the Op insists upon. The degree to which Red Harvest can be read as a Marxist fable continues to be debated. What is clear is that, once the representative of the I.W.W., Bill Quint, delivers his analysis of the situation in Personville and departs in Chapter One, the only proletarian in the novel is the Op himself. Willsson is the capitalist, and every other character in the novel is a gangster (or, what in Personville appears to be much the same thing, a cop) or a member of the middle class. Quint’s conclusion — that Willsson had hired thugs to break an eight-month strike that had followed his 1921 decision to abrogate worker-friendly contracts that had been won during the war, and that now the victorious mercenaries were refusing to return the town to Willsson’s control — sets up a class conflict, but in developing the Black Mask style of action (there are more than 20 identifiable corpses distributed over fewer than 200 pages), Hammett chose not to enroll the working class of Personville as visible heroes. Instead, he used the figure of the local plutocrat to personalize the conflict. The context in which Quint places Willsson’s behavior —“old Elihu didn’t know his Italian history” (Complete Novels, 10)— might have a contemporary resonance, following the 1922 triumph of Mussolini, but its principal association is with the princes of the Renaissance and condottieri. As a result, Personville is detached from the Wall Street corporate capitalism that was actually setting industrial policy, and with an eye to the bottom line, not to the restoration of a personal fiefdom. And the historical example of Marcus Daly provided a prototype upon which to model Elihu Willsson.

vi Red Harvest was serialized in Black Mask before it was issued by Knopf; The Black Camel was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post before it was issued by Bobbs-Merrill; The Benson Murder Case and The “Canary” Murder Case were both issued by Scribner’s, but only the second novel was serialized 122

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first: it appeared in Scribner’s Monthly. Each author appropriated factual episodes from the history of their times that would add specific appeals to the audiences for whom they were writing. Biggers was providing his comfortable, middlebrow audience with genial escapes into a world where, in the final chapter, baffling mysteries are always solved and young lovers are always joined. And these pleasures he could provide without the intrusion of sensational realities. But in the competitive market of mystery fiction in the later 1920s, Biggers did experiment with supplemental excitements. The echoing of the William Desmond Taylor murder in The Black Camel was one of these experiments. Though it was arguably a successful one —The Black Camel ranks closely behind The House Without a Key—it was not repeated. Willard Wright was proposing a more sophisticated entertainment for his audience, one that would provoke as well as entertain. By playing upon the murders of Joseph Bowne Elwell and Dot King, he announced not only that however impossible Philo Vance was, Philo Vance’s New York was real. And its reality was the reality of Damon Runyon’s New York, not Edith Wharton’s. The murdered bon vivant and the murdered demimondaine signaled to his au courant readers that Wright was claiming a place in the avant garde; Philo Vance would not be your parents’ detective. The first two novels, under cover of imitating crimes that were already on record, presented readers with behaviors that had been unmentionable to an older generation, but were now easily accommodated by a detective with savoir faire. Dashiell Hammett had a more complex task: to please the rather lowbrow audience of Black Mask and the rather highbrow audience of Alfred A. Knopf. As it happened, both brows embraced action that provided betrayal after betrayal and murder after murder; and both brows welcomed a lesson on the way a dedicated workingman could manipulate millionaires and gangsters into cleansing a corrupt city. Hammett did not need history to add sensation to his narrative, nor did he need to implicate his all-too-ordinary detective in the reality of recent scandals. What Hammett needed from the historical record was a reminder that the frontier may have closed in 1890, as Frederick Jackson Turner’s analysis of that year’s census had concluded, but the frontier ethos — of exploitation of natural and human resources, of city-builders and gangs and law-breakers and vigilantes — had only reshaped itself in cities like Anaconda or Butte or Personville. Biggers and Wright adapted stories drawn from the headlines; Hammett adapted a myth. 123

5

Enterprising, Flippant, Hard Young American Women in Detective Fiction of the 1920s i Women detective-story writers had clearly established themselves as authorities in the genre by 1925; they were at least as eminent as the male heirs of Conan Doyle. Anna Katherine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart were among the most notable Americans. Green had just published The Step on the Stair (1924), her 36th and final detective novel, and Mary Roberts Rinehart was at the height of her enormous popularity. In England, Agatha Christie had introduced Hercule Poirot in 1920 and Dorothy Sayers had introduced Peter Wimsey in 1923. But there would be no eminent women detectives until Mrs. Marple’s debut in 1930. Those who observed and knew would all be men. In the genre’s beginnings, women actually seemed destined for generic victimhood: all of the victims in the Dupin tales were female,1 but given Poe’s signature focus on the death of beautiful women, this was not an aspect of his detective story practice that his later emulators felt obligated to follow. There are but two female corpses in the 50 short and four long adventures of Sherlock Holmes,2 though female victims of non-lethal criminal plots are as common as male victims. And Conan Doyle, unlike Poe, could imagine women as killers; Holmes and Watson witness a woman — an eminent woman — cold-bloodedly murder the blackmailer, Charles Augustus Milverton. Nonetheless, Conan Doyle, as a healthy-minded Victorian man, allowed women a somewhat circumscribed space. They appear largely as wives and fiancées, and, of course, as servants. Occasionally they 124

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are seen as governesses or typists, but even these occupations seem to be transitions between the approved roles of daughter and wife. But in the course of the 20th century, the detective story became one of the most useful of popular genres for the exploration of feminist issues (and for the advocacy of feminist approaches to the solution of those issues). Earl Derr Biggers, Willard Wright, and Dashiell Hammett were, by no standard, enlightened feminists, but their fiction of the 1920s does reflect to some degree the unsettled status of women in American society.

ii The 1920s opened with an epochal acknowledgement of the new status of women in America: on 18 August 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, and across the nation women achieved the right to vote. That they then used their new franchise to help elect three conservative Republicans to preside over the decade — Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover — suggests that differences between the sexes were, in national politics at least, less dramatic than the Victorians had feared. But on a broader social scale, women’s lives were being profoundly altered, and these alterations did dramatically affect the whole of American society. The 1920s was the decade of the flapper, named after the floppy galoshes that were, briefly, a fashion statement.3 The flapper’s outfit consumed, famously, a great deal less yardage of dry goods than had her mother’s.4 Where the ideal woman of the previous two decades — the Gibson girl — had been statuesque, with thick hair piled high on her head, an impressive bosom and a wasp waist, conveying a sense of athletic good health as well as feminine delicacy, the flapper was short-haired and flatchested, suggesting a boyish vigor.5 And while the Gibson girl’s physique and costume were largely the aspiration of an upper-middle class womanhood, the flapper’s more modest demands upon the clothes budget and the sports regimen, could be more widely imitated. The war effort in 1917–1918 had pressed women into jobs from which they had formerly been excluded; the trend only accelerated after the crisis had passed: there were five times as many women working outside the home in 1928 as in 1918 (Goldberg, 93).6 And in addition to working like men, women were 125

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increasingly drinking and smoking and talking like men. In 1922, the Episcopal Church, as always in the vanguard of adapting Christian tradition to contemporary American trends, removed “obey” from a woman’s marriage vow, requiring of her only love and honor. It may, in the 21st century, be obvious that the preceding millennia of subordination of women to men constituted an unnatural upsetting of the essential biological equality of the sexes, but to many Americans in the 1920s, it was the new reversion to parity that seemed troublingly unnatural. Much of the literature of the Jazz Age addressed the implications of the new status of women, especially young women.

iii Earl Derr Biggers acknowledged at least some of these changes in the status of women in his Charlie Chan novels. If in one respect The House Without a Key, by presenting its romantic male lead with a choice between an attractive, socially acceptable blond and an attractive, somewhat disreputable brunette merely reiterates a 19th-century cliché, it also begins to complicate that stereotype. John Quincy Winterslip’s initial engagement is to the pallid Boston Brahmin, Agatha Parker, a puritanical wraith whose only actual presence in the novel comes through cables from the mainland in which she rejects as inconceivable the prospect of life away from the omphalos of Boston. The two young women whom Winterslip actually kisses in the novel are his attractive, blond, second cousin, Barbara, and the attractive dark-haired (one-quarter Portuguese) Carlota Egan, daughter of the disreputable owner of a dilapidated hotel on Waikiki. Were it 1825 and were the author James Fenimore Cooper, Barbara would naturally become the wife and Carlota, by some mischance, would surely die. But in 1925, there is no great surprise, and certainly no great disappointment, when, on the last page, it is to Carlota that John Quincy proposes marriage. Biggers has managed to make the choice a significant one: union with Carlota irrevocably aligns John Quincy with those Winterslips who succeed in breaking from Boston (though without sacrificing the strength of character that Boston’s puritanical heritage has bred into the Winterslip genes). In choosing the raffish brunette for his wife (and raffish San 126

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Francisco for his home), John Quincy Winterslip declares himself independent of the pale-faced prejudices of his class. It is not, however, a terribly bold declaration. Carlota Egan is a minimally disreputable young woman. She has acquired a college education on the mainland, and the principal source of her unsuitability — her impecunious and ostracized father — eventually emerges as a warrant of her virtue: Jim Egan, it turns out, is merely the unfortunate scion of a highly reputable family that includes a Captain “of the British Admiralty” (and, further securing their social status, a prosperous soap-maker who has been knighted for his contribution to British hygiene). On the one hand, Carlota does have the enterprise to take over management of her father’s hotel when he is briefly imprisoned; on the other, she immediately confesses to an inability to handle numbers, and calls upon John Quincy’s masculine mathematical competence to calculate for her the bill of one of the hotel’s few customers. When John Quincy forcefully rejects her plea that he flee to safety on the mainland, she is even capable of gushing, “You’re so much wiser than I am” (210). In the end, John Quincy Winterslip’s choice of partner seems less adventurous than his choice of domicile: abandoning Boston is more meaningful than abandoning Agatha.7 In the second Charlie Chan novel, Biggers did introduce his version of the self-sufficient, enterprising, modern young woman of the 1920s. She does not need a man, though she always does accept one. In The Chinese Parrot, she is Paula Wendell, a professional “location finder” for movie production companies. She drives her roadster “hunting backgrounds” in the landscapes of southern California: “By the Vandeventer Trail to Piñon Flat, down to the Salton Sea or up to the Morongos — all the time trying to find something new, something the dear old public will mistake for Algeria, Araby, the South Seas” (49). By making her not only a working girl, but a working girl whose work drives her across desert wildernesses, Biggers appeals to the new image of the plucky, self-reliant girl who earns her own living, who does not gush, and who, though she always finds a husband, is never looking for a husband. And she serves as the driver for the automobileless young man whom Biggers early establishes as her inevitable fiancé, as well as for the automobileless Charlie Chan; the two important men in the novel are literally moved by the important woman. Biggers does not intend to shock his Saturday Evening Post readers; The 127

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Saturday Evening Post was not in the business of shock. Paula Wendell is not Lady Brett, nor even Daisy Buchanan. She is not in revolt against bourgeois conventions, either deliberately or carelessly. But she does reflect a degree of female wit and willfulness and, above all, independence, that surprises if it does not shock. Paula’s successor in Behind That Curtain, the next Charlie Chan novel, June Morrow, is a prosecutor in the office of San Francisco’s district attorney. June Morrow is, explicitly, a model of the “emancipated” young American woman (20). The young man with whom Biggers matches her, Barry Kirk, initially assumes that “J. Morrow” must be a man; his surprise that she is not is presumably shared by the reader. In The Black Camel, the girl is Julie O’Neill, who works as the secretary of movie star Shelah Fane, making all the arrangements that a movie star’s life requires. The female movie star herself, with a faint whiff of the Hollywood Babylon about her, is, of course, another new type of woman. She is, in fact, the only murderess in the Charlie Chan series, but her crime is a sin of passion, and she has atoned with three years of troubled memories. And because she is the victim of the murder that Chan is investigating, she is the object of pity as well as of condemnation. Biggers is Victorian enough himself never to imagine a thoroughly dishonest woman. Even Shelah Fane is an earnest working woman. Pamela Potter, in Charlie Chan Carries On, is an heiress, not a working girl, but at her first appearance she distinguishes herself as a new girl. When she and her mother learn that her grandfather has been murdered, her mother faints; Pamela Potter does not. As she tells the Scotland Yard inspector, “I don’t belong to a fainting generation” (28). She enlists as surrogate detective, reporting regularly back to Inspector Duff. Leslie Beaton, in Keeper of the Keys, is the last of Biggers’s new girls, and probably the least. She appears as a daughter, a sister, and, in the end, as a fiancée; she is defined by her relationships with men. Even here, however, Biggers makes a gesture toward establishing her as more than just a dependent: when Charlie Chan first meets her, “she seemed at first glance quite helpless and lost. But — thought Chan — a competent look in those deep eyes of hers. Not for nothing had she cared for a spineless, artistic brother; she had learned, meanwhile, to take care of herself ” (62). “She had learned to take care of herself ”: this is the necessary qual128

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ity of a girl who hopes to get the guy in an Earl Derr Biggers novel. She will also be slender, and pretty, and witty, but she will know how to take care of herself. In the end, she will always let a young man take care of her, but it is romantic necessity, not economic necessity that drives her to this end.

iv Earl Derr Biggers was, it appears, a devoted husband and father. Willard Wright, as John Loughery’s biography makes clear, was neither. He treated his first wife and his daughter badly, and while he seems to have been less disagreeable to the other two women with whom he had long-term sexual relationships — Claire Burke and Claire de Lisle (who became his second wife)— there is little evidence that he esteemed women, and considerable evidence that he considered them to have little to contribute to the culture that he valued so highly. As Loughery points out, he invited 16 of the 17 painters he had selected for his Forum Exhibition to submit short essays for the catalogue; the one writer he assumed could have nothing articulate to say was the one woman, Marguerite Zorach (115). In his autobiographical novel, A Man of Promise, it is the women — mother, lovers, wife — who prevent the remarkable protagonist from achieving any remarkable results by binding him to middle-class measures of success. No woman, of course, is permitted to exercise such control over Wright’s idealized self: Philo Vance is immune to the seductions of women.8 And while the notable young women that appear in Vance novels, like those in the Charlie Chan novels, always work their way toward marriage, earnestness is never a quality they embrace. Nor are they enterprising — aside from the servant class, the young women Philo Vance must deal with seem either to be daughters of wealthy parents or upwardlymobile demimondaines maintaining themselves by singing and dancing in clubs or on Broadway. And as daughters or entertainers, they are conscientiously engaged in shocking the proprieties of their elders. The first flippant female is Muriel St. Clair, a singer and actress in musical comedies. Her profession, as well as the discovery of her gold mesh handbag in the rooms of the murdered roué Alvin Benson, makes her a 129

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prime suspect in the eyes of the moralistic police and District Attorney. (Philo Vance has already declared that, on psychological grounds, the murder could not have been committed by a woman.) When D.A. Markham confronts her with the evidence of her association with Benson, she exasperates him with her nonchalant refusal to cooperate with the investigation. She will not express conventional regret at Benson’s violent death; she will not explain her relationship with him, even though she was the last person known to see him alive. As Philo Vance suspects, and eventually confirms, Miss St. Clair’s coolness is part of a deliberate attempt to draw suspicion upon herself in order to divert it from her lover, Captain Leacock, whom she falsely believes to have committed the crime. Captain Leacock, who falsely believes Muriel St. Clair committed the crime, has reciprocated by confessing to murder when he believes she will be arrested. In the end, they marry happily. Having lovers foolishly sacrifice themselves based upon misunderstandings is a trite device of romance.9 And the nature of Captain Leacock’s self-sacrifice is trite enough in all respects; he stands in a long line of heroes who chivalrously take the blame for what they assume are their lover’s misdeeds. The mode of Muriel St. Clair’s self sacrifice is new. She spars irreverently with District Attorney Markham, and while Wright gives her little clever to say, he conveys her smartness through Markham’s reactions: he “scowls,” he is “manifestly annoyed,” he warns her “with a show of irritation,” he becomes “exasperated,” he asks “grimly,” his eyes “harden,” he controls himself “with effort.” John F.-X. Markham is, throughout the Philo Vance series, the embodiment of intelligent decency —“forthright, conventional, a trifle austere, and over-serious in his dealings with life” (19). He is regularly irritated by Philo Vance’s fanciful airs and supercilious manner. But his irritation at the fanciful air and supercilious manner of Muriel St. Clair rises to another level. It is difficult for him to tolerate a man who makes a habit of shocking the bourgeoisie; it is much more disagreeable to tolerate such a woman. And disagreeably insouciant young women seem to flourish in the New York City of Markham and Vance. In the second novel, such a woman takes center stage, though as a corpse. Margaret Odell has capitalized on her season of fame as a Broadway beauty (as première danseuse in the Follies), engaging in a notorious succession of amours (including “one or two obscure potentates in the 130

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backwashes of Europe” [10]). Unlike Muriel St. Clair, who parlayed her musical talents into marriage with a chivalrous captain, Margaret Odell’s less licit affairs lead her finally to an intimate relationship with the otherwise happily married manufacturer Kenneth Spotswoode and, when her demands upon him finally move from money to marriage, he murders her. Margaret Odell is not redeemed by the motive for her immorality; she is sacrificing herself for no one. Nor are her immoralities limited to the fashionable one of exploiting her sexuality on Broadway. She is also an insatiable blackmailer. But it is her celebrity that is remarked upon, not her sins. No one condemns her, but then no one tries to understand her either. Biggers gave his murdered Hollywood actress a troubled soul to justify pity for her. S.S. Van Dine opens the novel with a two-page sketch of Margaret Odell’s life, sufficient to portray her a pretty, greedy modern young thing — very pretty as well as very greedy. But she is an object, not a subject; neither S.S. Van Dine nor Philo Vance find it useful to recover the Canary’s private life and character. The origins of her prototype, Dot King, were played up in the press, but Wright was not interested in a Sister Carrie fable. In this respect, he follows the Golden Age model in its most reductive form: he needed a startling corpse, not the relict of a troubled life. The investigation will focus entirely on how the murder was committed, not on why — not on what led the young woman to live the life that brought her to that end. In the third Vance novel, The Greene Murder Case, the reason why young women behave the way that they do moves to the center of the narrative. The most vocal of the Greene women, Sibella, is cast in the mold of Muriel St. Clair, though she is athletic and “mannish” (45), marking a shift from the showgirl type that Muriel St. Clair and Margaret Odell had embodied. And her flippant attitude as she is questioned about the murder of her sister Julia and the attempted murder of her adopted sister Ada quickly offends Markham’s sensibilities. The district attorney again finds himself having “difficulty controlling his indignation” (46). Vance, naturally, engages in pleasantries with her. If Biggers never lost the habit of seeing young American women enterprisingly independent until they meet the right man, Wright seems to have quickly acquired the habit of seeing young American women as happily flouting the traditional decencies and, faced with disapproval, flaunting their flouting. In The Greene Murder 131

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Case, however, he also gives a major role to a different sort of young American woman. Ada Greene, the apparent victim of a homicidal attack, is eventually exposed as a homicidal maniac who successively kills her halfsister, her half-brother, her other half-brother, and her adoptive mother. She would have murdered her remaining half-sister, but for the intervention of Philo Vance. Wright felt obliged to explain Ada’s mania. He had been content to leave greed as the simple motive for the killing in The Benson Murder Case, and relief from extortion in The “Canary” Murder Case. Ada’s serial crimes did, to be sure, eliminate those who stood above her in a line of inheritance, but her character and motives are more complex. Ada Greene, having suffered a shoulder wound on the night that Julia Greene was murdered, initially appears as a victim. When Vance and Markham interview her, she is lying in her bed, pale, weak, “piteous.” She is then further victimized by Sibella, who brutally accuses Ada of hating the family that adopted her and of having murdered Julia. Ada remains, until the final revelation of her guilt, an object of sympathy. Markham treats her gently. She, in contrast to Muriel St. Clair, Margaret Odell, and Sibella Greene, appears to be a proper, docile young girl. But, of course, it is she who is exposed as the villain. Vance proposes four explanations for her crimes. The first is, again, greed. She would inherit the Greene fortune. The second motive is genetic: Vance discovers that Ada’s biological father was “a famous German criminal and murderer” who spent his final year in an asylum for the criminally insane. The third motive derives from what Vance calls her Cinderella situation as an adopted daughter in the Greene household, “looked down upon, treated like a servant, made to spend her time caring for a nagging invalid” (239). Unlike Cinderella, Ada responds to the treatment with “deadly hatred.” And finally, Ada had fallen in love with the Greene family doctor, Arthur von Blon, only to discover that his affections had already been claimed by Sibella. After the uncomplicated motives that led men to murder Alvin Benson and Margaret Odell, the psychopathology of Ada Greene comes as a surprise. And it suggests a fundamental difference between Wright’s vision of young American women and that of Biggers. Sibella, at the end of the novel, is happily married to Dr. von Blon and settled in Vienna. Wright’s flippant young women, if they are not murdered, also marry and settle down. Their characteristic irreverence, like the characteristic enterprise of 132

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Biggers’s young women, is only a phase. But where enterprise is a virtue new to young American women in the 1920s, it had long been, as Horatio Alger knew, the quintessential virtue of young American men. Biggers’s new women were merely embracing an admirable spirit hitherto limited to men. Irreverence, on the other hand, was not admired in men or women. Wright’s new women were not adopting an established masculine virtue, they were, along with advanced men like Philo Vance, establishing an altogether new and quite disquieting approach to living in New York City. It is precisely the meek, hard-working Ada who embodies the traditional feminine virtues, and who emerges as the utterly mad mass murderer. Wright’s later novels continue to be populated by flippant young women, determinedly unshaken by the murder of a family member, and happy to shock John F.-X. Markham with their unflappability, but there are also variations. The fourth novel, The Bishop Murder Case (1929), actually assigns this role to the physicist Sigurd Arnesson; it is his flippancy that offends Markham. And, completing the assigned role, Arnesson achieves marriage at the novel’s end, by taking the rather colorless Belle Dillard to wife. Of course, as a man, Arnesson receives additional rewards: a chair in mathematics at the University of Oslo and a Nobel Prize. In the fifth novel, The Scarab Murder Case (1930), the young woman is literally a woman of color: Meryt-Amen is an Egyptian Copt who, as a reverent devotee of the ancient gods of Egypt, is never flippant. She is, on the contrary, earnest and admirable, mourning the death of her benefactor and standing at the side of her besieged husband. She too ends the novel in a new and happy marriage. The Kennel Murder Case (1933) brings back the flippant young woman in the person of Hilda Lake. Like Sibella Greene, Hilda Lake is a “mannish” woman (44). She too succeeds in offending Markham with her want of sorrow at the death of her uncle. And she too, in the end, marries happily. Nothing in the second six cases of Philo Vance adds anything remarkably new to Willard Wright’s portrait of the new American woman. Even when there seems to be a forced novelty, the result brings little new. The ninth novel, The Garden Murder Case (1935), opens with the interesting promise that Philo Vance, hitherto personally exempt from emotional relations with anyone other than children, animals, and men (15), would finally 133

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reveal himself vulnerable to an attachment to that final small remnant of living being, the adult human female (“the first mature sentimental episode ... in Vance’s life” [31]). Zalia Graem is cast in a familiar mold: she has “muscular boyish hips” (62), and she enters the room to be interrogated by Markham “with breezy cynicism” (200). But the spirit has gone out of Wright’s women; it is Vance who questions her. Markham is given no lines at all.10 As a result, Zalia Graem inspires no visible annoyance, irritation, or exasperation, and so she makes little impression on the reader, who may well wonder at the source of her unique ability to stimulate Philo Vance’s otherwise torpid libido. And Vance’s response to this singular stimulation and his renunciation of it is revealing. He leaves the country for two months to restore his torpidity through research in Egypt. Upon his return, he explains to Van Dine that “a man’s affections involve a great responsibility,” and Van Dine concurs: “With the multiplicity of intellectual interests that occupied him, he doubted (and I think rightly so) his capacity to make any woman happy in the conventional sense” (330). It is surprising that the übermenschliche Philo Vance should feel obligated to meet any standard “in the conventional sense.” While his doubtful capacity to make Zalia happy might be physiological in nature, it is more likely emotional. He cannot satisfy her conventional need to be loved in a conventional manner: he cannot marry her. (Zalia’s conventional happiness is secured when she marries another character in the novel.) In the end, the unconventional detective, like the unconventional young women he meets, is all-too-conventional.

v Though he was largely absent from the lives of his daughters, initially for medical reasons and later for convenience, Dashiell Hammett was apparently not an utterly unfeeling father. His letters show a continuing interest in their lives, and his younger daughter seems to remember him with fondness. And though, like Willard Wright, he abandoned his wife, Hammett’s moral code compelled him to be considerably more responsible in securing her financial situation. Earl Derr Biggers was, as far as can be known, a faithful husband; Willard Wright certainly had extended 134

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affairs with women and presumably indulged in briefer relations. One need not presume about Dashiell Hammett. His moral code did not preclude him from engaging in countless sexual escapades with prostitutes, secretaries, starlets, and wives of friends. Born nearly a decade after the monogamous Biggers and something over six years after the incontinent Wright, Hammett fully exploited the liberties that the emancipation of women granted to the young men of the 1920s. And, perhaps as a consequence of his experiences, he led the way in creating a new model of young American womanhood. Biggers could stretch his image of the American girl to include a premarital phase of self-reliant enterprise. Wright could happily depict a phase of flippant irreverence, but, like Biggers, he too concluded every novel with conventional marriage. Where Biggers embraced marriage because he was at heart conventional, Wright did so because he had chosen to work in a conventional genre and wanted to provide a conventional ending.11 Hammett upset the conventions. None of his five novels ends with a marriage (though the fifth does, famously, begin with one). Hammett’s young women are not invariably in a “phase” that precedes marriage. They do not assume — and the detective does not assume, the reader does not assume — that the arc of their lives curves inevitably toward a conclusion in which they love, honor, and obey. Dorothy Parker, who observed that Hammett had “a fine ear for the ways of hard men,” also noted that he had “a clear eye for the ways of hard women” (65). Hammett’s women are usually hard. Though there are, occasionally, in Hammett’s fiction weak, soft women who provide the occasion for chivalric rescues. The Op’s involvement in “Zigzags of Treachery” (March 1924) is driven by the physical collapse of Dr. Estep’s wife after she is accused of her husband’s murder. Her lawyer repeatedly presses the Op to vindicate her before she dies of, presumably, the shame of the false charge. A young woman plays a secondary role in the first Continental Op story, “Arson Plus” (October 1923). As an accessory in an insurance fraud scheme, Evelyn Trowbridge is an attractive divorcee who abets a con man named Handerson by identifying him as her uncle Thornburgh and by having her former servants support the deception by working for “Thornburgh.” She is facile at improvising falsehoods, and her sexuality is wasted on the Op (“I was a busy, middle-aged detective ... a lot more interested in finding [the arsonist] ... than I was in feminine beauty” (CS, 12). She 135

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is otherwise unimportant. The second Op story, “Slippery Fingers,” features no women. But in the third Op story, “Crooked Souls” (October 1924), Audrey Gatewood begins to display some of the reckless amorality that will characterize many of the young women in the Op’s world. The 19-year-old daughter of a wealthy businessman, Audrey is a “wild, spoiled youngster” (45) who teams up with a con man to fake her own kidnapping and secure a $50,000 ransom from her insufficiently indulgent father. The Op figures out the scheme and when he comes to pick her up, the drug-addicted girl (“She’s had a skin full of hop ever since we started” [50]) fires a pistol at him. Wild, spoiled girls populate the Op’s San Francisco, most notably in “The Scorched Face” (May 1925). There the two Banbrock daughters, Myra (aged 20) and Ruth (18), with their generous allowances and excessive leisure are drawn into the cult run by Hador, “Priest of Alzoa.” Hador’s operation is designed specifically to appeal to the idle young women — daughters and wives — of San Francisco’s nouveau riche. As a result of his extortions, there has been a rash of suicides of such women, with Ruth Banbrock becoming the most recent. Hammett creates a more malignant exploiter of the occult than does either Biggers or Wright, but Hador can operate because there is a large population of wellto-do and unanchored women — wild and spoiled women — who are looking for something to shape their lives, whether it be a new spiritual meaning or a new sensual satisfaction. Alzoa provides them with a philosophy and the philosophy provides them with license to engage in orgies. Whether they are selfishly willful like Audry Gatewood or selfishly will-less like the Banbrock daughters, the “wild, spoiled youngsters” of the Op’s San Francisco engage in more radical violations of the old conventions than do the flippant canaries encountered by Philo Vance. If they are not wild and spoiled, the young women tend to be calculating and criminal — genuinely hard. Creda Dexter, in “The Tenth Clew” ( January 1924) uses her assets (“A sleek kitten — that dame! Rub her the right way and she’ll purr pretty. Rub her the wrong way — and look out for the claws!” [65]) to draw the wealthy widower, Charles Gantvoort, into the confidence racket she and her partner are running. “The House on Turk Street” and “The Girl with Silver Eyes” (April and June 1924) feature one of the hardest of young women. In the first story, red-haired Elvira is 136

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another gang member whose assignment is to use her physical attractiveness to draw men into the gang’s racket. Her specific targets are young men working for banks or brokerage houses. To please her, the young men would steal from their employers and then the gang would take away what the men had stolen. Two of the young men committed suicide, one was murdered by the gang. And, the Op reports, such was Elvira’s impact on the others that even after they had lost everything, not one of them would testify against her. When she returns in “The Girl with Silver Eyes,” Elvira has died her hair and renamed herself Jeanne Delano. She has developed a relation with the poet Burke Pangborn, using him to cash a forged check. Pangborn remains besotted with her, and is killed as he tries to come to her rescue. Porky Grout, a cowardly drug addict whom the Op uses as an informer, also dies while attempting to save Elvira. The only man Elvira fails to seduce is the Op, and when he walks her into the police station for booking, she leans over to whisper in his ear “the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable” (190). Other hard young women populate the Op’s world. Inés Almad, in “The Whosis Kid” (March 1925), for example, brings an exotic accent to the role, but she serves the same function as Creda Dexter and Elvira: she seduces a young jeweler on behalf of a small team of criminals and then the criminals proceed to betray one another until they collect themselves in San Francisco and are captured by the Op, who resists Inés’s blandishments, as he resisted those of Elvira. Princess Zhukowski is another exotic woman whose blandishments the Op resists. She is part of a Russian gang that undertakes to pillage a resort town (“The Gutting of Couffignal” December 1925); she offers the Op first money and then her body. He declines both, not because he doubts his capacity “to make any woman happy in the conventional sense,” but because “You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me” (479). Unlike Philo Vance, the Op notices the sexual attractiveness of every sexually attractive woman he encounters; his descriptions of Creda, Elvira, and Princess Zhukowski demonstrate as much. And they, as they offer themselves to him, have noticed that he has noticed. It is not “conventional,” marriage-directed morality that enables the Op to reject the offers; it is his stronger commitment to the job of work he has undertaken. Women in the Op’s world 137

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have reduced sex to an instrument — to acquire bonds or jewels or to secure release — and the Op (unlike Philo Vance) takes an equally instrumental view. Romance is a means, not an end; chivalry is dead. When the Princess Zhukowski walks away from the crippled Op on the last page of “The Gutting of Couffignal,” she is confident that there is enough residual “conventional sense” in the Op to preclude his shooting her. The Op shoots her. When he began to write novel-length detective stories at the end of the 1920s, Hammett was able to develop further his image of the hard new American woman and of her possible relationships with the American man. The most memorable results would come in the 1930s, with the fascinating prevaricator, Miss Wonderly/Miss LeBlanc/Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who plays with Miles Archer and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and Nora Charles, who plays with Nick in The Thin Man. But the two Continental Op novels published in Black Mask in 1927–28 (Red Harvest) and 1928–29 (The Dain Curse) provide portraits of young women at their hardest and at their softest. Dinah Brand is a ruthless and utterly mercenary trull; Gabrielle Dain is a freakishly vulnerable naïf. Both are effortlessly magnetic in their appeal to men. Neither Biggers nor Wright could imagine a woman as tough as Dinah Brand, as ineffectual as Gabrielle Dain, or as sexual as either one. Dinah Brand initially appears as the inspiration for the murder that draws the Op into the corrupt mining town of Poisonville. One of the men she has associated with has been killed by another man whom she has associated with. The Op solves the crime in Chapter Seven; the remaining 20 chapters recount his bloody but successful efforts to cleanse the city of its violent gangsters and its violent police. Dinah Brand initiates him into the mysteries of Personville. She seems to have had relations with many of the eminent citizens of the city’s extensive underworld, she seems to know everyone’s secrets, and is willing to barter her knowledge for her own advantages. And she is uncommonly open about her motives, or rather, her motive: she measures her advantage simply in dollars. As a result, the Op finds her a uniquely reliable Personvillian. He also finds her perversely attractive. In the short stories, the sexually attractive young women whom the Op encountered were small, elegantly dressed, and possessed of memorable eyes, often set in oval faces. 138

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Dinah Brand is a sloven. Her hair needs trimming; her lipstick needs adjusting; the fasteners of her dress need realignment; her stockings need replacement. She is “broad-shouldered” and “full-breasted,” with a “roundhipped body and big muscular legs” (29). There are lines around her mouth and her bloodshot eyes. She disdains men generally, regarding them as objects to be used. Her brutal treatment of Dan Rolf, the tubercular thin man who lives with her, serves her, and seems to adore her, emphasizes her callous indifference to male self-respect. And yet the Op, like the manhood of Personville, finds this aging, sloppy, and deeply greedy woman peculiarly attractive. In the short stories, he regularly repelled the advances of the sleek sexual villainesses who sought to use their carefully cultivated bodies to manipulate men. The completely careless Dinah Brand draws him into a relationship of mutual trust that is unprecedented. The Op lowers his guard with her so far as to be willing to drink himself into a vulnerable stupor with her. And he awakens from that stupor to discover his hand on the handle of an ice pick embedded in Dinah Brand’s left breast. The principal reason that Hammett substitutes this erotically-charged murder for actual sex is that it fully immerses the Op in the endemic violence of Personville. He has been increasingly aware of his own too-enthusiastic participation in the carnage (the death of Dinah Brand is, by his count, the 17th murder) and he fears he is “going blood-simple like the natives” (135). Because of the stupor, the Op does not know for certain whether he has killed the one likeable (and perhaps more than likeable) citizen of Personville. His doubts are not resolved until the last page of the novel. And not only does the Op have to question his own true nature; he finds that the possibility of his having committed the crime also tests his most fundamental male bond with his fellow Ops. One of the two who have been sent to help him sticks with him; the other, Dick Foley, who appeared as a trusted agent in ten short stories, loses faith and returns to San Francisco. But Dinah Brand’s death doesn’t just deepen the Op’s awareness of the thin line between righteous anger and culpable mania. It opens one vein of self-knowledge, but it also cuts short another. By killing Dinah Brand, Hammett ends the Op’s opportunity for a satisfyingly fulfilled relationship with a woman. He allows his detective to discover a darkness in 139

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his soul, but prevents him from discovering a redemptive love. Hammett would once again, from a very different angle, bring the Op to the verge of love in the next novel. Gabrielle Dain is also the object of men’s desire. Edgar Leggett loves her intensely as a father; young Eric Collinson loves her nobly as her fiancé and husband; Joseph Haldorn loves her as a besotted maniac; Owen Fitzstephen loves her possessively (and maniacally). The Op loves her ambiguously. She is, Hammett makes clear, something of a freak: she has very white skin, large eyes in a small face, “white, small, pointed” teeth, a pointed chin, “animal ears” (210) “without lobes, pointed tops” (341). She is addicted to morphine. Where Dinah Brand’s peculiarity was superficial — her disordered attire and cosmetics, Gabrielle Dain’s strangeness is in her body and her mind. She appears to be, as the title of the novel implies, cursed. It is the Op’s task to lift the curse; he is finally, in his last full-length performance, a chivalric rescuer. And he completes the rescue in the conventional manner of the detective, by explaining the “curse” as the consequence of the intelligible machinations of clever villains. It is not, he demonstrates, her cursed nature, but the malignant manipulations of her mother, her aunt, her second cousin and a sequence of secondary plotters that have wreaked the homicidal mayhem that has enveloped her. But the Op also rescues her from her morphine addiction by attending her through the agony of withdrawal. This is not a conventional service provided by the conventional detective. Neither Charlie Chan nor Philo Vance is called upon to invest himself in the mental recovery of a client. At the end of The Kidnap Murder Case, Wright permits Vance to suggest to Mrs. Andrews Falloway that she have her querulous son, Fraim, examined by an endocrinologist, and S.S. Van Dine can report on the final page of the novel that Fraim now appears healthy and normal. The happy ending testifies once more to the power of the detective’s diagnostic eye, but it costs the detective no life. The Op suffers with Gabrielle Dain through the week of her withdrawal. And it is clear that the sacrifice brings her close to loving him, and him close to loving her. In the end, the difference in age between the two — the Op is in his 40s, Gabrielle is 20— compels him to retreat from emotional involvement and, in response, for her to accept that he is a monster, not a lover — a “nice” monster. “An especially nice one to have around when you’re in trouble, but a monster just 140

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the same, without any human foolishness like love in him and —“ (378). She interrupts herself as she observes his reaction. The Op shakes off the charge of being loveless with a leering reference to his willingness to take up with Aaronia Haldorn, but it is clear that he has indeed experienced the human foolishness of love, and that he has suppressed his love not because he doubts his capacity to make any woman happy in the conventional sense, but because Gabrielle Dain is not the sort of woman that a man of his sort should marry. The world he needs to inhabit is not the world she needs. The two Continental Op novels thus engage the detective with women who strongly attract him. One of them is very much of his world, and the attraction is between individuals of comparable values and equal strength of will. The Op kills her. That is, he could have killed her, he thinks he may have killed her, and his interference in her affairs certainly led to her being killed. The other woman shares none of his worldly values and repeatedly submits to the will of any man who claims authority over her. This too is a slight overstatement — Gabrielle has rejected several suitors (including Own Fitzstephen). But if Dinah Brand is consistently a victimizer who preys on men, Gabrielle Dain is quintessentially a victim, preyed upon by men — except by the one man who pursues her and imprisons her in order to set her free. Red Harvest and The Dain Curse present two ways — one sentimental and one not — for the hard-boiled detective to respond to the young American women. Both ways would be pursued by the writers who followed Hammett. The tough dame who uses her sexuality to achieve her usually mercenary ends would become the signature figure in the genre, and dealing with her duplicities would become a principal occupation of the private eye. But the chivalric motif, with the hard-muscled and well-armed detective rescuing the imperiled girl trapped on mean streets that she is unprepared to navigate, persists as well. The hard-boiled detective story still has its roots in romance. Hammett would continue to work at getting the new woman right. In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid O’Shaughnessy is, of course, the iconic duplicitous dame. Her greed is somewhat less open than Dinah Brand’s, but no less deep. She is also less straightforward in her exploitation of men. Where Dinah crudely discarded men for whom she had no further use, Brigid kills them (Miles Archer) or causes them to be killed (Thursby). 141

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Dinah is who she seems to be, Brigid emphatically is not. She is manipulative. Though she is not a victimized girl like Gabrielle Dain, she adopts the aura of victimization — it is the basis of her opening gambit at the office of Spade & Archer. Dinah Brand understands herself, and the Op can accept her as a partner; Gabrielle Dain does not understand herself, and the Op protects and educates her. 12 The degree to which Brigid O’Shaughnessy understands herself is not at all clear. In her manipulations of most men, she cleverly serves her own self-interest; in her relationship with Sam Spade, her self-knowledge is questionable. When, at the end of the novel, she professes her love for the detective as he tries to explain why he will be turning her in for murder of Miles Archer, neither Spade nor the reader is certain that she is telling the truth, or even that she knows the truth. Brigid O’Shaughnessy is the most complex woman in Hammett’s fiction. Hammett’s next novel, The Glass Key, is almost entirely a novel about relations between men. Janet Henry functions largely as a device to test those relations, but to the extent that she exists as a character, she is closer to Gabrielle Dain than to Dinah Brand. She is more willful than Gabrielle, but she has no understanding of the world. She does not even understand the three men nearest to her — her father, her brother, and her would-be fiancé. Finally, in The Thin Man, Hammett develops a married detective. But Nick Charles bears no resemblance to Charlie Chan. Marriage is not a cultural anchor: Nick and Nora occupy a hotel room, not a home; they have one dog, not 12 children; they happily notice one another’s erotic interest in other people. They are New York sophisticates — at least, they are New York inebriates — and so belong to the world of Philo Vance, though they have none of Vance’s highbrow pretensions. Mimi Ferguson, the ex-wife of Clyde Wynant, is cast in the mold of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but without the redeeming possibility of perhaps loving someone. Her daughter, Dorothy, is cast in the mold of Gabrielle Dain, but without the “curse” that renders her melodramatically vulnerable. Though she is nonetheless vulnerable. Her vulnerability is the realistic vulnerability of a young girl who is a child of divorce, abandoned by her father, physically abused by her mother, and the object of the sexual desire of the men she meets. She is probably the most psychologically complex of all of Hammett’s women. Nora Charles, the only woman in Hammett’s fiction to 142

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marry a detective, has the straightforwardness of Dinah Brand, and though Hammett gives her a self-confidence and a wit that he denied Gabrielle Dain, Nora is happy to play the adoring spouse of the worldly man who knows guns and gangsters, stocks and bonds, cops and cannibals. She combines, however improbably, all of the delightful characteristics of the venturesome new woman of the 1920s with the all of the reliable virtues (including the gendered virtue of unlimited admiration of the husband) of the pre–1920 feminine ideal. It cannot be claimed that any of the three writers achieved — or even attempted — to explore the interior aspects of the female experience. It was the 1920s, and they were writing popular literature. Earl Derr Biggers made a decent effort to expand the economic world in which women might successfully compete, but he clearly chose to keep that expansion within comfortable limits. Wright certainly hoped to shock his readers with the brittle flippancy of his demimondaines, but not to shock them too much. And Hammett, who wanted to present women as being capable of the same amoral toughness that men were capable of, also imposed limits. His detectives were tough men, and so the ultimate toughness is male. The most street-smart woman (and, of course, all the other street-smart men) must finally yield to the hard-boiled detective. But there is an additional element: men can bond with one another in a way that no women can. The bond can be between the detective and a comrade, or between the detective and a gangster, or between the detective and a cop. Many men betray one another in Hammett’s fiction, but some men don’t. Some men live by a code. No woman does. Dinah Brand, one of Hammett’s toughest women, doesn’t get it. Nora Charles, one of Hammett’s most appealing women, at least senses that she doesn’t get it. Not until women began to write about women detectives investigating crimes would women in detective fiction get it. And that would happen long after the ’20s had ended.

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Appendix A: Three Brief Biographies Oh Yes, There Was a Man Named Earl Derr Biggers Earl Derr Biggers seems to have lived two score years and ten without offense, and consequently, with relatively little notice. He was never a martyr; he suffered, but never extremely, and never for a cause. He was an entertainer, a more or less successful entertainer between 1913 and 1925, and then, with the invention of Charlie Chan, a quite successful entertainer. He crossed many paths in his 30-year career as a professional writer — as a newspaperman, a playwright, and a novelist in Boston, New York, and Hollywood — but he seems to have impressed those who came to know him as more nice than noteworthy, more genial than memorable. The record presents a few testimonials to his good humor, but there are no important accounts of his life. In the published letters of the sorts of literary persons who have their letters published — H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, George Sterling, Maxwell Perkins, Robinson Jeffers — one can find references to Wright and to Hammett, and both Wright and Hammett have, in the decades since their deaths, been the objects of admirable biographical studies, but Biggers is much more elusive.1 The literary career of Earl Derr Biggers begins with his undergraduate years at Harvard and falls into three phases: an apprenticeship in Cambridge and Boston devoted to journalism and first experiments in the long and short forms of popular fiction (1908–14); a middle period attempting establish himself as a light dramatist in New York City (1914–20), while still, on the side, testing the market for short stories and novels; and a final decade in Pasadena, California, trying to secure a liv145

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ing as a writer for Hollywood and then discovering his destiny in the form of a plump Chinese American detective. Earl Derr Biggers was born in Warren, Ohio, on 26 August 1884, the only son of Robert J. and Emma E. Derr Biggers. Warren, with a population of 5,553 in 1880, was an undistinguished city in northeastern Ohio, 60 miles east of Cleveland, with factories and foundries, but also elm-lined streets.2 Warren gave Earl Biggers, as other Midwestern cities gave to so many other young Americans at the turn of the century, a middle–American place from which to escape, first eastward to a Harvard education, Boston journalism, and Broadway theatre, and then westward to Pasadena and Hollywood. Robert Biggers was (“apparently”) a workingman and small entrepreneur (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 2). Earl showed an early aptitude for writing, and, as well, a precocious sensitivity to the icons of American popular culture. His first exercises, “as soon as I could write connected sentences,” were a series of stories based upon the characters in Palmer Cox’s Brownie stories (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 2). Cox had begun publishing Brownie stories in the children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, in 1883, and The Brownies, Their Book, the first of many Brownie books, had been published in 1887. There is no evidence that either Wright or Hammett was influenced by The Brownies, though had they been influenced by the Brownies, they would not have permitted the fact to be published. Biggers attended Warren High School, graduating in 1903. In the fall of his senior year, seeking an outlet for his writing impulse, he founded a monthly literary magazine, The Cauldron. He recalled it with a characteristic note of self-deprecation: “The first issue led off with a grandiose editorial in which I split three infinitives and used the verb lay where I should have used lie” (G4). With the financial support of his uncle, James, a Warren businessman, Biggers matriculated at Harvard University in fall 1903. He would return briefly to the midwest, but for the remainder of his life would identify himself as a citizen of the northeast; even when he moved to California, he continued to vacation in the Berkshires. Biggers’s wife, a native Bostonian, would later describe her husband as “a Middle West product with a Boston complex. Boston put an awful dent in him” (qtd. in Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 6).3 146

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It was the new Harvard of President Charles W. Eliot that Biggers encountered in fall 1903, the Harvard that had taken the German model of the research university to heart, that had instituted the revolution known as “electives,” that had dropped Greek as an entrance requirement in 1887, and that had, since 1877, doubled the size of its undergraduate enrollment. Eliot had become president in 1869, and would resign in 1909, two years after Biggers’s graduation. The faculty included luminaries George Santayana, William James, Josiah Royce, Hugo Munsterberg, George Lyman Kittridge, and Irving Babbitt (who, like Biggers, was a refugee from Ohio — Dayton). A letter Biggers sent back to The Cauldron in Warren suggested that the life of a Harvard freshman might be a lonely one, but Biggers eventually fitted himself into Harvard’s world. He wrote for the Lampoon and for the Advocate. His choice of The Advocate over the more aesthetic Monthly may be telling. As a sign of Biggers’s aesthetic convictions at Harvard, his New York Times obituary noted that he had declared his preference for Rudyard Kipling and Richard Harding Davis over Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Goldsmith; for FPA (Franklin P. Adams) over Horace (6 April 1933, 17). These judgments are not particularly creditable, but not discreditable either. They do definitely place Biggers apart from Harvard’s Dante circle presided over by Charles Eliot Norton, and apart from the acolytes of George Santayana’s “feline aestheticism.”4 The establishment at Harvard, when it spoke of its cultural “home,” referred to England, or, at most, to western Europe. When his classmates read Keats to one another in the Cambridge twilight, they would ask Biggers to leave the room (NYT, 6 April 1933, 17). One of his submissions to the Advocate won a competition for a “pick up” story (a story in which a young male picks up a young female), and by later selling the story to a magazine for $25.00, Biggers entered the ranks of the professional writer (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 5).5 Graduating with Biggers in the class of 1907 were the editor Maxwell Perkins, the critic Van Wyck Brooks (class of ’08, though he graduated with the class of ’07), and the poet John Gould Fletcher. Overlapping his time at Harvard were luminaries such as Helen Keller and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (’04), John Hall Wheelock, Edward Sheldon, Samuel Eliot Morrison, and Alain Locke (’08), T.S. Eliot (’09), Walter Lippman, and John Reed (’10). Perkins would become famous as the editor of Ernest Hem147

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ingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe — and of S.S. Van Dine/Willard Huntington Wright (who spent the 1906–07 academic year taking courses with Perkins and Biggers at Harvard). Van Wyck Brooks would become the culture critic who, beginning in The Wine of the Puritans (1908) and America’s Coming of Age (1915) would attack the fatal division between the highbrow and the lowbrow in American culture. Neither Perkins nor Brooks seems ever to have noticed their classmate from Warren, Ohio; the poet Wheelock, in his recollections of his time at Harvard, would have much to say about Perkins, Brooks and other notable members of his class. He would then add, “I am probably missing some names — oh yes, there was a man named Earl Derr Biggers, who became a very well-known Broadway figure writing musical comedies and farces and so on, and who had a number of short stories both in the Advocate and in The Harvard Weekly” (Wheelock, 36). That the “man named Earl Derr Biggers” had also written a dozen popular plays and novels Wheelock missed entirely. It would seem that Biggers, despite his contributions to the Advocate, did not impress himself upon his literary classmates. By contrast, Wheelock did quite clearly recall Willard Wright, who spent less than a year a Harvard. Wright “was quite a wild boy,” the “college ass”; Wheelock remembered him for his mistresses and his love of brandy (202–03). Wheelock also remembered him for marrying a chorus girl in Boston, something Wright did not do. The things Willard Wright didn’t do always proved more memorable than the things Earl Biggers did. Another Harvard graduate, S.N. Behrman (’16), remembered Biggers a bit more distinctly: In those days, ambitious literati could be divided, roughly, into two classes: those with a greater grip on reality, who wanted to write for The Saturday Evening Post or Cosmopolitan and those, more vaporous, who wanted to write for The Smart Set. Earl Derr Biggers, for example, just a year ahead of me in English 12, belonged to the realistic group. By the time I ran into him again, twenty years after he had graduated, he had opulently achieved his ambition [Behrman, xix–xx].

The reference to the opulence of Biggers’s achievement presumably alludes to the success of Charlie Chan; it is Behrman’s version of Wheelock’s superior “oh yes, there was a man named Earl Derr Biggers.” Behrman writes as a declared partisan of the vaporous; he was an important contributor 148

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to The Smart Set in the early ’20s, and the vulgar popularity of Biggers’s Saturday Evening Post fiction placed it largely beneath notice. There is an odd aspect to Behrman’s “just a year ahead of me”: Biggers had, in fact, graduated from Harvard eight years before Behrman enrolled in English 12. English 12 was the famous course in “English Composition” which Charles T. Copeland had been offering to a cadre of Harvard upperclassmen since 1892. Copeland was revolutionizing teaching at Harvard, presuming to introduce a measure of intimacy in faculty-student relations. (The atomistic loneliness of student life at Harvard was a common complaint of the time.) Copey’s English 12 was already a cult experience to which no more than 30 students a year would be admitted. Each was required to write 800 words a week, and twice a month they faced Copey in his chambers in Hollis Hall to read their compositions (Williamson, 84). He demanded clarity and accuracy in writing, and having been for a time himself a newspaperman, he promoted a journalistic style. Kipling was a Copeland favorite. Several of Copeland’s protégé’s made careers for themselves in journalism — Jack Reed, Heywood Broun, and Walter Lippmann among the most prominent. Copeland’s actual advice about journalism reflected his own experience: “Get in, get wise, get out” (O’Conner, 22). Both Biggers and Wright would follow this precept. Against the Anglophilia of colleagues such as Barrett Wendell, “Copeland vigorously advocated in youthful writers the search for that lean, sinewy quality which distinguished American prose from its English ancestry” (O’Connor, 22). (Ironically, it would be Hammett, who did not have the benefit of Copeland’s tuition, who would achieve the lean, sinewy American style.) Some who passed through Copeland’s course, such as Van Wyck Brooks and T. S. Eliot, failed to be impressed by his principles or his style, but the list of writers who, whether they appreciated his tuition or not, underwent English 12 is striking; in addition to Biggers, Wright, Behrman, Brooks, Eliot, Reed, Broun, and Lippmann, it includes Robert Benchley, John Dos Passos, Brooks Atkinson, Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Cowley. Invited to contribute anecdotes to a biography of Copeland, Behrman recalled an experience which Biggers had related to him: Some years after I left Harvard, in Hollywood I met, at Montague Glass’s, Earl Derr Biggers. He was an alumnus of English 12 too; I asked him whether read-

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Appendix A ing themes to Copey had been the ordeal for him that it had been for me. “Ordeal!” he exclaimed, and even then mopped his brow. “I brought Copey a story once,” he told me, “a triangle story; I thought I had invented the surprising situation in which a man is in love with the wife of his friend. In the first few sentences Copey fell elaborately asleep, and those great whistling snores filled the room. I struggled on until I reached my great and unprecedented climax: the wife was in the lover’s arms, and her husband made a tactless entrance. ‘Immediately,’ I read, ‘he understood.’ This flash of percipience on the part of the husband was so dazzling that it woke Copey up. ‘What a brain!’ he said.” The reading ended right there, and so too, Biggers felt, his career as a writer of fiction. He turned then to philosophy, and next time brought in an abstruse essay on aesthetics. At the end of the first paragraph Copey said: “Biggers, where do you get your hair cut?” Earl was so startled that he answered literally, “Brattle Street.” “You should try the one on Harvard Square,” said Copey. “Much better there.” This experience drove Biggers back to fiction [qtd. in Adams, 180–81].

The self-deprecatory anecdote is characteristic of Biggers.6 Upon graduation from Harvard, Biggers briefly returned to Ohio, working first as a night reporter for the police desk of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and then for the publishers who would issue most of his books, including all of the Chan novels, the Indianapolis firm of Bobbs-Merrill. In 1908, Biggers returned to Boston and began work writing a daily humor column, “The Fact Is,” for the Boston Traveller. Eleanor Ladd, of Medford, Massachusetts, was also writing a column for the paper under the thoroughly New English name, “Phoebe Dwight.” She and Biggers would marry 14 September 1914. “Writing a humorous column in Boston —[Biggers] said — was a good deal like making faces in church; it offended a lot of nice people, and it wasn’t much fun” (Haycraft, 177–78). Either early 20th-century Bostonians were exceedingly sensitive, or Biggers exaggerates. Inoffensive humor would be Biggers’s stock in trade: unlike Wright, who reveled in épatering le bourgeoisie, and Hammett, who valued cold-eyed realism above decorum, Biggers always aimed to amuse the Bostonians — he might mock their pieties and pretensions, as he does in House Without a Key, but he would always do so gently. In 1909, he began also to write drama reviews for the Traveler, and he suggests, again with a measure of exaggeration, that pressure from theatre owners helped to precipitate his release from the paper. In fact, a change in the paper’s ownership in January 1912 seems to have been the principal cause. One consequence of his critical engage150

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ment with Boston theatre was an effort to write a play of his own: Biggers spent much of 1912 writing a comedy, If You’re Only Human, which was produced in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in December, and then transferred to Boston, where its reception was evidently not promising. The disappointing reception of If You’re Only Human led Biggers to turn from journalism and drama to fiction. He devoted a winter of memorable deprivation to writing his first novel. “Huddled near the coal grate in his Mount Vernon Place room, he munched peanut brittle and wrote a chapter a day” (Gregorich, “Earl”). By spring he had completed the manuscript of Seven Keys to Baldpate, a novel combining mystery melodrama, romance, and humor. Seven Keys to Baldpate appeared first as a serial in the Sunday Magazine of the Detroit News Tribune, beginning on 5 January 1913. It was published in book form on 15 February 1913 by his former employer, Bobbs-Merrill. Biggers’s brief engagement with the firm after his Harvard graduation presumably prompted his submission of the novel to this Indianapolis firm known primarily for its children’s books and school textbooks. Bobbs-Merrill was just then losing its principal popular novelist, Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose celebrated debut mystery, the best-selling Circular Staircase, it had published in 1908. She had stayed with them for her next six books, including the first compilation of “Tish” stories. But The Case of Jennie Brice (1913) would be the last Rinehart issued by Bobbs-Merrill, and Seven Keys to Baldpate, while not exactly in the Rinehart vein, includes the romance and mystery elements that Rinehart had exploited. Seven Keys has a bit more humor and a bit less sentiment than Rinehart’s usual fiction, but it would appeal to a similar audience. The New York Times reviewed Seven Keys to Baldpate on 23 February 1913, finding it to be “a gay saucy story, with a facetious hero, who is never at a loss for something to say and never fails to say it amusingly,” and it predicted that “The brilliant way in which he has written this, his first novel, gives promise of excellent things to come in his career as a novelist” (72). On the basis of this success, Biggers began submitting stories to magazines such as McClure’s, Red Book, and Ladies Home Journal. Seven Keys to Baldpate also helped to revive Biggers’s theatrical ambitions. George M. Cohan, the Broadway playwright, producer, actor, and songwriter, offered to adapt the novel for the stage, and claimed to have 151

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completed his version in ten days.7 The reviews were enthusiastic. It was “the season’s second smash hit” (Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle, 729), running out the season (320 performances on Broadway), and it toured the country for three more seasons. “The play remained a favorite — reputedly Cohan’s biggest money-maker — in summer stock and on amateur stages until after the Second World War” (Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle, 730). The play was Cohan’s biggest moneymaker, not Biggers’s, but it helped to establish Biggers’s name. He would spend the next few years straddling the genres of comedy-romance drama and comedy-romance fiction. Having acquired a degree of fame with the dramatic version of Seven Keys to Baldpate, and a degree of fortune with the novel, Biggers felt secure enough to marry Eleanor Ladd. (He had proposed on the day his novel was accepted by Bobbs-Merrill.) The couple made a trip to Europe, with the Times reporting that they were expected in Rome in April and that they had returned to New York from Liverpool on 19 July. Biggers’s next novel was Love Insurance, which would be published in September 1914, just three months after his return. It had been written in Boston, immediately after Seven Keys to Baldpate (NYT, 19 Oct 1919, XX3). The novel features a British protagonist, Lord Harrowby, but Lord Harrowby’s romantic misadventures take place primarily in the little town of San Marco, Florida. The Times reviewer noted that Biggers, clearly having profited from his experience with Seven Keys to Baldpate, had written a novel obviously designed for transfer to the stage. And in its advertising, Bobbs-Merrill not only cited Cohan’s play and Biggers’s first novel as warrants of the excellence of Love Insurance, they also promised that a dramatization of it by A.E. Thomas had already been commissioned. Nothing seems to have come of the dramatization. Biggers would himself, four years later, turn the novel into the play See-Saw, another unhappy exercise, and one which helped precipitate his exit from playwriting and from New York. Nonetheless, whether on its own merits or on the reputation of Seven Keys, Love Insurance rewarded its author. Biggers reported receiving $5,000 for the magazine and serial rights to the novel. And several years later, Biggers would disparage Douglas Fairbanks’s offer for the film rights to the novel: “Douglas Fairbanks is certainly a great comedian. Five hundred dollars for the rights to Love Insurance— and the 152

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balance to be taken out in the honor of having Doug leap like the agile mountain goat through the story. I have been getting that price for the movie rights to short stories.” (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 9) Biggers would eventually sell the film rights for $7,000. At Harvard, Biggers had reportedly considered Franklin P. Adams a better poet than Horace. Now, in 1914, in New York, Biggers encountered FPA, who had just joined the New York Tribune as a columnist, and whose “Conning Tower” was a principal vehicle for achieving and maintaining celebrity in Manhattan through the 1920s.8 One of FPA’s conceits was a series of columns entitled “The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys” in which he recorded items of personal experience. In his 19 January 1914 column, FPA noted, “With Earl Biggers the story-writer to luncheon and after we walked up the great avenue and did remark the men and women” (Adams, 112). Despite his connection with FPA and his reputation as a humorist, Biggers was not to join Adams with the other wits who gathered at the Round Table of the Algonquin. Alexander Woolcott called the Round Table into existence in 1919, just as Biggers was abandoning New York. But Biggers could claim the distinction of introducing Adams (recognized as the senior member of the Round Table) to one of the circle’s stars. In March 1914, Biggers pressed FPA to use his influence to get the Tribune to offer a job to a fellow Harvard alumnus, Robert Benchley.9 Benchley, however, declined the offer, and took a different position in Boston. Biggers did not give up. “At the earnest behest of Earl Derr Biggers,” Adams traveled to Boston to press the invitation to Benchley to join the staff of the Tribune (“The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys,” 22 November 1915; Adams, 161). As a result, Benchley returned to New York, met Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood, and when Woollcott beckoned in 1919, the principal wits of the Round Table were in place. And Biggers was in Pasadena. The Biggers’s only child, Robert Ladd, was born 6 June 1915. Biggers reported his home address to the 1914–15 edition of Who’s Who as Hotel Holley, Washington Square West, and maintained a rented office on Madison Avenue. New York City (or nearby Pelham Manor) would remain his home until, in the late 1920s, Biggers would move his family permanently to Pasadena, California. The 1914 trip to Europe inspired Biggers’s second attempt at play153

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writing, a melodrama that drew upon current events in war-torn Europe, Inside the Lines. Set in a hotel in Gibralter, the action involves the plots and counterplots of German and American spies, while humor is provided by the stranded Americans seeking to escape home.10 It was a good deal more successful than 1912’s If You’re Only Human. Inside the Lines premiered in Baltimore and opened in New York on February 1915, playing 103 performances. The Times was lukewarm, reporting that it would provide “a moderately interesting evening” (13 February 1915).11 It enjoyed its greatest success in London, where it ran for 500 nights. With Robert Welles Ritchie as a collaborator, Biggers published a “novelization” of the play (1915). It was popular enough to be filmed twice, first as a silent film (1918) and then as a talkie (1930). Biggers’s short novel, The Agony Column (1916), was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, one of the most desirable (and most remunerative) venues for fiction in America in the first half of the 20th century. The Agony Column is another light romance, with some clever exchanges. As inspired in part by Biggers’s honeymoon trip to Europe, it is set in London in the summer of 1914 (“that historic summer”), and involves an exchange of letters between a young man and a young woman, an exchange initiated by a notice the young man places in the “Agony Column” of the London Times. Biggers’s emerging stature as a writer is indicated by the response of Hart Crane, who came to New York City from Warren, Ohio, at the end of 1916. Crane was teenager escaping from his difficult family situation. His mentor and informal guardian in New York was the Warren-born painter, Carl Schmitt (1889–1989), whose European training had been financed by Crane’s aunt, Zell Hart Deming, and who would serve as a seminal aesthetic influence on Crane. Schmitt had returned to the States in 1916 to open a studio in New York. On January 16, 1917, Crane wrote home to his mother and grandmother about the celebrity that he had just encountered at Schmitt’s studio. He identified him as “Earl Biggers, the author of Seven Keys to Bald Pate, who had dropped in “for some grub” at Schmitt’s studio. “I was nearly shocked off my feet by the quietness and un-worldliness of his behavior.” “He is a fine fellow however,” the 17year-old Crane wrote of the 32-year old Biggers (Crane, 31). Schmitt’s studio at 308 E. 15th Street was the center of a circle of writers that, in 154

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addition to his fellow Warren ex-patriots, Crane and Biggers, included Van Wyck Brooks, Conrad Aiken, Alfred Kreymborg, and Padraic and Mary Colum. It was yet another New York circle in which Biggers, ambitious for popular acclaim, would not find a permanent place. Biggers has left little evidence of his social views beyond what can be inferred from his fiction. In July 1916, he was a member of a committee of the Author’s League of America that recommended that writers unionize themselves under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor. The principal motive for affiliating with the AFL lay in what the authors saw as abuses in the emerging area of screen-writing and screen adaptations. Biggers was joined by, among others, Franklin P. Adams, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Wilkens Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edwin Markham, Kathleen Norris, Melville Davisson Post, and Mary Roberts Rinehart. A bit more daring was Biggers’s agreement in 1916 to join the campaign initiated by the Author’s League of America to protest the censorship of Theodore Dreiser’s latest novel, The “Genius.” Anthony Comstock’s successor as secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, John Sumner, was leading a campaign to compel Dreiser’s publisher, the John Lane Company, to withdraw the book because, among other things, its hero painted nudes and some of its young women characters enjoyed extramarital sex without suffering retribution. Biggers had declined to sign when initially invited to by the editor and poet, Harold Hersey, the assistant to the League’s secretary, but when, in November, H.L. Mencken undertook “a general offensive against the lice who have refused to sign the protest” (qtd. in Lingeman, 137), Biggers capitulated and joined 457 other writers who came to Dreiser’s support. (Willard Wright, so far from being a louse, had joined Mencken in directing the campaign.) Biggers thus found himself, for a moment at least, in the company of Willa Cather, Ezra Pound, Jack Reed, Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Edwin Arlington Robinson.12 Two of Biggers’s letters to The New York Times in this period further suggest a moderately progressive position. In November 1916, shortly after the re-election of Woodrow Wilson, Biggers wrote to nominate Brand Whitlock as Wilson’s potential successor in 1920. Brand Whitlock (1869–1934) was, at the time, the American minister to Belgium, and was 155

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involved in promoting a resistance to the German invaders. Like Biggers, a native of Ohio, Whitlock had made a reputation as a Progressive politician in Illinois and Ohio, most notably as mayor of Toledo. He was also the author of reformist novels, the first of which, The Thirteenth District (1902), had been singled out for praise by William Dean Howells (and published Bobbs-Merrill). Biggers praised Whitlock’s memoir of his experiences of progressive reform in law and politics, Forty Years of It (1914), as “a fine brand of Americanism,” and argued that “every progressive and independent” voter should support his candidacy (NYT, 22 Nov 1916). This alignment with midwestern progressivism is qualified by a letter to the editor which Biggers composed nine months later, in August 1917. By this time, America was in the war and Russia was out of it. A left wing of the American labor movement was revolting against the chauvinism of Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor, and was attempting to organize an antiwar labor coalition. Leaders had met in New York City in May, and proposed the creation of a national People’s Council, with affiliated local Workmen’s Councils. A constituent convention was scheduled for September, but a variety of forces conspired to abort the endeavor. Biggers denounced the People’s Council’s “disloyal and treasonable program for an immediate, and therefore a German, peace,” and described the supporters as “cowards” and “Kaiser-lovers” (NYT, 14 August 1917). Biggers, now 33 and safe from conscription, embraced the Allied cause; Wright, 29 and scrambling to claim an exemption as a breadwinner for the family he had abandoned in California, was toning down, but not repudiating, the Germanophilia that his Kaiser-Wilhelm moustache had celebrated in 1913; Hammett, aged 24, would volunteer to join the army in 1918. Despite having broken into The Saturday Evening Post with The Agony Column, Biggers returned to playwriting. His first production, A Cure for Curables, opened 25 February 1918, at the 39th Street Theater. Biggers and Lawrence Whitman (the nom de plume of the actor William Hodge) adapted it from a story by Cora Harris. The conceit is that a doctor can win an inheritance (and the love of a girl, as well) if he can cure ten patients in 30 days. The collaboration was not entirely satisfactory — Hodges, who would star in the show, made so many revisions that Biggers would tell Burns Mantle, “There was one line of mine in ‘A Cure for Curables’ when 156

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it reached the boards, ... but after careful consideration Hodge removed it” (Mantle, 228). Though it mentioned Biggers as co-writer, the Times reviewed the comedy entirely and, as Biggers suggests, accurately, as a vehicle of, by, and for Hodges. The play ran for 112 performances. The year 1919 saw Biggers involved in two Broadway productions: See-Saw, his musical adaptation of his 1914 novel, Love Insurance, and Three’s a Crowd, which he and Christopher Morley were adapting from Morley’s short story, “Kathleen.” Neither experience was a happy one. Biggers had seen several attempts to have Love Insurance dramatized prevented by a professional collapse; he then prepared two dramatic versions of his own, but even the success of Inside the Lines could not attract a producer. Finally Biggers rewrote the scenario as a musical, which was accepted by the producer, Henry W. Savage. The composer Louis A. Hirsch was brought into the production and the musical finally opened at George M. Cohan’s Theatre on 23 September 1919. Alexander Woolcott gave the play a positive review (“Earl Derr Biggers has written a really capital book and some better-than-average lyrics” [NYT, 24 September 1919, 18]), and it ran for 89 performances. Three’s a Crowd was also being readied for the stage in the fall of 1919. The two coinciding productions resulted in a serious strain on the playwright. As Biggers told it to the theater historian, Burns Mantle, in the one instance he was confronted with a producer who roared his suggestions for improvements to the text, and in the other, with a producer whose near-bankruptcy compelled him to regularly sell additional five and ten-percent partnerships in the production, with each new partner insisting upon revisions. Three’s a Crowd, with the near-bankrupt producer, was presented as “a comedy in three acts by Earl Derr Biggers and Christopher Morley,” but Morley’s biographer indicates that aside from composing the story upon which the play was based, Morley had little involvement with writing the play. Three’s a Crowd had its debut at the Cort Theatre on 4 December 1919. Woollcott gave it a mixed review, finding much that was “fresh and amusing,” but reporting that the play as a whole had something of the quality of an opiate (NYT, 5 Dec 1919, 12). It played only 12 performances (though in 1923 it would be revised in London) and it put an end to Biggers’s effort to make his living as a playwright. He would now devote himself to writing short fiction for magazines, but as Burns 157

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Mantle recorded, he was also turning to the emerging market for writers in Hollywood: “Earl Derr Biggers figures that he is one of the luckier playwrights. He quit writing novels and plays and took to writing motion picture scenarios when both the quitting and the scenario market were at their peak” (Mantle, 227). Biggers’s flirtation with Broadway lasted less than five years (1915– 1919) and saw four plays (Inside the Lines, A Cure for Curables, See-Saw, and Three’s a Crowd) produced with differing degrees of success.13 Mantle’s account of Biggers’s Broadway disappointments in 1919 suggests that the obvious financial motive for the shift to California was seconded by a medical one: “Between these experiences Biggers’ blood pressure mounted with Biggers’ disgust. And when the experiences were over the playwright sought the twin balms of California — the climate for his health, the motion picture factories for the re-establishment of what once had been a bank account” (Mantle, 229). “Blood pressure” is not a figure of speech: though only in his mid–30s, Biggers already had a history of heart trouble and high blood pressure. His move to Pasadena, California, gave him more direct access to the new screenwriting market that was emerging in Hollywood, but it also offered the benefit of the salubrious climate of southern California. The first half of the 20s saw Biggers supplying material to the Hollywood studios, and while Pelham Manor remained his home address, he was evidently spending much of his time in Los Angeles, writing screenplays for Fox, Radio Pictures, and Warner Brothers. Biggers’s Hollywood years — the period between his departure from New York City as a disappointed playwright in 1920 and his emergence, in 1925, as the celebrated creator of Charlie Chan — are largely undocumented. There is no account of the screenplays he sold. He continued to write short stories and serials for magazines. “Love in Hollywood,” for example, was published in the Ladies Home Journal in April 1921. In 1922, The Ruling Passion, a silent film featuring George Arliss, was made from a Biggers short story, “Idle Hands.” The Reckless Age, with Reginald Denny, was based on Love Insurance, and was released in 1924. In April 1920, with his health problems again providing an incentive, Biggers treated himself and his wife to a vacation in Hawaii, which was then only on the verge of the development which would in a few decades make Waikiki a magnet for tourism. It was during his idyll in 158

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Honolulu that he conceived the plot device that would become the seed of the first Charlie Chan novel. “I was sitting one evening on a lanai on the water’s edge at Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, carrying out the doctor’s orders for a long rest.... Suddenly there in the twilight I thought of an excellent way of murdering a man — the swimming ashore from a ship in the harbor trick that would be the backbone of ‘The House Without a Key’” (NYT, 22 March 1931).14 The first fruit of the Hawaii trip, however, would be a short novel, Fifty Candles, that was serialized in 1921 and published as a book in 1926. Its detailed opening scene is set in Honolulu, though the rest of the novel takes place in San Francisco. Other work then distracted Biggers, and it was not until 1922, when a mortgage obligation compelled him to seek a $1200 advance from Bobbs-Merrill, that he made a commitment to produce another novel for them (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 10). It was on a vacation back east in the Berkshires that the seed from Hawaii finally germinated, and The House Without a Key was written. Originally conceived as the tale of two San Francisco newspapermen investigating a Honolulu mystery, a stroke of genius transformed the two investigators into a priggish heir of Boston Puritanism and a genial heir of Chinese Confucianism. The novel was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post beginning on 24 January 1925. Bobbs-Merrill published the book version on 16 March 1925. The New York Times review did not notice Charlie Chan until its final paragraph, when it concluded that the novel would please readers who enjoy “light” and “baffling” mysteries, with “the added attraction of a Chinaman who is a good scout and a first-rate detective. Best of all, he doesn’t say ‘velly’” (NYT, 3 May 1925, x???). Biggers later recalled that the novel did not really begin to sell until June (Schrader, 220), but he also reported that he was receiving letters praising the character of Charlie Chan even as the serial was running in the Post (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 11). Both George M. Cohan and William Hodge made offers to translate the novel to the Broadway stage, but Biggers rejected both offers. His frustrating experience with Hodges in 1919 explains that rejection, but his rejection of Cohan perhaps reflects Biggers’s sense that Cohan’s triumph with Seven Keys to Baldpate might have been his own. He wrote to his friend at Bobbs-Merrill, D. Laurance Chambers: “You know ... I never followed up on Baldpate the way I should have 159

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done, and I am not going to be so stupid this time” (qtd in Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 12). The success of The House Without a Key and the commitment of the Post and Bobbs-Merrill to the sequel enabled Biggers to take his wife and son on a four-month trip to Europe, his first visit since 1914. They departed by ship from New York on 30 April 1926, visiting Paris (five weeks), Switzerland, the Italian lakes, Munich, the Rhine, Holland, Belgium, and London, and finally returning from Glasgow on 28 August. In New York, Biggers made a point of seeing a medical specialist, another indication that his health was troubling him (“I am feeling quite rocky again,” he wrote to D. Laurence Chambers, an editor at Bobbs-Merrill [qtd. in Schrader, 216]). Though Charlie Chan was almost an afterthought in The House Without a Key, his appeal was sufficient to justify a sequel in which he was clearly the hero. Biggers worked diligently on The Chinese Parrot in his office in Pasadena. He undertook research trips to San Francisco and Barstow to verify his details, and aimed to complete a second draft by April 1. The Chinese Parrot was serialized in the Post ( June–July 1926) and then published by Bobbs-Merrill in September 1926, selling an impressive 800,000 copies. It was reviewed positively, with the Times acknowledging both its conventionality (its use of “familiar devices”) and Biggers’s play with those conventions (2 January 1927, BR12). Universal Pictures immediately secured the film rights, and by April 1927 had assigned the German director, Paul Leni, to make the movie. The screenplay was written by the veteran of silent movies, J. Grubb Alexander. Released on 23 October 1927, it featured Kamiyama Sojin, a Japanese magician, as Charlie Chan. Biggers was not pleased by the casting, describing Sojin as “a corking actor, but a long, thin, sinister chink” (qtd. in Ellman, 183). “Chink” may here be a deliberate racial stereotype; Biggers had earlier opposed casting Conrad Veidt as Charlie Chan, fearing he would “scare the public to death and brand Charlie as a sinister devil from the Orient” (Ellman, 183). The point seems to be that Biggers opposed the studio’s inability to imagine a non-sinister, non–“Chink” Chinese detective. Charlie Chan had proven his capacity to provide financial security for the Biggers family. Biggers undertook a third novel, but although his publishers hoped for a completed manuscript in September, Biggers 160

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strained himself to complete Behind That Curtain in December 1927. In fact, he felt so overworked that he was unable to participate in the promotional campaign launched in spring 1928. The Post paid $25,000 to serialize the third novel, Behind That Curtain, in March–May 1928; the Times reviewed it favorably (“Charlie Chan ... deserves a prominent place in the gallery of fictional sleuths” 6 May 1928, 68), but in a single paragraph in the ghetto of “New Mystery Stories.” Biggers was being put in his place. It was, certainly, a remunerative place: the Fox studio paid Biggers “a very gratifying sum” for the film rights to the novel (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 13). It was briefly expected that Behind That Curtain would be the Fox studio’s first talkie, though that honor eventually went elsewhere. The movie was released on 28 June 1929. The British actor, E.L. Park, played Charlie Chan, but he was actually billed below Boris Karloff, who had taken the role of “a Soudanese servant.” With the success of Charlie Chan in print and on the screen, Biggers was able to hire an architect to design a new house in which he could install his aging parents as well as his wife and son. Nonetheless, the categorization rankled. Biggers expressed a reluctance to follow the third Chan novel with a fourth: He wrote to Chambers at Bobbs-Merrill: “I don’t want to find myself in the position where the public won’t accept anything but a Chan story from me” (qtd in Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 14). Nonetheless, a holiday in Honolulu in the summer of 1928 inspired Biggers not only to produce a fourth Chan novel, but, after giving the detective two adventures in California, to return him to his home in Hawaii. The election of 1928 provided the occasion for another public indication that Biggers’s social views had moved significantly to the right since his 1916 endorsement of Brand Whitlock for president in 1920. In September 1928, Herbert Hoover’s campaign committee announced that 500 authors, one of them Earl Derr Biggers, had declared their preference of Hoover over Al Smith. Biggers’s support of Hoover put him in the company of Hamlin Garland, John O’Hara, Harold Bell Wright, Booth Tarkington, Zane Grey, and Kathleen Norris. The fourth Charlie Chan novel, The Black Camel, appeared in August 1929, having been serialized in the Post between May and June. Though it is set in Honolulu, it is Biggers’s “Hollywood novel,” featuring a range 161

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of Hollywood characters returning to California via Honolulu, having shot a film in the South Seas. It was, the Times observed, “an excellent detective story” (1 September 1929, BR9). An excellent detective story: Biggers was now pinned to the genre, a detective story writer, not a novelist. But it was 1929, and with his losses in the stock market, Biggers stopped wriggling. If he was chained to Charlie Chan, at least the chains were golden. In these Depression years, he was receiving $5,000 from movie studios just for the right to read his manuscripts. In May 1930 Warner Brothers released The Second Floor Mystery, based on The Agony Column. In July 1930, after completing the manuscript of the fifth Chan novel, Charlie Chan Carries On (serialized August–September 1930), he embarked with his wife and son on yet another voyage to Europe, returning in September. In November 1930 he suffered a severe heart attack; he resumed work on the sixth Charlie Chan novel in January 1931, but suffered another attack in March. When Charlie Chan Carries On was released by Fox in April 1931, the detective was played by Warner Oland, and Charlie Chan had finally found his most memorable embodiment. Oland, a Swede, had already played a number of roles as an oriental between 1918 and 1930 (including two appearances as Charlie Chan’s antithesis, Dr. Fu Manchu). His success in Charlie Chan Carries On would be repeated in 15 more films between 1931 and 1937. The first sequel would be the movie version of The Black Camel, released four months later in July 1931. Biggers traveled back to Honolulu to attend the filming, traveling on the same boat as newlyweds William Powell and Carole Lombard (NYT, 28 June 1931). Chang Apana (1869?–1933), was present throughout the on-location filming (NYT, 21 June 31),15 and Biggers, meeting him for the first time, signed copies of the novel for him, though Apana could not, it seems, read English. Apana’s New York Times obituary, with perhaps some license, declared that he and Biggers became “fast friends” (9 December 1933, N9); perhaps. In July 1931, Biggers and his wife traveled to Massachusetts to enroll their son at Choate School. And in November–December 1931, Biggers made what seems to be his only direct contribution to the cinematic Charlie Chan: he was apparently responsible for adding lines of dialogue to the remake of Behind That Curtain, which would be released in 1932. BobbsMerrill collected the first five Charlie Chan novels in a 1933 omnibus edi162

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tion. The Saturday Evening Post paid him a record $40,000 for the serialization rights to The Keeper of the Keys, the sixth (and final) Charlie Chan novel. There was some reconciliation to his fate when, in 1932, Biggers reported to the 25th reunion of the Harvard Class of 1907: “I am quite sure that I never intended to travel the road of the mystery writer.... Nor did I deliberately choose to have in the seat at my side, his life forever entangled with mine, a bland and moon-faced Chinese. Yet here I am, and with me Charlie Chan. Thank heaven he is amiable, philosophical — a good companion. For I know now that he and I must travel the rest of the journey together” (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 17). It was not to be a long journey. Biggers suffered another major heart attack in late March 1933 in Palm Springs, California, where he had gone to rest while his wife took his son back to Choate. Eleanor and Robert returned in time to be at his bedside when, on 5 April 1933, a final heart attack killed him. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered over the San Gabriel Mountains. Bobbs-Merrill considered commissioning sequels to the Charlie Chan novels, but Eleanor, Biggers’s sole legatee, refused to authorize them. Eleanor Ladd Biggers had taken an active role in Biggers’s literary career, reviewing his manuscripts and making suggestions for the designs of typefaces and book covers (Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 13). She was protective of his creation. “I am certain that there isn’t anyone who could go on with the Chan stories, and keep them the Chan stories that Earl created.... Charlie Chan’s characteristics and philosophy of life were Earl’s, and people loved Chan for the exact same reasons they loved Earl.... He is Earl’s monument and I cannot bear the idea of any change being made” (qtd in Gregorich, “Charlie Chan’s Poppa,” 18). She was, however, willing to permit continuation of the Charlie Chan film series, which had taken on a life of its own. In 1944, Sidney Toler, who had inherited the role of Charlie Chan following the death of Warner Oland in 1938, purchased the film rights to Charlie Chan from Eleanor Biggers, finally severing the last link between the literary and cinematic Chans. Toler would make 11 Chan films for Monogram, and then, following Toler’s death in 1947, Roland Winters would play Chan in a final series of films, from 1947 to 1949. 163

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A stage version of the final Charlie Chan novel, The Keeper of the Keys (the only Biggers title not adapted for the movies), was being prepared by Valentine Davies at the time of Biggers’s death; it opened on Broadway on 18 October 1933, and ran for just 23 performances. Soon after his death, Bobbs-Merrill published a collection of ten of Biggers’s non–Chan stories published in The Saturday Evening Post between 1921 and 1928 (Earl Derr Biggers Tells Ten Stories, 1933); Biggers set none of his novels or plays in the midwest, but three of the short stories are set in Mayfield, Indiana, presumably a version of Warren, Ohio.16 Eleanor Biggers’s observation that Biggers had invested his own characteristics and philosophy of life seems largely accurate. It even extends to Charlie Chan’s plump form: Biggers was, according to friends, “short, round, and dark” (Gregorich, “Earl”). And if, on the one hand, assigning one’s own philosophy to an oriental is, if one is an occidental, a form of cultural imperialism that today many would find offensive, Biggers’s closeness to his creation reflects favorably upon him. It suggests — and nothing we know about him contradicts the suggestion — that he was a decent man, with a genial temperament, modesty, a sense of humor, a devotion to family, a tolerance of other cultures, and a sharp intelligence. He seems to have been a genuinely nice man. His obituary in Variety concludes: “Although he specialized in detective and mystery stories, his friends knew him as a humorist, only occasional flashes of which got over into his books” (11 April 1933).

Willard Wright (S.S. Van Dine) Willard Wright always wanted to be celebrated. In his first bid for celebrity as a highbrow critic of the arts, he managed, after a decade of unrewarding work, to gain something of a reputation as an intellectual (and, as well, something of a reputation as a cad) among the cognoscenti; in his second bid, as S.S. Van Dine, author of detective novels, he enjoyed a decade of very rewarding fame, appealing to a very broad audience. But in his final years it was already evident that most of the fame and most of the rewards were ephemeral. S.S. Van Dine sank to footnote status in the history of the detective story genre, and Willard Wright the aesthetician 164

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was little remembered. But in 1992, John Loughery’s biography, Alias S.S. Van Dine, recovered something of the heroism of Willard Wright and the importance of S.S. Van Dine. Willard Wright was an accidental Southerner. His parents, Archibald Davenport Wright and Annie Van Vranken, were from upstate New York and married in New York City in 1884. Archibald Wright was something of an itinerant hotelier, taking his wife and family to a succession of establishments in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Charlottesville, Virginia; Lynchburg, Virginia; and finally, in 1900, selling his Virginia hotel at a loss to the Arcadia Hotel in Santa Monica, California (pop. 3,000). Willard and his brother Stanton were born in Charlottesville, Willard on October 15, 1887, and Stanton nearly three years later. Willard Wright thus spent most of his first 12 years in the South, but with his New York parents and his upbringing in a hotel milieu, he can hardly be said to have experienced a Southern childhood in any sense that would recognized by William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, or Erskine Caldwell. It was perhaps his Californian adolescence (1900–1905), 30 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, that defined him; it would be from southern California, not the Midwest or the South, that he would be escaping when he joined Biggers at Harvard in 1906. In his apologia pro vita sua, I Used to Be a Highbrow, but Look at Me Now, Wright claimed to have attended “seven different colleges here and abroad” (2). Like most of Wright’s autobiographical claims, there is some interesting truth and some characteristic exaggeration. Wright did matriculate at St. Vincent’s College (now Loyola Marymount University), near his home. He then attended “one term at the University of Southern California, several weeks at Syracuse University, and one year at Pomona” (Loughery, 43). His fifth and (so far as can be verified) final college was Harvard University, which he attended as a special student in 1906–07, Earl Derr Biggers’s senior year. He was allowed to register into only two classes, one of which was Copeland’s English 12; the other was Barrett Wendell’s “The History and Development of English Literature.” Biggers apparently enrolled in English 12 either in his junior (1905–1906) or senior (1906–1907) year, so there is a decent chance that the creators of Charlie Chan and Philo Vance suffered Copeland’s encouragements and disparagements at the same time. Wright would earn an “A” in Copeland’s 165

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class, and he never mentions Copey snoring at any of his readings, but he failed to impress Prof. Wendell; indeed, Prof. Wendell purged him from the class, and, in spring 1907, Harvard purged him from its rolls. Yet Wright had made more of an impression on Harvard in less than one year than Biggers had in four. Wright would be remembered by the poet Wheelwright (Harvard ’08), would be helped in France by the stage designer Lee Simonson (’08), and would published by Maxwell Perkins (’07). Simonson, who took no notice at all of Earl Derr Biggers, numbered Wright among his most memorable classmates: “Willard Huntington Wright (later S. S. Van Dine), who drifted in for a term as a special student, wrote consciously fleshy Swinburnian verse, and was the picture of a romantic poet with his blond hair brushed back off a high forehead and his alabaster neck in a Byronic collar” (10). “Consciously”: Wright, who throughout his life made such a dramatic impression — dramatically favorable and dramatically unfavorable — on his lovers, his colleagues, his employers, his readers — seems always to have made a deliberate impression. Like Biggers, Wright eagerly exploited the opportunities for publication that Harvard offered its undergraduates, but where Biggers was drawn to the Advocate and the Lampoon, Wright wrote for the Monthly. The Monthly, founded by Georges Santayana and his friends in 1885, was the more aesthetic venue; poets gravitated to the Monthly; short-story writers to the Advocate. Wright also exploited the opportunities for pleasure that Cambridge and Boston offered to Harvard men, and if the autobiographicality of his autobiographical novel, A Man of Promise, can be trusted, he may have had an intense affair with a young woman. (Presumably this would be the seed of Wheelock’s memory of Wright’s having married a chorus girl while at Harvard. Wheelock might be mistaking the fiction for fact, or remembering accurately a fabrication which Wright made at the time. Or he might be remembering accurately an actual affair with a chorus girl.) In any event, in spring 1907, Wright’s experiments in formal higher education were over. On his return across the continent, Wright paused to visit relatives in upstate New York and then detoured to the Pacific northwest with a family friend. There he learned that his 16-year-old brother was getting married, and, with his new wife and new and well-to-do mother-in-law, would soon be setting off to study art in the ateliers of Paris. Willard had 166

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just met a self-reliant young woman, Katherine Belle Boynton, in Seattle, and, having known her for only two weeks, married her on 13 July 1907. Paris, however, was not an option for them. The couple, with no resources, celebrated the trip down to Wright’s parents in Santa Monica as their honeymoon. Where Biggers, in his late 20s, waited until his first novel had been accepted for publication before proposing marriage to a woman he had met several years earlier, the 19-year-old Wright did not hesitate to leap into a commitment that, for most of the rest of his life, he would regard as an insufferable burden. Back in Santa Monica, Wright and his new bride lived with Wright’s parents. Katherine got a job as a secretary. Willard attempted, without much success, to sell real estate. In January 1908, he borrowed $2,500 from his father and joined two partners in founding the Cheer-ee Beverage Company. He escaped from the enterprise, losing only his investment, shortly before Cheer-ee declared bankruptcy in the summer of 1908. Taking advantage of family connections, Wright then secured a position as a ticket-taker on a commuter rail line. Neither the real estate venture, the Cheer-ee experiment, nor the ticket-taking ever made it into Wright’s selfportraits. Where Hammett may well have exaggerated the number of his proletarian experiences, Wright utterly erased his. In October 1908, Wright’s life finally took its decisive turn: he was hired as a probationary reporter/reviewer for the Los Angeles Times. It was also in October 1908 that his daughter, Beverly, was born. At 21, Wright was a father.17 The Los Angeles Times had a circulation of 52,000 (76,000 on Sundays) in 1908, providing a wide-reaching forum for the precocious 21year-old Wright to air his opinions (as a book reviewer) and to exercise his reportorial skills (covering bullfights in Tijuana and gamblers in Los Angeles). He was soon promoted to literary editor, and over the course of the next four years, he conscientiously polished an image of himself as the Mencken of the West Coast. In May 1909, Wright seized the opportunity to review a book by the Mencken of the East Coast (The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, H.L.’s second book), and his unsurprisingly favorable comments led to a correspondence in which the sage of Baltimore and the would-be sage of Los Angeles correlated their distress at the low character of American culture. Wright seized upon the need to meet with the Times’s advertising and 167

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circulation agents on the East Coast to make three trips across the country; he was assiduous in cultivating contacts among the avant garde (publishers Mitchell Kennerley and Ben Huebsch, poets Bliss Carmen and George Viereck, critics James Hunecker and Percival Pollard). And on the first trip, in October 1909, he made a pilgrimage to Mencken’s house on Hollis Street in Baltimore. The two iconoclasts (Mencken aged 29; Wright aged 22) had, Wright wrote to his wife, “a corking good time” (Loughery, 62) When Percival Pollard died in December 1911, Wright was invited to take over Pollard’s column in New York’s Town Topics. Though only 42 at the time of his death, Pollard had become a noteworthy culture critic whose challenges to the pieties of bourgeois literature, especially drama, had inspired a coterie of admirers. Mencken would acknowledge Pollard as a primary influence on his own anti-booboisie jeremiads. The invitation to replace Pollard and to mail a monthly column on the arts to New York was, then, a considerable compliment to the 24-year-old Wright. It enabled him to patronize the young Robinson Jeffers, encouraging the poet, reviewing his first volume, and, as Jeffers wrote to his wife, “logrolling for me with the eastern reviews” (Selected Letters, 10–11). While Biggers was experiencing the vicissitudes of his journey from Boston and popular journalism/popular fiction toward New York and popular drama/popular fiction, Willard Wright was making a leap from Los Angeles and Menckenian journalism to New York and Menckenian journalism. The Smart Set had been founded in 1900 as a magazine of fiction and verse, with some criticism. It proved to be popular, rising to a circulation of 165,000 in 1905. Mencken first appeared in its pages in November 1908, disparaging Henry James, but offering kind words for Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase. The circulation declined to 80,000, and in 1911, the magazine was sold to John Adams Thayer, who consulted Mencken regarding the selection of an editor who might revive the prospects. Mencken suggested Wright, and in October 1912, with the end of his contract with the Los Angeles Times, Wright was free to accept Thayer’s offer. He left his wife and his three-year-old daughter behind in Los Angeles, and moved to New York City in January 1913. Wright spent his first months in New York in what Mencken called “a somewhat bawdy bachelor apartment in 45th Street” (My Life, 205). Mencken found him 168

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to be “an extremely amusing fellow and full of ambitious writing plans” (205). Wright’s year-long tenure as editor of The Smart Set was a controversial one, and the reports of those who recalled his tenure appear to have been colored by the impact of those controversies (and of later controversies as well). Mencken, who by 1918 believed he was justified in despising Wright, naturally down-played Wright’s achievements. Burton Rascoe, who was troubled by Mencken’s refusal to cooperate with a history of The Smart Set, compensated by highlighting Wright’s contributions. It is certain that Wright aimed, with some success, at a high literary tone, soliciting works by writers such as Pound, Conrad, Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and Ford Madox Ford. It is also clear that Wright sought to be provocative in less high-minded ways, disturbing his publisher by printing what Thayer regarded as mere pornography. By autumn, Thayer was looking for an excuse to fire Wright, and Wright obliged in November by billing the cost of a dummy issue of a new arts journal he was hoping to inaugurate to The Smart Set account. After some negotiations with Thayer, mediated by Mencken, who was still sympathetic to Wright’s intentions (though irritated by Wright’s inflexibility), Wright agreed to terminate his editorship prematurely with the December issue. He received, according to Mencken, who mediated the settlement, a severance of six-months salary. One of Thayer’s objections to Wright concerned a trip to Europe, which Wright had persuaded Thayer to finance. The ostensible purpose was for Wright to solicit manuscripts from the European avant garde, and he did make a useful connection with Ezra Pound in London. But the rest of the five week trip was less productive for The Smart Set, though fruitful for Wright himself. He visited Berlin, Vienna, Munich, and Paris, gathering impressions which he would present in his first book (he would write the Vienna chapter and most of the London chapter in Europe After 8:15, with Mencken accounting for Munich and parts of London and George Jean Nathan covering Berlin and Paris). In Munich, Wright attended an exhibition of paintings by his brother and Morgan Russell. Russell was another American who had sought instruction in Paris. The two young men had recognized a common interest in a new theory of color, and had proposed themselves as the vanguard of synchromism, the movement which, they believed, would succeed impressionism. Though there have 169

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been upward reassessments of their originality and their impact, the two synchromists did not, after all, possess the key to the future of European art. But their polemics did impress Willard, who, back in New York in April 1913, had dismissed the Armory Show. Now, in Munich in June, Willard took the promotion of his brother’s revolutionary aesthetic as a mission. He would publish a long article entitled “From Impressionism to Synchromism” in Forum. In fact, though it was published under Willard’s name, it was, by some accounts, Stanton who supplied the 9,000 words. But the seriousness with which Willard now approached aesthetics is undeniable, and while his brother’s influence would continue to be great, the succession of books and articles on matters of art, especially painting, that Willard would produce over the next 12 years, reflected his own increasing command of the field. In September 1913, Wright’s father, Archibald, had died; in his will, he had made a point of leaving his estate to his widow, not his sons, a point which the sons did not miss and did resent. Following the funeral, Wright returned — without wife and daughter — to bring his editorship of Smart Set to its unnatural end. He then briefly ( January–March 1914) took over Franklin P. Adams’s column in the New York Mail, “Always in Good Humor.” (Adams was moving to the Tribune, where he would, in January 1914, record his walk up Broadway with Earl Derr Biggers, author of Seven Keys to Baldpate.) Wright was living with his brother, who had returned from France to show his paintings in New York. It was at this time that Wright met the actress Claire Burke, who would, despite being married, spend the next decade often sharing Wright’s bed and, it seems, often subsidizing Wright’s board. During this period, late 1913 to early 1914, while Willard was living with Stanton in New York, both brothers apparently began the drug habits that would trouble Stanton until 1919 and Willard for the rest of his life. Exactly what drugs Willard was consuming at any given time is, naturally enough, not clear, but it appears that morphine, opium, cocaine, marijuana, and hashish were, at various times included in his pharmacopoeia. Wright would enter rehabilitation programs at various times and at various places (the first time in 1916, at Johns Hopkins, on the recommendation of Mencken.) Wright’s addictions may account, in part, for the trail of offended former allies like Nathan, Mencken, Dreiser, and George Ster170

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ling. Mencken was offended by several aspects of Wright’s character — his prevarications (“a monumental liar” [My Life as Author and Editor, 205]), his unrepaid loans, his general egoism (“heliogalalisme” [My Life as Author and Editor, 206]), but after Wright’s retreat from New York in 1917, he frequently explained his deep aversion to Wright by reference to his drug habits. Writing to George Sterling, 22 May 1919, Mencken hopes Wright “doesn’t use his hop-gun on your girl” ( Joshi, 2001); to Theodore Dreiser, 23 September 1920: “consider his state today — full of drugs, hopeless, jobless and living by petty graft” (Dreiser, Letters, 290). Drugs certainly contributed to the financial embarrassments that Wright suffered until 1926, when Philo Vance led to a reversal of fortune. In March 1914, Stanton and Willard (without either of their wives) returned to Europe. With a small subsidy from their mother, the brothers shared a room at 14, rue de Moulin de Beurre in Paris. Stanton continued his development as a painter, and Willard cultivated his taste. (Mencken reports spending a week in Paris with Wright and Claire Burke: “He and Claire were living on the Left Bank and subsisting (as he told me) mainly on some cheap carbohydrate on the order of tapioca” (My Life, 207). With the outbreak of World War I in August, the brothers moved to London, where Willard continued to work upon his major treatise, Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning, which argued that a movement toward an emphasis upon color and abstraction was inevitable and that Stanton’s synchromism was the fulfillment of this movement, and upon his semi-autobiographical novel, A Man of Promise, which featured a young man of taste and high ambition reduced to a life of mediocrity by the women in his life. The former would published in 1915, the latter in 1916. Both would receive some respectful reviews, and the treatise continues to be of interest to historians of American art. The war eventually compelled the brothers to return to the United States in 1915, and economy compelled them to share rooms in the Bronx. In March of the following year, Willard further established his credentials as an arbiter of modern art by organizing what has come to be seen as the sequel to the epochal Armory Show of 1913. If the Armory Show introduced America to the shocking new art of European painting — the art of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Picabia, et al., The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters made the argument that native tal171

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ent was also smashing idols. Wright included 17 avant garde artists, many of whom history has admitted as significant American painters: Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Man Ray, Thomas Hart Benton, and, of course, the synchromists, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald Wright. Each of the artists contributed a statement of aesthetic principles, and the record indicates that Willard Wright edited these statements, sometimes to a considerable extent, and sometimes without permission. The book and the exhibition, along with his art reviews in Forum and International Studio, made Willard an important figure on the New York art scene at a moment when New York was beginning to supplant Paris as the necessary place in modern art. He had attempted to expand his cultural influence by also publishing in 1915 a collection of writings from Nietzsche. What Nietzsche Taught was not the first attempt to popularize the radical thoughts of the German philosopher in America, but it was an early one, and a creditable one. In 1916 he made a further claim to the attention of advanced intellects. The Creative Will: Studies in the Philosophy and Syntax of Aesthetics used the Nietzschean device of an aphoristic style to lay out a Wrightian view of art. Its lasting influence seems to have been negligible, but at the time it struck artists of the caliber of Georgia O’Keeffe and William Faulkner as presenting an exciting and encouraging view of the artist’s role. Willard, at the age of 30, had made himself a noted advocate of the avant garde. But advocacy of the avant garde is not the most remunerative of advocacies. Early in 1917, despairing of success in New York, Stanton MacDonald Wright retreated to Los Angeles, where, with few compromises, he would spend the rest of his long life (he died in 1970) developing his own artistic style, procuring commissions, and teaching master classes. Willard would not follow his brother until the end of the year, by which time his circumstances would be more desperate. He spent the first part of 1917 kicking against the pricks by scribbling a small screed against the unsurprising Anglophilia of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Misinforming a Nation), followed by another pamphlet promoting the even-handedness of the American New International Encyclopedia (Informing a Nation). He also edited a volume of French short stories. But he was paying his rent with a culture column in the New York Evening Mail, a position which Mencken had helped him to. 172

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Wright, in deploring the hegemony of English culture in America, had compensated by overvaluing the contributions of Germany to civilization, and he was, like Mencken, outraged when in April 1917, America declared itself on the side of Britain and France against the Central Powers. Willard Wright, aged 29, also had a wife and daughter, but they were living in California (and supported by Katherine’s income and some assistance from Wright’s mother), while he was in New York. In some agitation, he wrote his wife to remind her that, if anyone asked, he was, indeed, their sole support, and he began to look for friendly doctors who would support his fall-back position that he was medically unfit for service. (In the event, the military did not challenge his medical claim.) Wright believed that a secretary whom he had hired to take dictation was surreptitiously seeking evidence of his being in the pay of imperial Germany, and to expose her, he manufactured some seemingly incriminating papers. His plan worked only too well. The secretary seized the papers; Wright seized the secretary as she attempted to call the Secret Service; and the Secret Service seized Wright. The misapprehensions were quickly sorted out, but not quickly enough to prelude charges in the jingoistic press. The Mail quickly fired its literary editor, and with no resources left, Wright returned to California in December and moved into the impoverished household which his wife had been maintaining for their nine-year-old daughter, largely on her own earnings as an office worker. Wright attempted to resume working at the Los Angeles Times, but in April 1918, he collapsed and was checked into the Sierra Madre Sanitarium, evidently for drug detoxification. Upon his release that summer, he attempted to make a new start with Katherine. Leaving their daughter with his mother, he and Katherine moved to San Francisco and in January 1919, Wright began writing a weekly column of art reviews and social commentary for the San Francisco Bulletin. In February 1920, Wright made a final effort to arouse interest of America’s moneyed classes in supporting American art. He and Stanton organized “Exhibition of Paintings by American Modernists” in Los Angeles in the hope that the West Coast would embrace the new wave of painters (all of the Forum artists, plus Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, and others) whom the East Coast had disdained. Only one painting sold (a second was sold when the exhibition traveled to San Francisco), and Wright’s 173

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career as an impresario, prescient as it had been, was over. He would make one more statement —The Future of Painting— published in 1923, but that would mark the end of Willard Huntington Wright’s turbulent decade as a culture critic in America. When Earl Derr Biggers moved to Pasadena in 1920 to pursue his fortunes in Hollywood, he declared his relief at escaping the contentions of the Broadway theatre, but he may also have felt that the move from writing for the world of the stage, with its traditions, to writing for the brave new world of cinema was something of a descent. Willard Wright certainly felt the descent as he too haunted Hollywood, looking for employment. “In the first half of 1920 Willard became something of a classic hanger-on in the studio world, scrounging about for any kind of job, gabbing about script ideas, and trying to meet people who could introduce him to the producers and directors who counted” (Loughery, 152). Even after he returned to New York in May 1920, Wright continued to try to promote himself as a screenwriter and as a movie critic, never with enough success to assure him of a living. He supported himself through various arrangements: reviewing plays and movies, securing a major loan with the promise of proceeds from his publications, accepting gifts from his intermittent mistress, Claire Burke. He lived in Greenwich Village for 14 months, then eluded his creditors by moving into a room in the Belleclaire Hotel on the corner of Broadway and 77th Street. He suffered health problems — colitis, pneumonia, dental abscesses — and had not conquered his addictions. Despite the 1923 publication of his The Future of Painting, he was a forgotten man. When, in his June 1926 survey of men of letters (“The All-Star Literary Vaudeville”), Edmund Wilson came to literary criticism, he dismissed Willard Huntington Wright as one who “some years ago, gave the impression of being someone important” (Wilson, 237). It was at this point that Willard Huntington Wright gave birth to S.S. Van Dine. He would set down his version of the moment in I Used to Be a Highbrow, but Look at Me Now: in early 1923, having exhausted himself in an effort to wring lilies from acorns in the American wilderness, “I jumped out of bed and my knees gave way” (4). Suffering from “nervous prostration,” his “medico,” Dr. Jacob Munter Lobsenz, forbade him all reading and writing. After a month of hearing Wright plead for his bedside copy of Taine’s Philosophie de l’Art, Lobsenz yielded so far as 174

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to permit him “light fiction.” “I detested light fiction,” Wright reports, but with no alternative, he spent two years of recovery reading nothing but. By late summer 1925, he had recovered enough to begin pleading for permission to write. Once again, he and Dr. Lobsenz reached a compromise: as of 1 January 1926, Wright would be permitted to write “light fiction.” Between September and December 1925, Wright constructed the plots of three detective stories and then elaborated these into three 30,000word synopses. These he took to his Harvard classmate, Maxwell Perkins, who was, at the time, editing Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Lardner for the house of Charles Scribner and Sons. Perkins said yes, and The Benson Murder Case was published in October, and was “an immediate success” (“in sordid commercial terms,” Wright quickly added). This account errs in its slight exaggerations but mainly in its omissions. Wright had, Loughery has discovered, begun to think of making a living by writing popular fiction in the spring 1924. Dr. Lobsenz was a friend and an obstetrician, who may have helped Wright deal with his addictions during this period (the addictions are a major, though understandable omission). He may well have suggested that Wright look at detective fiction. Wright first submitted his synopses to the firm of Boni and Liveright, which had published his collection of French short stories in 1917. Liveright’s rejection led him to call upon his “classmate.” Wright did not exaggerate the success of The Benson Murder Case. And The “Canary” Murder Case, serialized in Scribner’s Magazine (the first detective story to receive that distinction) and published in book form in July 1927, surpassed its predecessor. Paramount secured film rights, and released The “Canary” Murder Case, starring William Powell (who would later play Nick Charles in the Thin Man series) in February 1929, followed rapidly by The Greene Murder Case (also 1929) and The Benson Murder Case (1930). Philo Vance was a phenomenon, and Willard Wright’s life as an impecunious highbrow was over. I Used to Be a Highbrow, but Look at Me Now was written in the summer of 1928 and published in The American Magazine in September, before being issued as a booklet by Scribner’s in 1929. (The second and third Philo Vance novels had been serialized in Scribner’s Magazine; the fourth, The Bishop Murder Case, would begin serialization in The American Magazine in October 1928.) The “highbrow” portion was a three-page resume of 175

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Wright’s first 40 years, from the age of four, when a poem of his was published in his home newspaper, to the strenuous days in Munich, Paris, London, and New York, when he wrote nine books “on a variety of cultural subjects” (3; Wright could not be too specific as, in 1928, he was still not admitting that S.S. Van Dine was Willard Huntington Wright). The “Look at Me Now” was Wright’s uneasy celebration of his “sordid” success. He devotes pages to enumerating the astonishing popularity of his detective stories — how quickly the printings sold out; how quickly and how far the novels rose on the bestseller lists and how long they remained there; how the youth of the nation have embraced Philo Vance, but also how presidential nominees and Oxford dons have preferred him. I Used to Be a Highbrow, but Look at Me Now ends with the observation, “I doubt if any one writer has more than six good detective-novel ideas in his system,” and he then, unwisely, committed himself: “At any rate, I shall draw the line at that number” (28). In a July 1929 “Post Scriptum” he is even more emphatic: The Bishop Murder Case is outselling its three predecessors, “but, whatever the circumstances, I am positively not going to write but two more detective novels” (29). Then he will resume the unrewarding (but unsordid) life of the highbrow: “I shall again tread that long, weary path to personal fulfillment, which has no end but which leads ever upward to the stars, for only in an effort to achieve that which is beyond all human achievement does the restless spirit of man find solace. The bitterest of all disillusions are the realities we have managed to grasp” (29). Bitter perhaps, but remunerative certainly. The fifth Vance case, The Scarab Murder Case (1930), was also lucrative. Wright put off writing the sixth (and presumably final) case, not to prematurely resume treading “that long, weary path,” but rather to collect even more money from Hollywood. If Wright’s 1920 attempt to sell himself to the movies had been a disappointment, his return in 1928 to observe Paramount’s filming of The “Canary” Murder Case had given him great pleasure. The studio had gratified him with “a suite at the Ambassador, a Packard and a chauffeur ... and long lavish dinners at the Monmartre” (Loughery, 206). In 1930 he returned in a calculated (and successful) attempt to extract nearly $60,000 Depression dollars from Warner Brothers. Wright composed the screenplays for 12 Vitaphone shorts (The S.S. Van Dine Mystery Series), which 176

Willard Wright (S.S. Van Dine)

were released in 1931–32, and one full script for The Blue Moon Murders, which Warner Brothers eventually filmed in 1933 as Girl Missing. Philo Vance did not figure in any of the stories: the Warner Brothers scripts were to the Vance novels what the Vance novels were to The Creative Will and The Future of Painting. The sixth Philo Vance novel, The Kennel Murder Case, was published in 1933. By that time, Wright had divorced his wife (24 October 1930) and married a young artist, Claire de Lisle (27 October 1930). The Depression had begun, but Philo Vance had granted Wright immunity. He maintained an enviable lifestyle: a penthouse on Central Park West, a kennel in New Jersey, where he raised prize-winning terriers (the inspiration for the kennel case), aquariums (86 of them) full of exotic tropical fish (inspiring the seventh Philo Vance case), funds to gamble with at casinos and the racetrack (the eighth and ninth cases), and vast quantities of cognac. Having grasped these “realities,” Wright found he could not let them go. He signed more movie deals (the shape of the final two Philo Vance novels were, to a humiliating degree, dictated by the demands of Hollywood); he appeared in advertisements for General Electric Radios and Hiram Walker gin. He was no longer prepared to “tread that long, weary path to personal fulfillment.” He wrote a seventh Philo Vance novel, and an eighth, and.... In February 1939, as he was finishing work on the 30,000-word synopsis of the 12th Philo Vance novel, The Winter Murder Case, Wright suffered a heart attack. He returned to his penthouse, where he remained bedridden until his death on 11 April 1939. Wright’s body, like Biggers’s six years and five days earlier, was cremated. His obituary filled two columns of The New York Times (filled it with the accumulation of slight misrepresentations which he had been promulgating for more than a decade). Willard Wright seems to have been a brilliant and courageous and disagreeable man. He seems to have been a liar pretty much throughout his life. He may have been self-indulgent, using drugs and women in his impoverished Wright years as well as in his affluent Van Dine years. He may have been a racist (Loughery, p. 183, reports an ugly incident in which he shouts epithets at the black waiters at a New Jersey resort). But Willard Wright was intelligent and passionate; he thought critically and he lived intensely. Between 1910 and 1923, he was a strong voice for a modernism 177

Appendix A

in the arts, especially painting. And if, in the end, he sold out for an endless sequence of butler-filled snifters of fine brandy, he knew he had sold out. If, by one measure, he was a man of no integrity at all, who would lie, and plagiarize, and philander, and defraud creditors (including friends without great resources), he was also a man who cared about art and about America. He cared enough to advocate his views (with vehemence in his polemics) and to efficiently organize his exhibitions. He cared, and he was right; at least, he was on the side of history. The artists that he championed — Russell, Hartley, Benson, Demuth, Man Ray, Marin, Stieglitz, O’Keefe, and of course, his brother, Stanton — are artists who have since come to be seen as among the men and women who moved the center of western art from Paris to New York.

Dashiell Hammett The life of Dashiell Hammett has been well-documented. There have been three full-length biographies by William Nolan, Richard Layman, and Diane Johnson, and, following the death of Lillian Hellman, a richly detailed dual biography of Hellman and Hammett by Joan Mellen. A thick volume of Hammett’s letters has been published, and his surviving daughter has recorded her memoir. Hammett has also entered popular culture as a character in fiction (Hammett, by Joe Gores) and in film (Hammett, 1982, Frederic Forrest as Hammett; Julia, 1978, Jason Robards as Hammett), and on television (Dash and Lilly, 1999, Sam Shepard as Hammett; Citizen Cohn, 1992, Frederic Forrest as Hammett). The Hammetts, unlike the Wrights, were genuine Southerners, having farmed and kept shop in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, since the early 18th century (and by some accounts, since 1630). Samuel Dashiell Hammett, the son of Richard and Annie Bond Hammett, was born in his grandfather’s farmhouse on 27 May 1894. Richard Hammett was, despite his hearty manner, an inadequate provider for the family. His aspirations to political influence in his county having been frustrated, he moved his family first to Philadelphia (1900), and then to Baltimore (1901), where the family, including Hammett’s older brother and younger sister, lived in middle-class (or near-middle-class) comfort. Hammett grew up in an 178

Dashiell Hammett

urban world, and while he would not ever return to live in Baltimore once he left, his departure would be more a rejection of his family than of his region. Hammett attended the Baltimore public schools (Public School No. 72). He read extensively, using the West Lexington Library, a branch of the Pratt Library. In September 1908, as Biggers and Wright were beginning their post–Harvard apprenticeships in journalism in Boston and Los Angeles, Hammett, aged 14, was entering Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, the only high school in Baltimore with the authority to grant college credit to its graduates. He performed moderately well in the fall semester, but his father’s illness led to his withdrawal — Hammett was obliged to assume some responsibility for the family business (which seems to have involved peddling seafood door-to-door in Baltimore neighborhoods). The business collapsed in summer 1909. From 1909 until joining the Pinkerton organization in 1915, Hammett held a series of jobs, none of them with any enthusiasm: “I became the unsatisfactory and unsatisfied employee of various railroads, stock brokers, machine manufacturers, canners, and the like. Usually I was fired” (Selected Letters, 27). William F. Nolan itemizes the variety of his employments: “a freight clerk, a stevedore, a time-keeper in a machine shop, a yardman, a cannery worker, a junior clerk in an advertising agency, and as a nail-machine operator in a box factory” (6). If the Pinkerton Detective Agency was, as its founder intended it to be, an organization of professionals, these teenage occupations were the sum of Hammett’s genuinely proletarian experience. In 1915, Hammett entered the occupation that would define him. He joined the Baltimore office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, where he learned the trade from an assistant manager, James Wright (who has often been identified as a model for Hammett’s Continental Op). An important Pinkerton experience occurred in the summer of 1917 when the 23-year-old Hammett was sent to Butte, Montana, to defend the interests of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company against the striking Butte Miners Union. Hammett claimed that an officer of Anaconda Copper offered him $5,000 to kill a union organizer, Frank Little (Nolan, 14). Hammett declined the offer, but Frank Little would shortly thereafter be murdered by vigilantes, and the entire episode may have been decisive in 179

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turning Hammett’s sympathies strongly against the capitalists and in favor of the working class. 1917 was also rendered memorable by another incident. “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” which Hammett published in The Smart Set in 1923, narrates 29 anecdotes from Hammett’s career with the Pinkerton’s. Only one is dated: “In 1917, in Washington, D.C., I met a young woman who did not remark that my work must be very interesting” (87). Willard Wright had been frantic (and successful) in his effort to avoid military service during the First World War. On 24 June 1918, Dashiell Hammett volunteered, enlisting in the army. He was assigned to a Motor Ambulance Corps at Camp Meade, Maryland, but did not see service overseas. He left the army in April 1919 as a sergeant, having been in and out of the hospital with fever (possibly the Spanish influenza), acute bronchitis, and tuberculosis. He weighed 140 pounds, and received a disability pension. He returned to his family in Baltimore, and resumed working for the Pinkertons. A year later, in May 1920, he moved to Spokane, Washington, in order to take up a Pinkerton assignment covering a western territory that took him as far as California and Arizona. His health deteriorated, and by November, his tubercular lungs led to his admission to Cushman Hospital in Tacoma, Washington. He was transferred to a hospital at Camp Kearny near San Diego, California, in February 1921. Released in May, he lived briefly in Seattle, then, in June, moved to San Francisco. Hammett would suffer from lung disorders for the rest of his life. He would be hospitalized again in October 1923. While at Cushman Hospital in Tacoma, he met a nurse, Josephine Dolan, whom he would marry on 7 July 1921. Their daughter, Mary Jane, would be born October 15, 1921. Lillian Hellman (and others) were persuaded that Mary was not biologically Hammett’s daughter. It is certain that Hammett consistently treated her as his daughter throughout her troubled life. In December 1921, Hammett formally ended his career as a Pinkerton detective. His income came solely from an army disability (100 percent) income of $80 a month. In February 1922, he began a course of study at Munson’s Business College in San Francisco, originally intending to become a newspaper reporter, but then shifting his focus to advertising. He would complete his studies in May 1923, but by that time, he 180

Dashiell Hammett

had already begun a career as a writer of popular fiction, devoting four hours a day to developing his craft. In October 1922, he published his first piece, a very brief short story, “The Parthian Shot,” in The Smart Set. It amounted to little more than a brief set-up to a punchline : Mrs. Key, dissatisfied with her marriage, revenges herself upon her dull husband by naming their son Donald (i.e. Don Key). Hammett would sell two more items to The Smart Set in 1923. Willard Wright had, in 1913, initiated The Smart Set’s run as an avant garde journal; Hammett, in his small way, was there at the end. In October 1923, Mencken and Nathan announced that, effective January 1924, they would be severing their connection with the magazine. The magazine would be sold to the Hearst Corporation in July 1924 and linger for six more years, printing increasingly inoffensive matter. In addition to the two Smart Set items, Hammett would record 17 other publications in 1923. Brief Stories took three items, and he made single sales to The New Pearson’s, Saucy Stories, and Action Stories, but his principal market was the pulp magazine Black Mask, which, between June and December, published seven of Hammett’s stories and three letters in which he commented upon his fiction and his life. Black Mask was a byblow of the Mencken and Nathan journalistic enterprise. To subsidize the advancement of their highbrow prize, Smart Set, they inaugurated a series of lowbrow cousins: Parisienne (1915), Saucy Stories (1916), and The Black Mask (1920). They did not hesitate to express the contempt in which they held these mercenary enterprises, and sold them as soon as they could profitably be sold. Black Mask debuted in April 1920 and was sold in November of the same year. There is, perhaps, an irony in the result that readers, critics, and scholars of all brows in the 21st century are paying considerably more attention to the hard-boiled culture of Black Mask than to the clever culture of Smart Set. Although, partly as a result of the enormous influence of Hammett’s Continental Op stories, Black Mask is best known for its detective fiction, it was initially open to other genres as well. Its first subtitle was “An Illustrated Magazine of Detective Mystery, Adventure, Romance, and Spiritualism.” George Sutton became the editor in October 1922; he introduced the two writers who would come to embody the house style: Hammett and Carrol John Daly. Daly, whose first stories appeared in 1922, wrote 181

Appendix A

what is generally recognized as the first hard-boiled detective story, “The False Burton Combs.” It appeared in the same December 1922 issue that saw Hammett’s first Black Mask detective story, “The Road Home.” Hammett’s watershed hard-boiled story, “Arson Plus,” appeared in October 1923. It introduced the Continental Op, and began Hammett’s reign as the very model of the Black Mask writer. The 1 January 1924 issue made a Continental Op tale the cover story. Daly would remain more popular with the readers, but Hammett would become the darling of editors and critics. In March 1926, Hammett published “Creeping Siamese,” his 27th story in Black Mask. He would not publish again in the magazine until the new editor, Joseph Thompson Shaw, wooed him back in February 1927. Instead, Hammett now attempted to exploit his tuition in advertising by becoming the advertising manager for Albert S. Samuels Jewelers in San Francisco at $350 a month. He began drinking again, and after six months suffered a major episode of hemorrhaging that returned him to the hospital. When he emerged, he resumed his advertising work on a part-time basis. A second daughter, Josephine, was born on 24 May 1926. Doctors advised Hammett’s wife to separate herself and their children from the tubercular Hammett. She moved for a time into a house in Fairfax, across the bay from San Francisco, and then, for about six months, took their daughters to visit her relatives in Montana. They then returned to San Francisco. Hammett would visit his family on weekends, but never returned to live with them. Joseph Shaw encouraged Hammett to test himself in longer narratives. Hammett thus reappeared in Black Mask with a pair of connected novella-length stories, “The Big Knock-Over” and “$106,000 Blood Money,” in February and March 1927. In November he produced “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” which would be the first of four installments of the novel that Alfred Knopf would publish as Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, in 1929. Although it would be his detective stories published in Black Mask that would constitute Hammett’s great achievement in this period, he also experimented with a number of different genres and different venues. LeRoy Panek has tabulated Hammett’s output between October 1922 and November 1927: Hammett published 66 stories (24 of them Continental Op stories) in 18 different periodicals (seven of the 18 182

Dashiell Hammett

being pulp magazines); he experimented with clever bits for Smart Set (6 items), sex stories (7), adventure stories (4), Westerns (2), criminal stories (5) and detective stories (2). He also published non-fiction discussions of the literary qualities of sex stories and of advertising and had reviewed mystery fiction for The Saturday Review of Literature from January to June 1926 (Panek, Reading Early Hammett, 5–22). With the publication of Red Harvest in 1929, Hammett made his claim to supremacy in American detective fiction. He was, already, the thin éminence grise in the world of Black Mask writers and readers; with the imprimatur of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (publisher of Conrad, Maugham, Lawrence, Gide, Mencken, Dreiser, and Cather), his five detective novels would impress his originality upon Hollywood producers and New York literati. As he wrote to Blanche Knopf in 1928, Hammett’s ambitions for his work in the genre were high: “I am one of the few — if there are any more — people who take the detective story seriously.... Some day somebody’s going to make ‘literature’ of it ... and I’m selfish enough to have my hopes” (Hammett, Letters, 47). His first four novels —Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), and The Glass Key (1931)— came in rapid succession, and were serialized in Black Mask prior to their publication by Knopf. Then there was a three-year pause before The Thin Man appeared in 1934, and it was not offered to Black Mask. The delay has several explanations. In part, Hammett may have exhausted his vein. The Thin Man, with its retired, married, and bibulous detective, Nick Charles, marked a definite shift from the hard-boiled, Black Mask milieu encountered by the Continental Op, Sam Spade, and Ned Beaumont. With only a couple of exceptions, such as the Ruritanian “This King Business” and the sagebrush “Corkscrew,” Hammett had set his detective stories in the sorts of realistic settings that a Pinkerton (or Continental) operative might actually encounter: the streets and homes of a cross-section of American urban society. The Thin Man shifts to penthouse urbanity. Nick and Nora Charles could not be mistaken for Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, but had their paths crossed Wimsey and Vane might happily have weekended with the Charleses; neither the Op, Spade, nor Beaumont would have had much to exchange with the English couple. Though he kept to the safety of the mystery genre, Hammett was clearly straining in a new direction. 183

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One factor pressing him in this new direction had entered Hammett’s life in November 1930, when he was introduced to Lillian Hellman. Hammett and Hellman soon became a couple famous for their collaborations (Hammett was especially influential in his contributions to the series of successful plays that Hellman would write in the 1930s and 1940s), their commitment — strained, but never broken — to each other, and their shared political activism. Both joined the Communist Party in the mid–1930s, and neither the turns of Soviet internal and foreign policies prior to Hitler’s invasion in 1941 nor the excesses of the anti–Communist witch-hunts of the late 1940s and the early 1950s in America shook either of them from their allegiance. When America entered the Second World War, Hammett — aged 47 and tubercular — enlisted in the army, and from September 1943 to April 1945, he served in an isolated army base in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. After the war ended, he resumed his activities in opposition to the capitalist economic system that prevailed in the nation he had been defending. It was a time when, in a spasm of reaction, the nation’s authorities mobilized to crush the opponents. Hammett was impoverished by an IRS judgment against him. He owed the government well over $100,000 in back taxes (“Hammett had considered taxes an annoyance since the 1930s,” writes the editor of his Letters [577]). He famously spent six months in prison for contempt of court after refusing to testify about a bail fund established to support men and women who had been convicted of conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government. His uncomplaining acceptance of the Communist’s Party’s occasional reversals of policy and of the American government’s energetic suppression of his subversive activities made him a hero to Hellman and to many others. A less heroic factor in Hammett’s failure to write anything of significance in the final 30 years of his life lay in the astonishing success of the work he did between 1927 and 1933. The popularity of his books, and even more, the popularity of the movies (and radio shows and comic books) derived from his writings, made Hammett — like Willard Wright — suddenly very rich. In 1930, at the beginning of the Depression, he had an income of $100,000; in 1934, he was occupying a $2,000-a-month penthouse in Hollywood (Mellen, 27, 75). Wright had lavished his windfall on excellent brandy, but also on art and dogs and tropical fish. Ham184

Dashiell Hammett

mett seems to have dedicated his to liquor and women. He was, like Wright, not always a pleasant drunk, and he seems to have been drunk a great deal. And he was, as Joan Mellen amply documents, very far from sexually faithful to Lillian Hellman (nor, Mellen also documents, was Hellman faithful to Hammett). In early 1931 an encounter with a young Hollywood ingénue, Elise De Lisle, led to a lawsuit in which De Lisle was awarded $2,500 by a Los Angeles court as compensation for having been “bruised and battered in resisting the asserted fervid love makings of Dashiell Hammett” (Mellen, 55). Hammett’s numerous other liaisons had no legal consequences, though they did at times stress his relationship with Hellman. Throughout, Hammett remained married to Josephine Dolan Hammett, and while his support of her was sometimes irregular, he remained in constant and affectionate contact with both of his daughters. As a father, at least, he surpassed Willard Wright. Drinking and promiscuity were choices; Hammett was also diverted from writing by repeated attacks of venereal disease and, as well, by recurrences of his tubercular condition. He had a heart attack in August 1955, and was increasingly an invalid. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in late 1960 and died soon afterward on 10 January 1961.

185

Appendix B: Mystery and Detection Bestsellers, 1925–1935 Defining the “bestseller” is an uncertain business, but a collation of three definitions may be helpful in recognizing the appeal of Earl Derr Biggers, S.S. Van Dine, and Dashiell Hammett in the second half of the 1920s. Perhaps the best attempt to identify American bestsellers lies in the research of Alice Payne Hackett, published in volumes beginning with Fifty Years of Best Sellers in 1945 and ending in 1977 with 80 Years of Best Sellers (with James Henry Burke). Hackett attempted to tabulate the total sales of each work of popular fiction and non-fiction. Her list of crime and mystery books to sell over 1 million copies by 1976 is dominated by names like Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, and Richard Prather. But Ellery Queen, that protean figure who began as a direct copy of S.S. Van Dine and Philo Vance can claim 12 titles. Only two of the Vance novels (Greene and Bishop) made her list, though she does note that the last mystery book to achieve bestseller status before The Greene Murder Case in 1928 was Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1910 The Window at the White Cat. None of Biggers’s or Hammett’s novels met her criterion. In Bestseller Index, Keith Justice measured popularity by tenure on the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list. Though the novels of Biggers, Wright, and Hammett do not appear as overwhelming favorites, they do appear. The Charlie Chan novels spent a total of 16 weeks on the bestseller list, the Philo Vance novels a total of 52 weeks, and Hammett’s detective novels a total of 12 weeks. Philo Vance’s dominance in his time is evident. 186

Mystery and Detection Bestsellers, 1925–1935

Scribner’s had reason to be grateful to Willard Wright during the early Depression years. In contrast, however, the novels of Mary Roberts Rinehart spent a total of 241 weeks on the bestseller list, and those of Agatha Christie 325 weeks. Rinehart and Christie, of course, had much longer careers and produced many more volumes of fiction. In Golden Multitudes, Frank Luther Mott defined a bestseller as a book whose sales amounted to at least 1 percent of the American population in a given decade (1,000,000 in the 1920s; 1,200,000 in the 1930s). By this standard, there were no mystery genre bestsellers between 1908 (Mary Robert Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase) and 1931 (Ellery Queen’s The Dutch Shoe Mystery). But Mott also compiled a list of “better sellers,” popular books that did not quite rise to the level of 1 percent. Three of the six Charlie Chan books qualified as better sellers (The Chinese Parrot, Behind That Curtain, and Charlie Chan Carries On), as did two of the 12 Philo Vance books (The Greene Murder Case and The Bishop Murder Case) and two of Hammett’s five novels, the Continental Op’s Red Harvest and Sam Spade’s The Maltese Falcon. Mott’s account gives reason for Bobbs-Merrill’s satisfaction with Biggers’s sales, and, as well, Knopf ’s happiness with Hammett. It should also be remembered that bestseller figures do not include the readership of the periodicals in which the stories originally appeared. This is especially important in the case of Charlie Chan, who was in every instance exposed to the wide circulation of The Saturday Evening Post, and of the Continental Op (and Sam Spade), whose adventures were first read by the distinctive audience of Black Mask. The murder cases of Philo Vance were serialized in Scribner’s Magazine (and later in American Magazine), but the emphasis was always on the books. As the table below suggests, the 1930s saw a new set of writers inherit — and expand — the genre’s claim on the bestseller list. Ellery Queen was the direct heir of S.S. Van Dine; Erle Stanley Gardner belonged to the Black Mask boys and was an avowed admirer of Hammett’s work. Agatha Christie (and, for a moment, Leslie Charteris) represents the return of the English tradition to broad popularity in America. Although Mr. Moto aimed at the same Saturday Evening Post audience that Charlie Chan had cultivated, Earl Derr Biggers would have no best-selling successors until the ethnic detective again asserted himself in the persons of Joe Leaphorn and Easy Rawlins in the late 20th century. 187

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Mystery and Detection Bestsellers, 1925–1935 1892

Conan Doyle

1908 1909 1910 1925 1926

Biggers

1927

Van Dine

1928

Van Dine

1929

Biggers Van Dine Biggers Hammett

1930

Biggers Hammett Van Dine

1931

Hammett

1932

1933

1934

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Mott: Bestseller) Rinehart The Circular Staircase (Mott: Bestseller; Hackett) Rinehart The Man in the Lower Ten (Hackett) Rinehart Window at the White Cat (Hackett) Rinehart The Red Lamp ( Justice: 8 weeks) The Chinese Parrot (Mott: Better Seller) Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Mott: Better Seller) Canary Murder Case (Mott: Better Seller) Rinehart Lost Ecstasy ( Justice: 16 weeks) The Greene Murder Case (Hackett: #4; Mott: Better Seller; Justice: 8 weeks) Behind That Curtain(Mott: Better Seller; Justice: 4 weeks) The Bishop Murder Case (Hackett: #4; Mott: Better Seller; Justice: 16 weeks) The Black Camel ( Justice: 8 weeks) Red Harvest (Mott: Better Seller) Rinehart This Strange Adventure ( Justice : 12 weeks) Charlie Chan Carries On (Mott: Better Seller) The Maltese Falcon(Mott: Better Seller) The Scarab Murder Case ( Justice: 8 weeks) Queen French Powder Mystery (Mott: Better Seller) Rinehart The Door ( Justice: 8 weeks) The Glass Key (Mott: Better Seller) Queen The Dutch Shoe Mystery (Mott: Bestseller) Charteris Enter the Saint (Mott: Better Seller) Queen The Eg yptian Cross Mystery (Mott: Bestseller) Christie Peril at End House (Mott: Better Seller) Gardner The Case of the Sulky Girl (Mott: Bestseller) Gardner The Case of the Velvet Claws (Mott: Better Seller) Gardner The Case of the Lucky Legs (Mott: Better Seller) Queen The Chinese Orange Mystery (Mott: Bestseller) Queen The Adventures of Ellery Queen (Mott: Better Seller) Gardner The Case of the Curious Bride (Mott: Bestseller)

188

Mystery and Detection Bestsellers, 1925–1935 1935

Gardner

The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (Mott: Bestseller) The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat (Mott: Better Seller) The Spanish Cape Mystery (Mott: Better Seller)

Gardner Queen

Frank Luther Mott’s Bestsellers, 1925–1935 For context, the following are the books purchased by at least 1 percent of Americans in the decade 1925–35. Biggers, Wright, and Hammett planted the seed unobserved between 1925 and 1930; Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner reaped the harvest. 1926 1926 1929 1929 1931 1931 1932 1933 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy Thorne Smith, Topper Lloyd C. Douglass, The Magnificent Obsession Robert L. Ripley, Believe It or Not Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth Ellery Queen, The Dutch Shoe Mystery Ellery Queen, The Eg yptian Cross Mystery Hervey Allen, Anthony Adverse Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Sulky Girl James Hilton, Lost Horizon Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Curious Bride Ellery Queen, The Chinese Orange Mystery Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Counterfeit Eye

189

Appendix C: Films Based on the Works of Earl Derr Biggers, S.S. Van Dine, and Dashiell Hammett This catalog of films based on the stories of Biggers, Wright, and Hammett in the 1920s and after may provide some sense of the extra-literary appeal of their work. It also notes a few curious overlaps, such as, for instance, William Powell playing Wright’s detective in five films and then playing one of Hammett’s detectives in six films, or Warren William playing the Sam Spade figure in the first remake of The Maltese Falcon, and then playing Philo Vance in one of the late Vance films. Films based on non–Chan, non–Vance, non–Op/Spade/Beaumont/ Charles novels by Biggers, Wright, and Hammett are included to provide additional context for the fiction/film nexus that all three writers worked within and profited from. The list is largely derived from information in Berlin, Hanke, Mitchell, Parish, and Tuska, supplemented by reference to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). 1917 Biggers

Seven Keys to Baldpate Artcraft Pictures Corp. George M. Cohan as Magee (An Australian film version of the Cohan theatrical version of Biggers’s novel had been made in 1916.) Remade five times: 1925, 1929, 1935, 1947, and 1983 (as House of the Long Shadows)

190

Films Based on the Works Biggers

The Gown of Destiny Triangle. Released 30 December 1917 Based on “Each According to His Gifts”

Biggers

The Blind Adventure Vitagraph. Released 7 January 1918 Based on The Agony Column. Remade twice: 1926, 1930 Inside the Lines Delcah Photoplays. Released 26 August 1918 Remade 1930

1918

Biggers 1919 Biggers

Love Insurance Famous Players–Lasky. Released 17 August 1919 Remade 1924 and 1940 as One Night in the Tropics 1940

Biggers

Her Face Value Realart. Released 13 October 1921 Fifty Candles Irvin V. Willat Prod. Released 11 December 1921

1921 Biggers 1922 Biggers

The Ruling Passion Distinctive Prod. Released 22 January 1922 Based on “Idle Hands.” Remade 1931 as The Millionaire and 1947 as That Way With Women

Biggers

The Reckless Age Universal. Released 17 August 1924 Remake of Love Insurance Trouping with Ellen Eastern. Released 5 October 1924

1924

Biggers 1925 Biggers

Seven Keys to Baldpate Paramount. Released 19 October 1925

1926 Biggers

Chan

The Man Upstairs Warner Brothers. Released 22 January 1926 Remake of The Agony Column The House Without a Key (Silent) 10 chapter, Pathé. 1 October–29 December 1926. All chapters were 2 reels, except the first, which was 3 reels. Charlie Chan (played by George Kuwa) appeared only briefly (less than three minutes) Shia Jung played “Young Chinese Girl” in her first film. Remade in 1933 as Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case

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Appendix C 1927 Chan

The Chinese Parrot (Silent) Universal. Released 23 October 1927. Kamiyama Sojin (a Japanese actor and magician) playing Charlie Chan Anna May Wong was credited as the “Nautch Dancer.” Remade in 1933 as Charlie Chan’s Courage

1928 Biggers 1929 Chan

Vance

Vance

1930 Vance

Vance Vance

Vance

The Op

Honeymoon Flats Universal. Released 1 April 1928

Behind That Curtain (Sound) Fox. Released 30 June 1929. E.L. Park as Chan (billed below Boris Karloff, who played a “Soudanese” servant) Remade in 1933 as Charlie Chan’s Chance The Canary Murder Case Paramount. Released 16 February 1929 William Powell as Vance. Also featuring Louise Brooks Filmed as a silent; then dubbed. The Greene Murder Case Paramount. Released 31 August 1929 William Powell as Vance Released as a silent and as a sound movie The Bishop Murder Case. Released 3 January 1930 MGM. Basil Rathbone as Vance Released as a silent and as a sound movie The Benson Murder Case Paramount. Released 12 April 1930 William Powell as Vance El Cuerpo del Delito Paramount Ramón Pereda as Vance. Spanish version of The Benson Murder Case, debuted in Buenos Aires Paramount on Parade Paramount. Released 26 April 1930 William Powell as Vance, Warner Oland as Fu Manchu. Biggers The Second Floor Mystery Warner Brothers. Released 26 April 1930 Remake of The Agony Column Biggers Inside the Lines RKO. Released 5 July 1930 Roadhouse Nights Paramount. Released 23 February 1930. Loosely based on Red Harvest; the protagonist is Charles

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Films Based on the Works Ruggles (played by Willie Bindbugel); the Continental Op does not appear. Jimmy Durante’s film debut (as “Daffy”) 1931 Chan

Chan

Chan

Spade

1932 Chan 1933 Chan

Vance

Charlie Chan Carries On Fox. Released 12 April 1931 Warner Oland as Chan. As early as 1919, Warner Oland had played a Chinese character, the villainous Wu Fang, in a Pearl White serial, The Lightning Raider. More recently, Oland had completed two films as Dr. Fu Manchu: The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Fu Manchu (1930). Eran Trece Fox. Released 4 December 1931 Manuel Arbo as Charlie Chan Spanish version of Charlie Chan Carries On The Black Camel Fox. Released 21 June 1931 Of the five Warner Oland movies based on Biggers’s novels, this is the only one with a surviving print. Bela Lugosi is featured as Tarneverro. Remade in 1933 as Charlie Chan in Rio The S.S. Van Dine Mysteries Warner Brothers. Released between September 1931 and August 1932 Willard Wright composed screenplays for 12 Vitaphone shorts (17–21 minute films). No Philo Vance The Maltese Falcon Warner Brothers. Released 13 June 1931 Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade (Alternate title: Dangerous Female) Biggers The Millionaire Warner Brothers. Released 1 May 1931 Remake of Idle Hands Hammett City Streets Paramount. Released 18 April 1931 Gary Cooper as “The Kid” Charlie Chan’s Chance Fox. Released 24 January 1932 Remake of Behind That Curtain Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case Fox. Released 15 September 1933 Lester Cole and Marion Orth Remake of The House Without a Key The Kennel Murder Case

193

Appendix C

[Chan

1934 Chan Chan

Vance

Nick Charles

Warner. Released November 1933 William Powell as Vance (later featured as Nick Charles in the Thin Man series). Mary Astor (later featured as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon) Remade in 1940 as Calling Philo Vance Wright Girl Missing First National (Warner subsidiary). Based on Wright’s screenplay, The Blue Moon Murder Case. The Keeper of the Keys, Biggers’s sixth and final Charlie Chan novel was never filmed, but a dramatization by Valentine Davies opened on Broadway on 18 October 1933 and ran for three weeks.] Charlie Chan’s Courage Fox. Released 6 July 1934 Remake of The Chinese Parrot Charlie Chan in London Fox. Released 12 September 1934 Story by Philip MacDonald; first screenplay not based on a Biggers novel. The Dragon Murder Case First National (a Warner subsidiary). Released 25 August 1934 Warren William as Vance (Williams would play Ted Sloane [Sam Spade] in the 1936 remake of The Maltese Falcon. He also played Perry Mason in four films, 1934–36) Directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, who would later direct a number of Charlie Chan films Biggers Take the Stand Liberty Pictures. Released 7 September 1934 The Thin Man MGM. Released 25 May 1934 William Powell (who played Philo Vance in 5 films) and Myrna Loy Hammett Woman in the Dark Select Pictures Corp. Released 9 November 1934

1935 Chan Chan Chan Vance

Charlie Chan in Paris Fox. Released 21 January 1935 Charlie Chan in Eg ypt Fox. Released 21 June 1935 Charlie Chan in Shanghai Fox. Released 14 October 1935 The Casino Murder Case MGM. Released 15 March 1935 Paul Lukas as Vance

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Films Based on the Works Hammett

Mr. Dynamite Universal. Released 22 April 1935

Ned The Glass Key Beaumont Paramount. Released 15 June 1935

Charlie Chan Films, 1936–1949 Warner Oland as Charlie Chan Charlie Charlie Charlie Charlie Charlie Charlie Charlie

Chan’s Secret (1936, 20th Century-Fox) Chan at the Circus (1936, 20th Century-Fox) Chan at the Race Track (1936, 20th Century-Fox) Chan at the Opera (1936, 20th Century-Fox) Chan at the Olympics (1937, 20th Century-Fox) Chan on Broadway (1937, 20th Century-Fox) Chan at Monte Carlo (1937, 20th Century-Fox)

Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938, 20th Century-Fox) Charlie Chan in Reno (1939, 20th Century-Fox) Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939, 20th Century-Fox) Charlie Chan in City in Darkness (1939, 20th Century-Fox) Charlie Chan in Panama (1940, 20th Century-Fox) Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise (1940, 20th Century-Fox) (= Charlie Chan Carries On) Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum (1940, 20th Century-Fox) Murder Over New York (1940, 20th Century-Fox) (= Behind That Curtain) Dead Men Tell (1941, 20th Century-Fox) Charlie Chan in Rio (1941, 20th Century-Fox) (= The Black Camel) Castle in the Desert (1942, 20th Century-Fox) Charlie Chan in the Secret Service (1944, Monogram) Charlie Chan in the Chinese Cat (1944, Monogram) Charlie Chan in Black Magic (1944, Monogram) The Jade Mask (1945, Monogram) The Scarlet Clue (1945, Monogram) The Shanghai Cobra (1945, Monogram) The Red Dragon (1945, Monogram) Dark Alibi (1946, Monogram) Dangerous Money (1946, Monogram) The Trap (1946, Monogram) Roland Winters as Charlie Chan The Chinese Ring (1947, Monogram) Docks of New Orleans (1948, Monogram) The Shanghai Chest (1948, Monogram) The Feathered Serpent (1948, Monogram) The Golden Eye (1948, Monogram) The Sky Dragon (1949, Monogram)

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Appendix C

Philo Vance Films, 1936–1947 The Garden Murder Case (1936, MGM), Edmund Lowe as Philo Vance The Scarab Murder Case (1937, British Paramount), Wilfrid Hyde-White as Philo Vance Night of Mystery (1937, Paramount), Grant Richards as Philo Vance The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939 Paramount), Warren William as Philo Vance Calling Philo Vance (1940, Warner Brothers), James Stephenson as Philo Vance Philo Vance’s Secret Mission (1947, Eagle Lion) William Wright as Philo Vance Philo Vance’s Gamble (1947, PRC), Alan Curtis as Philo Vance Philo Vance’s Return (1947, PRC) Alan Curtis as Philo Vance (The three 1947 films tried to turn Philo Vance into a hard-boiled dick.)

Dashiell Hammett’s Films, 1936–1947 Satan Met a Lady (1936, Warner Bros). Remake of The Maltese Falcon, with Warren William as Ted Shane (= Sam Spade) After the Thin Man (1936, MGM) Secret Agent X-9 (1937, Universal) Another Thin Man (1939, Loews) The Maltese Falcon (1941, Warner Bros) Humphrey Bogart The Shadow of the Thin Man (1941, MGM) The Glass Key (1942, Paramount) The Thin Man Goes Home (1945, MGM) The Song of the Thin Man (1947, MGM)

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Chapter Notes Chapter 1 1. Average Americans had been spending 60 percent of their income on necessities in 1900; by 1920 this had been reduced to 50 percent (Goldberg, 85), leaving a disposable income for comforts and luxuries. Even the necessities were being acquired in a new way: in 1910, 70 percent of American families were eating homebaked bread; in 1924, 70 percent were purchasing their bread from stores. And the character of the stores from which they were making their purchases was changing as well. In 1920, chain stores such as Woolworths and A & P commanded just 4 percent of the retail trade; by 1929, this had quintupled to 20 percent. And the new popularity of installment plans to pay for large purchases such as appliances, furnishings, and cars made these items more and more common in American households. The new appliances were run on electricity: by 1928 one-half of the homes in America were electrified (Dumenil, 128). In 1919, 30 percent of industries had been electrified; by 1929, the percentage was 70 percent. The sudden ubiquity of the automobile changed everything, from the movement of industrial products to the expansion of the suburbs to the location of (and opportunities for) teenage sex. There were 9 million registered automobiles in 1920; the number tripled to 27 million in 1930. Fords that had cost $950 in 1910 were selling for $290 in 1923 (Douglas, 187), and American automobile manufacturers increased their annual production by 320 percent between 1919 and 1929 from 1.5 million vehicles to 4.8 million (Nash, 78; Dumenil, 58). 1929 saw automobile production reach 5,337,087 vehicles, a number which depression and war would prevent the industry from surpassing for 20 years ( Jowett, 140). 2. The Book of the Month Club, founded in 1926, was one of the most visible expressions of

a new and, in significant respects, cohesive audience of middle class readers. In 1920, the first radio station began broadcasting in the United States. Within two years, 575 additional licenses had been granted (Goldberg, 89). President Harding made the first presidential radio address from Baltimore in 1922, demonstrating the political value of the new medium. And also in 1922, the first paid commercial was aired on a New York City station. For $50 the builders of a garden apartment complex informed listeners of the new opportunity; $150,000 in sales followed, and radio discovered where its profit lay. In 1926, David Sarnoff founded the National Broadcasting Company; the following year William Paley began CBS. In 1922, Americans owned roughly 400,000 radios, .016 radios per household. In 1925, the number had risen tenfold to 4 million radios and by 1930 to 13,000,000. By 1935, there were 30,500,000 radios in America, nearly one (.956) for every household ( Jowett, 192). Television was still in its infancy in the 1920s, though the first regular television broadcasts were aired by WGY in Schenectady, NY, in 1928. The other major medium of entertainment and information to emerge in the decade was the motion picture. By 1922, average weekly movie attendance in the United States was 40 million. With 25,687,000 households, this meant that on average, every household sent a member to the theater a bit more than three times in any two-week period ( Jowett, 475). In 1923 there were 15,000 motion picture theaters, capable of seating more 7.5 million viewers ( Jowett, 140). By 1930, the average weekly attendance had risen to 90 million — more than three visits per household per week ( Jowett, 475), and in 1931 there were 742 new film releases. 1928 saw the first sound films, but it would not be until 1931 that attendance at the talkies outnumbered attendance at the silent films (Finley, 378).

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Notes — Chapter 1 3. Other highbrows might select other years between 1910 and 1920 for the cultural watershed. After viewing the 8 November 1910–15 January 1911 exhibition of Post-Impressionists at Grafton Gallery, London, Virginia Woolf declared, “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” 4. In “The Guilty Vicarage,” W.H. Auden argues that the detective story has a “magical function” which he associates with a Christian need for redemption from guilt; the detective, by dissolving doubts and suspicions and loading guilt upon an individual, redeems the society of the novel and restores its innocence. Even readers burdened not with “guilt,” but with a troubling sense of confusion — what do we know? What can we know?— may appreciate the magical function of narrative that first constructs baffling unknowns and then supplies certain knowledge. 5. The Great Good Place of the Golden Age Detective novel was a notable diversion from the milieu inhabited by earlier detectives such as the Parisians Dupin and Lecoq, or the Londoner, Holmes. Though he visited the green world of the provinces in several stories, Holmes was essentially a creature of the metropolis, and of all levels of the metropolis. He ventured into very well-to-do districts, serving kings and princes and popes, and often into the lowest of the slums, dealing with lascars and drug addicts. 6. “No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches…” ( James, 55). 7. Willard Wright, in the survey of the detective story genre that he published as the introduction to his anthology in 1927, had come to the same conclusion as the Times— he too identified Uncle Abner as “one of the very few detectives deserving to be ranked with that immortal triumvirate, Dupin, Lecoq, and Holmes” (23), but he offered a different reason for “the decided superiority” of English detective stories over American: “the fact that the English novelist takes this type of fiction more seriously than we do…. The current writers in England … perform their task with the same conscientious care that they confer on their more serious books” (29). By “more seriously” Wright does not, of course, mean that the English writers were employing the genre to undertake sober investiga-

tions of the psychology or sociology of crime; quite the contrary: by holding up the adventures of Phillip Trent, Reggie Fortune, Father Brown, and Hercule Poirot as examples of English excellence, Wright means that the English authors were bred to the knowledge that the confection of light entertainments requires the same diligence and polish applied to the manufacture of sterner fictions. American writers, by contrast, have hitherto approached the task of amusing their audience with “contempt and carelessness” (29). 8. The Times names none of them, but a letter to the editor four days later (15 July) names them, plus a dozen others. 9. In any event, she produced no series detective to compete with Charlie Chan or Philo Vance. And it has always been the series detective who has dominated the genre. In his admirable history of the detective story, Bloody Murder, Julian Symons appropriately reserves half of a chapter for “Curiosities and Singletons.” Detective novels without sequels — such as Vera Caspary’s Laura or C.P. Snow’s Death Under Sail or Will Hjorstberg’s Fallen Angel— do expand the scope of the genre. But even when they are very popular, they do not have the same sort of influence as the serial novels in which a detective repeatedly satisfies the reader’s appetite for fables of knowing. Repetition is a key element in the appeal of the detective story. 10. Biggers emphasizes the strangeness of mid–Pacific America by inserting a brief bit of comedy in which John Quincy is persuaded to try to exchange his greenbacks for Hawaiian money before boarding the ship to Honolulu. 11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who favored Detective Story Magazine over Black Mask and Norbert Davis over Dashiell Hammett, wrote to thank Norman Malcolm for sending copies of hardboiled detective stories to him: “I had, before they arrived, been reading a detective story by Dorothy Sayers, & it was so bloody foul that it depressed me. Then when I opened one of your mags, it was like getting out of a stuffy room into the fresh air” (Malcolm, 76). One needn’t be American or lowbrow to respond to the fresh air that Hammett inspired, though it helped, in 1930, not to be an editor at the Times. 12. And for readers who come to genre fiction precisely to achieve distance from their own lives, this was — and is — a disincentive to take up the hard-boiled style. Of course there is always the distance mandated by the generic contract: however realistic the characters and scenes, there will be an unrealistically certain

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Notes — Chapter 2 conclusion. And Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, with its sanguinary excesses, pointed to another source of distance — the hard-boiled style could press crude violence to a stylized estrangement from reality. 13. The preferred phrase today seems to be New Religious Movement (NRM), but in 1925 the word was “Cult.” “Oriental” has also fallen from accepted usage, but it is the idiom of the time. 14. Most famously, Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared on 18 May 1926, and was believed to have drowned in the Pacific Ocean. On 23 June she reappeared in Mexico, with a tale of having been kidnapped, but a good deal of evidence pointed to her having run off with the married manager of her radio station. In the same year, Warien Robertson, founder of the “Temple of the Gospel of the Kingdom” was convicted of sex crimes. And in the following year, Benjamin Purnell, leader of the House of David, was also convicted of sex crimes. 15. In this respect, he follows the second method used by many detectives: disguise is used occasionally by Dupin and Holmes; it is a principal device adopted by Gaboriau’s Lecoq and by numerous dime novel detectives such as Nick Carter and King Brady. It is also the device favored by Alan Pinkerton’s semi-fictional detectives. The line “I had some talent in a psychic way” is a tantalizing one, suggesting that there is some substance to the pretensions of the Hollywood crystal-gazer, but the point is undeveloped.

Chapter 2 1. Mrs. Grundy’s English heritage and Wright’s Teutonism are to the point. Wright belonged to a sub–group of Anglophobic American intellectuals who saw Germany as an antidote to the pernicious and seemingly endless dominance of England over America. Percival Pollard and James Gibbons Huneker provided precedents; Mencken was, of course, its chief and loudest exponent. 2. H.L. Mencken, Wright’s early patron and ally, occupies an ambivalent place (“one of the most challenging and paradoxical figures in the history of American culture” [210]) in May’s account of the Rebellion. 3. Georgia O’Keefe responded with enthusiasm to The Creative Will. In letters to Anita Politzer, she writes “I’ve been reading Huntington Wrights [sic] new book — The Masses sent it today. He’s too damn smart! I never read any-

thing like it. I admire him, enjoy him & hate him” (21 December 1916). She later reports that Clive Bell “seems so stupid beside Wright” (Lovingly, Georgia, 223, 227). William Faulkner was also impressed by the aesthetic developed by Wright in The Creative Will (Blotner, 106). Stieglitz and O’Keefe seem to be the intellectuals who were most impressed and least disillusioned by Willard Wright. Loughery reports Wright happily visiting Stieglitz in February 1926, shortly after Scribner embraced his proposal for a detective story series. And Stieglitz, who preferred poetry to novels, seems to have “reveled in” his old associate’s Philo Vance novels (Lowe, 212). 4. The second half of the sentence promotes Lewis Mumford —“gives the impression of someone about to be [important].” Among the intellectuals who receive more than a half-sentence in the literary criticism section of Wilson’s chronicle: H.L. Mencken, Paul Rosenfeld, Van Wyck Brooks, George Jean Nathan, Burton Rascoe, Paul Elmer More, and John Dewey. 5. Thomas Bender notes that while “intellectual” as a noun had been adopted from the French after its introduction during the Dreyfus affair in 1898, it was William James who popularized it in American discourse, also in 1907. “Middle-brow” belatedly makes its first recorded appearance in 1925, the year of Charlie Chan’s debut in The Saturday Evening Post. 6. Brooks “acquired unparalleled authority among American intellectuals committed to one or another program of literary reform” (Wasserstrom, 16). 7. Casey Nelson Blake, in a very useful study of the cultural criticism of Bourne, Brooks, Frank, and Mumford, finds the unifying theme of their critique to be “a communitarian vision of self–realization through participation in a democratic culture” (Beloved Community, 2). Blake distinguishes the Young Americans from other intellectuals of the period by their downplaying of conflict in the public sphere and their subordination of issues of rights and of class to their ideal of community (3). 8. Brooks’s next three books would present case studies of the disastrous impacts of the divide: The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), offered Twain as an example of high artistic potential stifled by the low pieties of American middleclass life; The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925), offered James as an example of the artist who escaped the pieties, only to lose his grounding in American realities; and finally The Life of Emerson (1932), completed after Brooks’s recovery from a complete mental breakdown, offered

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Notes — Chapter 2 Emerson as an American who had retained his integrity as a thinker and writer, and also as an American. By 1932, Brooks was, in fact, moving toward the optimistic re–evaluation of American culture that led to his Finders and Makers series of books, arguing that there was, after all, a long and fruitful “usable” history of American arts and letters. 9. Bender identifies the bourgeois culture with the Italianate brownstones that proclaimed middle-class hegemony as New York expanded north of the diverse architecture of Greenwich Village. The association of the new young intellectuals with the Village in the 1920s thus becomes an architectural accent in their repudiation of the genteel tradition. 10. Lasch also sees a potential flaw in “detachment”: the intellectual’s estrangement from his society gives him his peculiar and useful perspective on his society’s faults, but it also leads to a defensiveness which tempts him to identify his cause with history and to justify his program as a crusade (xv). The willingness of many intellectuals (and Dashiell Hammett may be numbered among them) to submit themselves to the discipline of the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s may reflect this identification with history. 11. Walter Lippmann, whose first year at Harvard coincided with Van Wyck Brooks’s last (and Willard Wright’s only year), was initially drawn to Brooks’s vision of a new engagement between the intellectual and the real, commercial, catchpenny world. In 1914, urging Brooks to contribute to The New Republic, Lippmann declared that the journal would advocate humanism: “Humanism, I believe, means this real sense of the relation between the abstract and the concrete, between the noble dream and the actual limitations of life” (Riccio, 17). But Lippmann’s vision of how to establish this relation shifted, not exactly toward detachment, but to an engagement with a “strategic elite.” Lippmann argued that the intellectual had the obligation to catch the ear of power. “Only the insider can make decisions…. The outsider is necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome” (The Phantom Public, 150). Lippmann thus proposes neither the democratic model of Brooks, nor the aristocratic model that Willard Wright would embrace. His insider is neither a lowbrow politician nor a highbrow professor. Lippmann pursued his insider strategy with considerable success for five decades, though the episode of his final disappointment with Lyndon Johnson might suggest that insider influence comes at a cost.

12. It is, of course, a one-way traffic: the intellectual is the outsider who descends into a disordered world and re–orders it; he changes the world, the world does not change him. Hence the convention of the unaltered detective: the detective enters every story fresh, unaffected in his essential character by any of his prior cases. 13. If Dupin’s “Paris” is dismissed as a fauxNew York, the point still stands: Poe definitely sets his detective in a city outside of history. There is certainly commerce in the Rue Morgue: the poor bank clerk, LeBon, bearing sacks of gold coins to the L’Esplanaye garret, is unmistakably a figure of commercial significance, as is the cigar-girl victim of the second Dupin tale. But there is no relevant historical context to any of the three Dupin tales. As recent critics have observed, Poe was not ignorant of nor unaffected by the social and political issues that disturbed America in the 1840s. These issues often emerge in his “grotesques” and his satires. But none of them is permitted color the worlds of Poe’s detectives. 14. Later in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Dupin will allude to Molière, Cuvier, and Rousseau; in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” there are references to Novalis, Landor, Bellini; and in “The Purloined Letter,” to Seneca, Rochefoucauld, La Bougive (= La Bruyère?), Machiavelli, Campenella, Pascal, Bryant, Catalini, Virgil, and Crebillon fils. By the company he cites, Poe is making unmistakable his hero’s membership in the society of highbrows. Of course, many of Poe’s protagonists are similarly affiliated; there are few lowbrows in Poe’s fiction. His non–detective protagonists — in, for example, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” or “Berenice”— may pursue esoteric researches in isolated locations, but if they cite authorities, they are usually occult authorities. The parade of allusions, especially in “The Purloined Letter,” which represents the apotheosis of Chevalier Dupin, is uncommon. 15. “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” adds little to the character of the detective’s relation to his society. When the body of the young grisette, Marie Rogêt, is found floating in the Seine and the police are again confounded by the evidence, the prefect solicits Dupin’s assistance. Dupin sleeps through Prefect G⎯⎯’s exposition of police discoveries, then devotes himself to an analysis of various newspaper accounts of the crime. The burden of the story lies in this analysis: Poe is more interested in using Dupin to ridicule the thinking of the New York journalists who speculated about the body of the young cigar-girl

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Notes — Chapter 2 Mary Rogers, whose body was found floating in the Hudson, than in constructing a narrative of crime and detection. The story ends inconclusively, with Dupin pointing out the proper direction the investigation should now take, and then a bracketed editorial insertion reporting that his directions were followed by the police and that the prefect honored his “compact” with Dupin. Society and the prefect benefit as before; Dupin also appears to benefit: though the terms of the compact are never specified, they presumably build upon the prefect’s open offer of a reward of 20,000 francs. 16. When Poe designed a reward for his other detective (in “The Gold Bug”), he made it utterly fantastic: William Legrand digs up Captain Kidd’s treasure chest, filled with so much gold and jewels that the narrator requires a long paragraph merely to summarize the contents. But even with the treasure chest, Poe feels obligated to specify an astonishing cash value (“a million and a half dollars”). 17. Two anecdotes from the life of Thales may be relevant. Thales (fl. 585 BC) has, since the time of Plato, been regarded as the first of the Greek philosophers, and thus, was perhaps the first highbrow in the western tradition. In the Theaetetus, Plato records the comment of lowbrow (“a witty and attractive Thracian servant girl”) who observed Thales fall into a well while he was gazing upward at the stars; she declared “that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but what was behind him and just by his feet escaped notice” (Kirk and Raven, 78). The legend of the practical ineptitude of the highbrow thus coincides with the first recognition of the highbrow. But a story recorded by Aristotle in the Politics provides the highbrow’s reply: when his contemporaries reproached Thales for his poverty (“as though philosophy were no use”), he studied the skies, and in winter recognized meteorological conditions that indicated a good growing season for olives. In winter, then, Thales raised money, paid small deposits on all the olive presses in his region, and when the season justified his prediction, “he then hired them out on his own terms and so made a large profit, thus demonstrating that it is easy for philosophers to be rich, if they wish, but that it is not in this that they are interested” (Kirk and Raven, 78). Thus Thales answered the Thracian girl’s mockery. Dupin’s acceptance of Prefect G⎯⎯’s very large checks is similarly his answer to Prefect G⎯⎯’s mockery. 18. When Holmes does seem to arrogate the function of judge and jury, he does so in an ex-

ercise of mercy, not of vengeance in the manner of Dupin. Holmes, as he says in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” leaves the matter of judgment to “a higher court than the Assizes” (130). 19. It may be significant that it is the Copernican revolution that Holmes disdains. Watson immediately proceeds to credit Holmes with an impressive record of scientific literacy (“Botany — Variable”; “Geology—Practical but limited”; “Chemistry—Profound”; “Anatomy— Accurate, but unsystematic”). In the 1840s, Dupin saw himself as an analyst; Holmes, in the late 19th century, sees himself as a scientist. But science, for all its prestige in the decades after Darwin, might to many middle- and lowbrow noses still smell a bit of brimstone. By dissociating Holmes so dramatically (and so improbably) from the most famous of scientific revolutions, Conan Doyle asserts that Holmes’s science is not revolutionary, not dangerous. Holmes will not use his mind to upset the universe; his analytic method will only make a practical pennyworth of difference in the troubled lives of those who find themselves associated with violent crimes. He does not presume to criticize the ways of the world or of the solar system. 20. It might be observed that “nil” and “feeble” actually overstate the ignorance of the archetypal Sherlock Holmes. As generations of Baker Street Irregulars have argued, Watson got Holmes wrong. Or rather, having used Watson’s initial catalog to establish Holmes as expert only in fields directly relevant to his profession, Conan Doyle felt free in later stories to suggest that the detective’s excellence in criminal investigation did not really preclude thoughtful responses to matters of culture. Holmes’s hairline receded over the years, and his brow did grow rather high. Even Watson’s initial inventory allowed that Holmes played the violin well, and throughout the saga, Holmes’s love of music, as a player and as an auditor is emphasized. Early in A Study in Scarlet, Holmes astonishes Watson by professing to know nothing of the Victorian sage, Thomas Carlyle; later he appears to be quoting him, and in the second Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four, he casually remarks upon Carlyle’s work. In “The Greek Interpreter” Holmes, whose knowledge of astronomy was nil, discourses on “the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic” (635). With nil knowledge of literature, Holmes at different times makes knowing allusions to the works of DeQuincy, Goethe, Hafiz, Horace, Poe, Winwoode Reade, Jean Paul Richter, Shakespeare, and Thoreau; in his spare moments, Holmes pursues publishable research

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Notes — Chapter 2 into the polyphonic motets of Lassus, the Chaldean roots of the Cornish language, early English charters, and beekeeping. Were it not for those initial “nils” and “feebles,” one might well take Sherlock Holmes for a highbrow. Which is why the “nils” and “feebles” are there. They are Sherlock Holmes’s necessary anchors in catchpenny reality. His uncommon intellectual interests are acceptable because we have been assured that they are rare; they save him from being an idiot savant who comprehends everything about criminal investigation and nothing about anything else, without making him a Dupin-like savant who seems to know everything about everything. 21. Civilization in the United States is a collection of thirty essays (including one on cities by Lewis Mumford and one on literature by Van Wyck Brooks). Its reiterated theme is the Young American one: American lowbrow life is inimical to culture. 22. It is, perhaps, significant that Futrelle was, like Poe, not only an American, but a Southern American. 23. The English “supersleuths” were Father Brown, Reginald Fortune (H.C. Bailey), Hercule Poirot, Dr. Priestley ( John Rhode), Colonel Gore (Lynn Brock), Inspector Hanaud (A.E.W. Mason), and Max Carrados (Ernst Bramah). 24. Julian Symons has kind words for Wright’s erudition and singles out The Greene Murder Case and The Bishop Murder Case as “among the finest fruits of the Golden Age” (118). Symons rather unfairly uses Wright’s erudition as a club to attack Dorothy Sayers: “Vance does come through as a personality of real intellectual attainment in a way that Wimsey does not” (117). Dorothy Sayers was as much an intellectual as Willard Wright, and in her own way, as combative a one. Wright perhaps put more of his own alienation and arrogance into Vance, whereas Sayers — increasingly as her vision of Wimsey matured — made her detective a mirror of the person she thought she desired, rather than the person she thought she was. Vance’s intellectual pretensions are essential to his character; Lord Peter Wimsey’s affectations become secondary to the man whom Harriet Vane can love. They may nonetheless grow wearisome for many readers, but that they became beloved excesses for many other readers has made Wimsey a figure who has survived his time. 25. It is the middle-brow, uncomprehending lawyer — S.S. Van Dine — who in a footnote (p. 6) observes that the Cézanne watercolors that

Philo Vance admires at the opening of The Benson Murder Case were within four years selling for three times their original price. For Van Dine (and for the reader) this serves as a proof of Vance’s unerring taste. For Vance himself, it would be irrelevant: the herd may bid the price up or down; it cannot enhance or diminish the value of the watercolors. 26. In part, his arrogance reflects a desire to keep his thought pure: “‘Until we approach all human problems,’ he once remarked, ‘with the clinical aloofness and cynical contempt of a doctor examining a guinea-pig strapped to a board, we have little chance of getting at the truth’” (A Study in Scarlet, 3.13). This line is in the spirit of young Stamford’s initial impression of Sherlock Holmes: “Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes — it approaches to cold-bloodedness” (3.19). Conan Doyle endowed Holmes with his sang froid as a sign of his scientific bona fides: his hero would not follow the common sentimental line in which his ultimate virtue would be proven by his devotion/service to a deserving maiden. Holmes’s heroism would lie entirely in his intellectual pursuit of truth. The very first action of Holmes’s that Watson reports is his battering a corpse with a stick (to study post–mortem bruising). In a form like the detective story, which at least until the 1970s emphasized plot and action as the major attraction, the detective needs to start each case with a clean spirit, and this requires that each case end with him no more attached to anyone than he was at the beginning. With a few significant exceptions, such as the Peter Wimsey and Nero Wolfe series, it would not be until the 1970s that detective story writers discovered that the evolving emotional life of the detective could be a principal source of the series’ popularity. 27. The line is spoken by Chremes in Terence’s play, Heautontimoroumenos (The Self-Tormentor), in response to being told to mind his own business. [This, incidentally, is the sort of pedantic footnote that litters the pages of the early Vance novels.] 28. The Stuyvesant Club is an interesting device. On the one hand, it is a club, evidence that Vance is not a willful isolato. On the other hand, it implies an elitist, highly selective amiability, and it is, in any event, an quite insubstantial location, used only as an alternate site for Vance’s conversations with two fellow members — D.A. Markham and annalist Van Dine. Though there was an actual Petrus Stuyvesant Club, a residence club for artists and art-lovers founded in 1914 at 127/129 East 10th Street, Vance’s Club ap-

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Notes — Chapter 3 pears to be “uptown” and to favor the “political, legal, and financial ranks” (Canary, 14) 29. That Vance’s irritating mannerisms are British may be the result of change of heart in the formerly Anglophobic Wright, or, more probably, an expedient concession to the contemporary dominance of English detective story writers. Or is it perhaps a hint that Vance and his acolyte, Van Dine, are menaces to genuine American culture, much as the Encyclopædia Britannica had been a decade earlier? Perhaps Wright’s ambivalence about his foray into pleasing the mob instead of abusing it led to his assigning the “hero” an excess of England worship. Vance’s Anglicisms would then be signs of a spaniel submission to our old home, rather than of elitist foppery. 30. Dannay and Lee were both 24 when they created Ellery Queen. They were young writers on the make, not highbrows, though they would develop scholarly credentials over the course of their careers. Rex Stout’s long-lived detective, Nero Wolfe, who debuted in 1934, has none of Ellery Queen’s superficial similarities to Philo Vance, but he is, more than Queen, a highbrow. Wolfe’s otherwise intolerable superiority is made lastingly palatable by making him monstrous. Wolfe has read everything, knows everything, judges everything, and never errs. But he is also corpulent and immobile, and trapped in neurotic routines. He is palatable because, however awesome his intellect, his life is pitiable; his mind ranges widely (and inerrantly); his physical existence is inhumanly circumscribed. He does not (as Vance does) scorn the common man’s lifestyle; the common man may well scorn Wolfe’s. And where Vance’s narrator simply adores him, Wolfe’s narrator (Archie Goodwin) respects Wolfe’s genius, but has a strong mind of his own and frequently censures Wolfe’s odd practices. (Despite the overstatement, which will justly outrage Wolfe’s partisans, this paragraph does accurately depict the advantage of Wolfe’s disadvantages.) 31. The Charlie Chan films, with their play on “number-one son,” may overdo the patriarchal role for comic effect, but they pick up on a crucial aspect of Earl Derr Biggers’s conception of his detective. 32. To be sure, although Chan is successful as a Chinese father and as an American detective, Biggers assigns him a significant uneasiness at this double happiness; he cannot fully unify the two sides of his character. This theme is most evident in the last novel, which opens with

Charlie Chan meeting a thoroughly assimilated Chinese American couple and ends with him thinking about a thoroughly unassimilated Chinese man who returns to his homeland to die after 60 years of service in America. 33. Biggers’s rare interventions in public policy — in favor of the Progressive presidential candidate, Brand Whitlock, in 1916; against the anti–war labor coalition, the People’s Council in 1917 — contrast dramatically with Wright’s extensive strident advocacy of his aesthetic views prior to writing detective fiction, and Hammett’s extensive and strident advocacy of his social views after writing detective fiction. 34. This ignorance of high culture is not inevitable in private eye fiction. Many hard-boiled writers seem to feel obligated to have their tough-guys also demonstrate mastery of at least some elements of elite arts. Philip Marlowe works at chess problems (Ruy Lopez openings), listens to Khachaturyan violin concertos, and quotes T.S. Eliot; Robert B. Parker’s Spenser knows his English literature as well as he knows his mean streets. 35. The hard-boiled detective often finds himself in the company of ineffectual highbrows. The Op’s client, the ineffectual reformer newspaperman with a French wife, Donald Willsson, is the closest thing to an intellectual in Personville. The novelist and megalomaniac Owen Fitzgerald is certainly a highbrow in The Dain Curse. Casper Guttman’s mastery of medieval history marks him as something of a scholar in The Maltese Falcon. Clyde Wynant is noted inventor in The Thin Man. The custom persists in the hard-boiled genre. Philip Marlowe’s first client is a wealthy retired general; his last client is a novelist. Many hard-boiled detectives find themselves hired by scientists, psychiatrists, surgeons, university presidents, and artists to deal with problems they cannot themselves solve.

Chapter 3 1. They would later expand into a Decalogue. Willard Wright’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” (1928), frequently reprinted as the companion to Knox’s 1928 decalogue, rephrases a number of Knox’s — the detective must not be the villain (Knox, VII; Wright, 4); no “supernatural or preternatural agencies” (Knox, II), no slate-writing, ouijaboards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the like” (Wright, 8). But

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Notes — Chapter 3 Wright takes no exception to Chinese — or any other ethnic — presences. 2. Rohmer’s Fu Manchu tales remained popular enough to justify sequels until 1948. They were joined by many other Yellow Peril novels. And by Yellow Peril films: the very popular serial, The Exploits of Elaine (1914, with two sequels in 1915), used Fu-Manchu-like Chinese villains — Wong Lang Sin (who became Long Sin in the sequel) and Wu Fang—as evil masterminds. By the mid–teens, Hollywood’s Chinese villains had become so outrageous that the Chinese government lodged a formal protest (Utley, 129). John Charles Beecham’s two novels featuring Ah Sing (The Argus Pheasant, 1918 and The Yellow Spider, 1920) are notable for rendering the Chinese villain (“cruel and ruthless, devoid of all moral sense, and a veritable fiend in human form” [Yellow Spider, 49]) as plump — “fat as a Christmas duck” (17)— rather than ominously slender. 3. Biggers told The New York Times that he was specifically intending to refute the negative stereotype of the Chinaman: “Sinister and wicked Chinese were old stuff in mystery stories, but an amiable Chinese acting on the side of law and order had never been used up to that time” (“Creating Charlie Chan,” VIII.6). In addition to being one of the earliest of ethnic detectives, Charlie Chan is also one of the earliest police detectives in the genre; Biggers wanted to make his identification with law and order unquestionable. 4. Of the 23,507 Chinese citizens in Hawaii in 1920, 32.7 percent were classified as “preferred classes” (professional, proprietary, clerical, sales, skilled) and 77.1 percent as farmers, semiskilled, domestic service, unskilled. The proportion of preferred classes would grow to 50.1 percent in 1930, a trend that would continue (Glick, 110). 5. The white actor could, in the 1930s, laugh off the issue—Warner Oland reportedly told his co–star, Keye Luke, “I owe my Chinese appearance to the Mongol invasion” (Hanke, 1)—but such cavalier comments only reinforce 21st century objections that non–Asians, even those with Mongol ancestry, cannot possibly speak for Asians. 6. Eleven years later, Hagedorn seized the opportunity to drive another stake into the heart of the detective’s never-to-be-revived bulk. The introduction to Charlie Chan Is Dead 2 (2004) was, however, a bit less sanguine: “Is Charlie Chan really dead? Probably not. According to the critic and scholar David Eng, Charlie’s merely in a coma” (xxvii).

7. A “good” Chinese man — like Charlie Chan—is, on this reading, “the fulfillment of white male homosexual fantasy, literally kissing white ass.” The charge is, at one level, silly: no detective, of any racial or ethnic identity, is as philoprogenitive as Charlie Chan. He is the father of ten children in the first novel, and acquires an 11th in the course of the third. But, of course, “literally” in polemic does not mean literally, and Charlie Chan’s virility is not to be proven by the presence of numerous offspring (nor by the absence of romantic interest in men). 8. In The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction 1850 –1950, William F. Wu detects the same emasculation of Charlie Chan: “Biggers eliminates all assertiveness, sexuality, and variety of emotion from Charlie Chan” (182). Again there is overstatement; Charlie Chan is, in fact, assertive at times, sexual at times (given the number of his offspring, at least 12 times), and, not excessively, emotional at times, but the Wu’s thrust has validity. And Wu’s description of Biggers’s motive —“To avoid any possible taint of the Yellow Peril”— actually seems fair to Biggers: he was proposing a Yellow Protector to set against the Yellow Peril. He was juxtaposing Charlie Chan (and Charlie Chan’s pidgin-speaking wife, and 1920s-slang-speaking children) against the insidious Fu Manchu and his hordes of yellow (and other Asian shades) minions. Charlie Chan is a domesticated detective. He is rarely aggressive in asserting his authority (though, at the end of The Chinese Parrot, when the villain threatens to shoot Chan, Charlies does shoot the pistol from his hand); Biggers usually arranges matters so that Charlie Chan’s assertions are quietly accepted. His sexuality is safely contained within a long-established marriage. And his emotions are generally expressed in a fractured, flowery English that Biggers and his audience took to be Chinese, but which also distanced the emotions. 9. The arrogance (or, more playfully, the vanity) of Great Detectives is common, but far from universal. Few, in fact, approach Philo Vance’s extreme. And some of the most well-known, such as Father Brown, are famously humble, without any racial stigma at all. On the other hand, Arthur W. Upfield made a degree of arrogant self–confidence one of the signature characteristics of his halfAnglo, half-aboriginal Australian detective, Napoleon Bonaparte (twenty-nine novels (1929–1963). By adopting a generic convention of egoism, Upfield spared himself the charge of emasculating his non– white protagonist. Other non–Asian writers of

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Notes — Chapter 3 mystery fiction featuring Asians have been more conscientious in this regard. 10. “I never met Chang until I had written three of the Chan stories, and when I did, I found none of Charlie’s characteristics noticeable. The character of Charlie Chan, for better or worse, is entirely fictitious” (NYT, 22 March 1931:VIII.6). 11. Yunte Huang, for example, deplores Charlie Chan’s pseudo-Chinese aphorisms (“his nuggets of fortune-cookie Confucius”) and concludes that his blend of ornate and ungrammatical English “epitomizes a racist conception of the Chinese language and its speakers” (Huang, 208). 12. Biggers’s careful reading of these letters is evidenced in the fact that some of Charlie Chan’s characteristic struggles with English grammar do have a linguistic basis: Chinese verbs, for example, do not distinguish singular and plural and Chinese nouns do not require articles, and rendering English usage difficult in these respects. 13. It might be noted that Chang Apana, the real Chinese detective, is recorded as speaking three languages: Chinese (the dialect of Canton, Guangdong; his family, like Charlie Chan and most Chinese Americans of the time, had come from the region of the Pearl River delta), Hawaiian, and “Pidgin English” (Hyung-chan Kim, 18). 14. Biggers’s successor was more ambitious. When, following the death of Earl Derr Biggers, Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post, wanted an oriental replacement for Charlie Chan, he approached John P. Marquand and agreed to fund the expenses of a research trip to China. Marquand spent several months in Japan, Manchuria, and China in 1934 and several more months in 1935 before beginning the first of six Mr. Moto novels (1935–57). There would be eight Mr. Moto films released between 1937 and 1939. Mr. Moto would be played by the quite occidental Peter Lorre. As a result, Marquand, though as occidental as Biggers, was able to situate Mr. Moto in a natural, social and, especially, political landscape that is more authentically Asian than anything Biggers attempted. But Mr. Moto is today no more acceptable as a representation of an Asian character than is Charlie Chan. 15. Ah Sing’s final words express his failure to assimilate: “My fo’get. Tell ’um Boss too much woik that house. Sing go away” (193). 16. The House Without a Key might be called a Henry James theme plotted on a Robert Louis

Stevenson map. Lambert Strether, in The Ambassadors, is sent to old Europe to recall a friend’s nephew to the path of New England virtue, while John Quincy Winterslip is sent west to new San Francisco and newer Honolulu to recall his aunt to that same path. 17. David Kalakaua (1836–91) was king of Hawaii 1874–91. Remembered by Hawaiians for liberalizing limits on the public display of native traditions, his regime was regarded by whites as extravagant and corrupt (and inhospitable to whites) and in 1887 the “Bayonet Constitution” was forced upon him, diminishing his powers. He was succeeded by his sister Lydia Kamalaeha Kaolamalii Liliuokalani, who was deposed by the Revolution of 1893. Sanford Dole served as the first and only president of the Republic of Hawaii. After annexation by the U.S., Dole served as the first territorial governor (1900–03); his brother, James Drummond Dole, would found the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (Hapco) in 1901. 18. Erle Stanley Gardner will confront his lawyer-detective with the same contrast between Hawaii and California a little more than a decade after The House Without a Key, but Perry Mason, as a hard-boiled hero, will have no difficulty preferring the busyness of Los Angeles: pointing toward Waikiki Beach, he tells Della Street, “Over there … is something which civilization has commercialized but can’t kill, a friendly people, a gentle warm climate, where time drifts by unnoticed. I’m leaving it to go back to the roar of a city, the jangle of telephones, the blast of automobile horns, the clanging of traffic signals, clients who lie to me and yet expect me to be loyal to them—and I can hardly wait to get there” (The Case of the Substitute Face [1938, 1–2]). Mason has been stopping in Honolulu on his return from a trip to China. Gardner himself traveled to China, and as a young defense lawyer, established a favorable reputation for himself in the Californian Chinese community. He used his experiences in early short stories such as “Fingers of Fong” (1933) and in later novels such as Murder Up My Sleeve (1937), which features Terry Clane, a detective who is an “ex-student of ‘concentration’ in a Chinese monastery” and which presents a number of interesting Chinese characters. 19. When necessary, Charlie Chan can remind an English butler that the Chinese are “a heathen race … that was busy inventing the art of printing at moment when gentlemen in Great Britain were still beating one another over head with spiked clubs” (The Black Camel, 6.474),

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Notes — Chapter 4 and he can refer to the wisdom of K’ung-fu-tsze or the decree of the Emperor Yü (“who came to the throne of China in year 2205 B.C.” [The Black Camel, 15.524]), but for the most part, Charlie Chan’s China, though of crucial importance, consists of a few allusions and stereotypes. 20. Sun Yatsen (Sun Wen), the great leader of the Chinese revolution in 1911, was schooled in Hawaii, and retained an association with the Hawaiian Chinese community. Like Charlie Chan, Sun came from southern China to Hawaii. He lived there with his elder brother until his return to China in 1886, roughly the date of Charlie Chan’s childhood passage from Canton to Honolulu. 21. Charlie Chan is, in fact, no laggard: most of his cases are plotted carefully to occur in the space of a few days. In The Black Camel, he solves the murder of Shelah Fane within 24 hours. But Chan says he is patient, and he enjoins patience upon any number of English and American detectives, journalists, other busybodies. Charlie Chan himself repeats the aphorism in later novels —“Patience … always brightest plan in these matters” (Behind That Curtain, 10.161)— but as often as not, the phrase “oriental calm” or “the patience of the East” is spoken by a western character in admiration of the un–Western virtue that Chan embodies. 22. The other reason for becoming a series protagonist was popular demand: “Scarcely had the story stopped running in the ‘Post’ when I began to hear from people all over the country who wanted another Charlie Chan story. The idea had never occurred to me to write a series, but the possibilities looked good” (“Creating Charlie Chan,” VIII.6). Biggers had written a John Quincy Winterslip story; people all over the country read a Charlie Chan story. What they realized before Biggers did was Charlie Chan’s potential as an original, unwestern detective. 23. Toward the end of his writing career, in 1933, Hammett published a short story with an interesting racial theme. The narrator of “Nightshade” rescues a young white woman, takes her to a nightclub, and then, avoiding her invitation, sends her home in cab. Only the last lines reveal that the narrator is black. 24. Although in this story Hammett certainly plays with ethnic stereotypes: the Chinese master criminal speaks in a deliberate parody of flowery Chinese humility (“If the Terror of Evildoers will honor one of my deplorable chairs by resting his divine body on it, I can assure him the chair shall be burned afterward” [414]). But

there are other less playful stereotypes: the Op talks of the “unmistakable” odor of “unwashed Chinese” (421), and observes of a gunman that when he uses his guns, he empties the clip “Chinese-fashion” (412). 25. The Op’s adventure in Chinatown has received praise. It can be compared with Charlie Chan’s less melodramatic visit in Chapter 3 of The Chinese Parrot. 26. Charlie Chan’s vague associations with 20th-century Chinese history were a choice, not a necessity. Biggers’s first fictional exploitation of his discovery of the Chinese in Hawaii and California came in a short novel entitled Fifty Candles, serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1921, and issued in book form in 1926, following the success of Chan. The crime in the novel turns on a precisely dated event: an 1898 immigration hearing in Honolulu for one Chang See. Chang had been born in Hawaii, but had spent his young manhood in China, joining in the movement led by Kang Youwei to reform the Manchu dynasty. In 1898, the Dowager Empress Cixi ordered the suppression of the movement, and the reformers fled the country. 1898 was also the year that the Chinese Exclusion Act was extended to the new territory of Hawaii. Chang See’s failed attempt to justify his citizenship with his birth certificate leads to the situation in which, 20 years later in San Francisco, the ruthless capitalist Henry Drew is murdered. Chang See provides some interesting variations on the stereotypes, but the point is that Biggers was capable of anchoring his Chinese characters in Chinese and American history; Charlie Chan’s nostalgia for an insubstantial Canton deliberately keeps him out of history. 27. Joan Mellen notes that in the course of his extensive womanizing, Hammett himself showed a particular preference for Chinese women (106).

Chapter 4 1. Writing to Perkins, Wright offered his view of Fitzgerald’s achievement: “You ask me … what I thought of the ‘Jazz Age’ stories—I think they are cheap, silly, and amateurish” (Burlingame, 23). 2. In some notoriously inconclusive homicide investigations, such as the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892 or the murder of Sanford White in New York City in 1906, there might be no legal solution to the crime — Lizzie Borden was ac-

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Notes — Chapter 5 quitted, and Harry K. Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity, but the public “knew” who had done the deeds. 3. Scribner’s advertising department worked up a facsimile NYPD crime report on the death of Alvin Benson and circulated 1,300 copies (Loughery, 184). 4. A few hints from his chauffeur, Edwin Rhodes, suggest another, less elevated dimension to Elwell’s womanizing: “Elwell would hail women at random, according to Rhodes, and, if rebuffed, would explain that it was a mistake in identity, which explanation would sometimes lead to a conversation ending with their riding away side by side” (NYT, 20 June 1920). This account suggests more the gourmand than the gourmet. 5. Tammany Hall was the venerable political machine that could date its origins to 1789. It had enjoyed some success as the instrument of Aaron Burr in 1798, but did not elect its first mayor until 1855. Under Boss Tweed (1865–1871) it achieved its lasting reputation for corruption and for reliably protecting its ethnic voters. 6. There is, however, one possible allusion to Walker’s administration in The Benson Murder Case. If Walker was not accompanied into office by a reform district attorney like Francis F.-X. Markham, the mayor did appoint as his police commissioner a man who seems to have surprised everyone with his efficiency and his integrity. Historians give George V. McLaughlin credit for fighting corruption within the force, and Captain Arthur Carey of the Homicide Squad singled McLaughlin out for praise: “in a short time he built up one of the most efficient police machines” (239). McLaughlin was the former state superintendent of banks, and there may be a reference to this fact in the history of Inspector Moran, the Commanding Officer of the Detective Bureau, who assigns Sergeant Heath to the Benson case. Van Dine observes that Moran looks “more like a successful Wall Street broker of the better class than a police official” (29), and a footnote reports that he was a former banker who had been considered for police commissioner by the Gaynor administration (Gaynor was the Tammany mayor [1910– 1913] who preceded John Purroy Mitchell.) 7. And lest an inattentive reader not connect Alvin Benson with Joseph Elwell, the footnote reference to the historical case in Chapter V of the novel supplies the link: “Even the famous Elwell case, which came several years later and bore certain points of similarity to the Ben-

son case created no greater sensation, despite the fact that Elwell was more widely known than Benson, and the persons involved were more prominent socially. Indeed, the Benson case was referred to several times in descriptions of the Elwell case; and one anti–administration paper regretted editorially that John F.-X. Markham was no longer District Attorney of New York” (61). 8. The Hollywood fortune-teller, however theatrical, was certainly not unrealistic. Indeed, when Mabel Normand was diagnosed in 1927 with the tuberculosis that would kill her in 1930, she began to consult numerologists and readers of tea leaves (Fussell, 219). 9. The author Charles Higham, after reviewing all the evidence, identifies Mary Miles Minter as, in fact, the most likely murderer of William Desmond Taylor. 10. A mine fire on 8 June 1917 killed 164 men. The miners went on strike 15 June; Little was lynched on 1 August. By 10 August, federal troops were patrolling the city. In late October mining operations resumed, and 18 December, the strike was called off (Hyde, 109). 11. Daly’s great antagonist in the Copper King wars that divided Montana at the end of the 19th century is another historical precedent for Elihu Willsson. But although William A. Clarke, who pitted his Colorado Smelting and Mining Company of Butte against Daly’s Anaconda, was also a rapacious exploiter of workers and of natural resources, and also monopolized the institutions of his company town, he had somewhat broader cultural horizons than did Daly (or Willsson). He collected art (donating a collection of old masters to the Corcoran gallery), sought (and after Daly’s death, achieved) election to the U.S. Senate, and aspired to social eminence in New York City, where he built a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Clarke’s company would be absorbed into Daly’s through the 1915 merger engineered in New York. (It was this combined corporation that in 1917 hired the Pinkertons [including Hammett] to break the strike. Clarke died in 1925.

Chapter 5 1. Mme. and Mlle. L’Esplanaye were murder victims in “Rue Morgue,” Marie Roget was a murder victim in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and the female “royal person” was a blackmail victim in “Purloined Letter.” 2. Brenda Tregennis dies of the poison that

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Notes — Chapter 5 renders her brothers insane in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” and Maria Gibson is a suicide in “The Adventure of Thor Bridge.” The salted ear of a female victim appears in “The Cardboard Box.” 3. Or, alternatively, flappers were named after the British locution for nestlings that are testing their wings, but not yet ready to fly. 4. Sales of brassieres and corsets dropped 11 percent between 1924 and 1927 (and this in the less-than-cutting-edge fashion environment of the Federal Reserve District of Cleveland), and it has been estimated that the amount of material required to dress a decent American woman had fallen from 191⁄4 yards to just seven in 1927 (Allen, 79). 5. The boyish silhouette did not preclude gender-based enhancements: the number of beauty shops catering to these new women expanded throughout the decade, from 5,000 in 1920 to 40,000 in 1930. Where American women spent 17 million dollars on cosmetics in 1914, they would spent 141 million in 1925 (Dumenil, 141). 6. They were, however, not paid as well as men for their work. Though the statistic has always been a debatable one, the accepted figure for 1929 is that for every dollar earned by men, women, in comparable jobs, earned only 59 cents. And in some respects, women found the 1920s to be a period of closing, not opening doors. The percentage of women attending undergraduate and graduate school declined through the decade, though the total number of college students doubled from 600,000 to 1,200,000 in 1930 (Goldberg, 92). In 1920, women were 6 percent of the nation’s physicians; by 1930, the percentage had decreased to 4.4. The divorce rate, which presumably impacted women’s lives to a greater degree than men’s, at least in economic terms, continued a steady increase: 1 in 21 marriages (under 5 percent) had ended in divorce in 1880, 1 in 12 in 1890, 1 in 7 in 1924 (Dumenil 130). By 1928, 16.5 percent of marriages were ending in divorce (Goldberg, 92). 7. If he hesitates to assign too much autonomy to his female romantic lead, Biggers is willing to present his audience with a distinctly strong-willed older woman. John Quincy’s maiden aunt Minerva has scandalously ventured alone to Hawaii, actively resists the calls of her family to resume her place in Back Bay society, and, despite the strong disapproval of her puritanical cousin, Amos, has chosen to stay with her dishonorable cousin, Dan. Throughout the

novel, she displays admirable strength of character. But willful spinsters, especially willful New England spinsters, were known quantities in popular literature (and in “high” literature); they had populated American fiction at least since the time of Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was the willful young woman who was being anatomized and celebrated in the fiction of contemporary writers like Lewis, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. 8. In Vance’s ninth appearance, The Garden Murder Case, Wright did finally feel obliged to reveal for the first time what S.S. Van Dine calls a softer, more romantic side of the detective. He may, like Raymond Chandler, have felt some pressure to testify to his hero’s heterosexual bona fides. It is, therefore, a bit odd that the only woman to inspire erotic feelings in Philo Vance, Zalia Graeme, is introduced as “a swaggering, pretty girl” with “muscular boyish hips” (62). Miss Graeme is otherwise undistinguished. Vance renounces his claims on her with a sorrow that is asserted rather than presented; Zalia Graeme, without apparent distress, marries another wealthy young man. 9. Hammett uses the same basic situation in “Women, Politics and Murder”: Cara Kenbrook thinks her lover, Stanley Tennant, has murdered Bernard Gilmore; Stanley Tennant thinks she has committed the crime. But instead of each of them foolishly claiming responsibility, they foolishly try to frame the Continental Op. The Op, as he must, discovers the true killer. The story ends not with the lovers happily married, but with Stanley Tennant crumpled at the bottom of the stairs of the police station, the Op having thus requited a beating that Tennant had administered to him. The contrast to Wright’s conventional action and conventional ending is clear. 10. In the early novels, the deference that the district attorney of Manhattan and a sergeant in the homicide division of the NYPD paid to an aesthetic amateur was remarked upon by critics who found the Van Dine novels to be inadequately realistic, even for detective fiction. As the series developed, Wright all but dropped the pretense that Vance was assisting Markham. The district attorney ceases to be an active character, and functions almost entirely as an insubstantial but official aegis under which Vance conducts his investigations. 11. It is, of course, possible that the marriages that are reported at the end of each Philo Vance novel also reflect the author’s personal conventionality in this area. Wright was certainly a rebel in aesthetics and dissolute in practice; he may

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Notes — Appendix A nonetheless have been old-fashioned in his attitude toward matrimony. Unlike Hammett, who never divorced his wife, Josephine (and consequently never married Lillian Hellman, his partner for nearly 30 years), Wright did divorce his wife in order to legitimize his relationship with his final partner. 12. The little-noticed Rhea Gutman provides The Maltese Falcon with another small echo of the Gabrielle Dain model of woman as victim.

Appendix A 1. The principal biographical account of Earl Derr Biggers is Barbara Gregorich’s 17-page life of a native son published in the Ohio magazine, Timeline. Gregorich also published a shorter “vita” in the Harvard Magazine: his home state and his alma mater have shown at least some interest in preserving a record of Biggers’s life. 2. The owner of one of the factories between 1901 and 1908 was Clarence Crane who made his fortune in maple syrup and sugar, and whose wife, Grace, had given birth to a son, Hart, two years before the family moved to Warren. 3. Biggers’s fascination with Brahmin culture lasted at least until 1925, when it manifested itself in the first Charlie Chan novel, but just as the very Bostonian hero of that novel happily accommodated himself to Honolulu and San Francisco, so Biggers seems to taken in stride the departures which were forced upon him. 4. The phrase is Brooks’s (Scenes & Portraits, 103); Brooks too reacted against the DanteDonne-Santayana coteries, but he did so on behalf of a programmatic rejection of the genteel tradition. 5. The New York Times (9 March 1913, 132) reports that Biggers’s first sale to a magazine occurred in his sophomore year (1904–05). 6. Behrman tells a similar anecdote against himself— a very similar anecdote in which Copey snores through a Behrman story. Then Behrman tells of the story which he wrote for Copey and which was accepted by Mencken and Nathan for publication in The Smart Set (though it eventually appeared in a Smart Set sibling, La Vie Parisienne). Behrman, having followed Biggers to Harvard, followed him into writing plays for Broadway, and then, five years after Biggers, followed him to Hollywood, and in both locations proved more successful as a comic playwright and as a screenwriter. Biggers’s Charlie

Chan novels, however, remain in print in the 21st century, and Behrman’s work largely does not. 7. The tryout for the play was scheduled for Hartford, Connecticut, and when, as a result of injuries in an automobile accident, the star, Wallace Eddinger, was unable to perform the lead role, Cohan, who had broken his collarbone in the same accident, took over the role the first two nights. (Cohan would play the hero, William Magee, for the full run of a 1935 revival of the play.) Eddinger opened the play on Broadway on 22 September 1913, at the Astor Theater. 8. The Tribune had seduced Adams from the New York Mail; the Mail secured a replacement in the person of the recently fired editor of The Smart Set, Willard Wright. Wright’s Mail column, “Always in Good Humor,” was illsuited to his temper, and he lasted only three months. 9. Benchley, Harvard ’12, was not a classmate of Biggers. In 1914, he was working for Curtis Publishing’s New York office, as was, by one account, Biggers (Altman, 67). 10. Biggers would write an article for the Times (7 March 1915) connecting the conception of the play with his shipboard approach to Gibraltar in April 1914. 11. “The play was only a modest success in America, perhaps because Under Cover and The White Feather had employed many of its tricks first” (Bordman, 22). 12. Standing firm against all solicitations were W.D. Howells, Ellen Glasgow, Hamlin Garland, and Joyce Kilmer. 13. In exactly this period of time, Eugene O’Neill decided to make himself a playwright. He attended George Pierce Baker’s Harvard workshop on playwriting (1915), helped establish the Provincetown Players (1916), and, by 1919, had produced and published Bound East for Cardiff, The Long Voyage Home, Ile, and The Moon of the Caribees. O’Neill was committed to developing a new art of American drama; Biggers sought merely to please audience expectations. 14. Agatha and Archie Christie vacationed in Hawaii two years after Biggers. In August 1922, they took a two-week break from their roundthe-world tour in Honolulu. Mrs. Christie, however, was not inspired. 15. Biggers told The New York Times that when, after completing Behind That Curtain, he first met Apana, “I found none of Charlie’s characteristics noticeable.” (22 March 1931, X6).

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Notes — Appendix A 16. Denied further adventures of Charlie Chan, The Saturday Evening Post eventually fixed upon John Q. Marquand as a suitable successor to Earl Derr Biggers. It allotted him a travel budget in 1934 and sent him to the Far East where Marquand decided to use China as a setting, but a Japanese investigator as a protagonist. The first of six Mr. Moto novels began to be serialized in 1935.

17. Biggers would achieve fatherhood at 31; Hammett at 27. Wright’s relationship with his daughter appears never to have been a happy one — often quite an unhappy one; Biggers seems to have been a good father to his son; Hammett was at intervals a devoted and loving parent and a distant and uninvolved one to his two daughters.

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Index Abner, Uncle (fictional detective) 12, 13, 49, 198n7 Adams, Franklin P. 153, 170 “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” 208n2 “The Adventure of the Second Stain” 46– 47 “The Adventure of Thor Bridge” 208n2 The Agony Column 154, 156, 162 Allen, Frederick Lewis 9 America’s Coming-of-Age 36–40 Apana, Chang 72–73, 162, 204n10, 205n13 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty” 116 Armory Show 31, 34, 170, 171 “Arson Plus” 135, 182 Auden, W.H. 11, 17, 48, 61, 198n4 Barton, Bruce 21 Behind That Curtain 83, 85, 87, 88–89, 128, 161, 162 Behrman, S.N. 148–50, 209n6 Benchley, Robert 153, 209n9 Benda, Julien 39–40, 56, 62 Bender, Thomas 37–38, 62, 199n5, 200n9 The Benson Murder Case 7, 29, 51, 53, 56–57, 98, 104–110, 119, 120, 122, 129–30, 175, 202n25, 207n3, 207n6, 207n7 Bestsellers 186–89 “The Big Knockover” 182 Biggers, Earl Derr 145–64 and passim; The Agony Column 154, 156, 162; Behind That Curtain 83, 85, 87, 88–89, 128, 161, 162; The Black Camel 16, 22–23, 26, 72, 73, 82, 87, 115–19, 123, 161–62, 205n19, 206n21; Charlie Chan Carries On 82, 89, 128, 162; The Chinese Parrot 73, 83–84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 119, 127–28, 160, 204n8; A Cure for the Curables

156–57; Earl Derr Biggers Tells Ten Stories 164; Fifty Candles 159, 206n26; The House Without a Key 4, 15, 28, 67, 72, 74, 76, 78–81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 126–27, 150, 159–60, 198n10, 205n16, 208n7; “Idle Hands” 158; If You’re Only Human 151; Inside the Lines 154; The Keeper of the Keys 75, 76, 77, 84, 95, 128, 163, 164, 203n32; Love Insurance 152; The Second Floor Mystery 162; See-Saw 157; Seven Keys to Baldpate 103, 151–52, 154, 159, 170; Three’s a Crowd 157 Biggers, Eleanor Ladd (wife) 150, 152, 163 Biggers, Emma E. (mother) 146 Biggers, Robert J. (father) 146 Biggers, Robert Ladd (son) 153, 163 The Bishop Murder Case 29, 50, 52, 133, 175 The Black Camel 16, 22–23, 26, 72, 73, 82, 87, 115–19, 123, 161–62, 205n19, 206n21 Black Mask 3, 17, 24, 122, 123, 181–83, 187, 198n11 Blake, Casey Nelson 199n7 The Blue Moon Murders 177 Bobbs-Merrill 150, 151, 152, 159–60, 162, 163 “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” 201n18 Bourne, Randolph 33, 36, 38, 59, 62, 68 Boxer Rebellion 91 Brooks, Van Wyck 31, 32, 33, 35–40, 54, 56, 62, 64, 146–148, 149, 199n6, 199n8, 209n4; America’s Coming-of-Age 36–40; Wine of the Puritans 35–36 Brown, Father (fictional detective) 48, 63, 73 Buck, Pearl 68 Burke, Claire 171, 174

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Index The “Canary” Murder Case 53, 98, 113–14, 122, 130–31, 175, 176, 202n28 “The Cardboard Box” 46, 208n2 Carey, Arthur 104, 110, 112, 113 Carter, Nick (fictional detective) 39, 199n15 Chan, Charlie (fictional detective) 22– 23 Chan, Jeffrey Paul 71 Chandler, Raymond 5, 17–18, 20, 115 Charlie Chan Carries On 82, 89, 128, 162 Chesterton, G.K. 3, 12 Chin, Frank 71 The Chinese Parrot 73, 83–84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 119, 127–28, 160, 204n8 Christie, Agatha 3, 23, 27, 124, 210n14 “The Cleansing of Poisonville” 182 Cohan, George M. 151–52, 159, 209n7 Collins, Wilkie 48 Conan Doyle, Arthur 3, 8, 12, 21, 27, 45–47, 57, 124–25; “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” 208n2; “The Adventure of the Second Stain” 46–47; “The Adventure of Thor Bridge” 208n2; “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” 201n18; “The Cardboard Box” 46, 208n2; “His Last Bow” 47; “The Naval Treaty” 45; A Study in Scarlet 45, 201n20, 202n26 Confucius 26, 59–60, 71, 75, 81, 86, 88 Coolidge, Calvin 8, 125 Copeland, Charles T. 149, 165–66 Cox, Palmer 146 Crane, Hart 154–55, 209n2 The Creative Will 34, 52, 199n3 “Crooked Souls” 136 Cults 21, 136, 199n13, 199n14 A Cure for the Curables 156–57 The Dain Curse 24–25, 120, 140–41, 183, 203n35 Daly, Carrol John 181–82, 184 Daly, Marcus 121–23, 207n11 Dannay, Frederic see Queen, Ellery Davies, Valentine 164 Davis, Richard Harding 147 “Dead Yellow Women” 93–95, 206n24 Dreiser, Theodore 33, 155, 170, 171 Dupin, Auguste (fictional detective) 41–43, 44, 46, 50–51, 55, 62, 124, 199n15, 200n14, 200n15 Earl Derr Biggers Tells Ten Stories 164 Egyptology 23, 92

Einstein 9–10 Eliot, Charles W. 147 Elwell, Joseph Bowne 198–104, 106–110 Encyclopædia Britannica 14, 33, 203n29 Europe After 8:15 169 Fairbanks, Douglas 152–3 Faulkner, William 172, 199n3 Fifty Candles 159, 206n26 Flapper 125, 208n3 Fletcher, John Gould 147 Ford, Corey 7 Forum Exhibition 33, 34, 171–72 Fu Manchu 66–67, 71, 73–74, 80, 204n2, 204n8 Futrelle, Jacques 49, 50, 51, 202n22; “The Problem of the Stolen Rubens” 49 The Future of Painting 34, 174 Gaboriau, Emile 44–45 The Garden Murder Case 52, 123–24, 208n8 Gardner, Erle Stanley 186, 187, 205n18 Gibson Girl 125 “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” 136–37 The Glass Key 27, 142, 183 “The Gold Bug” 201n6 Golden Age mysteries 3, 10–11, 19–20, 28, 67, 86, 89, 98, 114, 118, 198n5 The Gracie Allen Murder Case 29 Grant, Madison 69 Great Detective 10–11, 19–20, 25–26, 67, 73, 84, 89 The Great Detectives 49–50 Great Good Place 11, 198n5 Green, Anna Katherine 48, 124 The Greene Murder Case 29, 99, 131–33, 175 Gregorich, Barbara 209n1 Gryce, Ebenezer (fictional detective) 48 “The Gutting of Couffignal” 137–38 Hackett, Alice Payne 58–59 Hagedorn, Jessica 71, 204n6 Hammett, Annie Bond (mother) 178 Hammett, Dashiell 178–85 and passim; “Arson Plus” 135, 182; “The Big Knockover” 182; “The Cleansing of Poisonville” 182; “Crooked Souls” 136; The Dain Curse 24–25, 120, 140–41, 183, 203n35; “Dead Yellow Women” 93–95, 206n24; “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” 136–37; The Glass Key 27, 142, 183;

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Index “The Gutting of Couffignal” 137–38; “The House on Turk Street” 93, 136–37; The Maltese Falcon 17, 27, 120, 138, 141–42, 183, 203n35, 209n12; Nightmare Town 29; “Nightshade” 206n23; “$100,000 Blood Money” 182; Red Harvest 4, 17, 26, 27, 63, 64, 120–22, 123, 138–40, 183, 198n12, 203n35; “The Road Home” 18; “The Scorched Face” 24, 136; Selected Letters 61, 179; “Slippery Fingers” 136; “The Tenth Clue” 136; The Thin Man 27, 138, 142–43, 183, 203n35; “The Whosis Kid” 137; “Women, Politics and Murder” 208n9; “Zigzags of Treachery” 135 Hammett, Josephine Dolan (wife) 180 Hammett, Mary Jane (daughter) 180 Hammett, Richard 178 Harding, Warren G. 8, 9, 10, 11, 46, 125 Harte, Bret 73 Harvard University 8, 31, 38, 59, 97, 146, 163, 165 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 12, 16 Hellman, Lilian 178, 180, 184–85, 209n11 Hemingway, Ernest 97, 147 Highbrow 35, 37 “His Last Bow” 47 Hodge, William 156–57, 159 Holmes, Sherlock (fictional detective) 4, 12, 16, 26, 27, 40, 45–46, 57, 63–64, 124, 198n5, 201n18, 201n19, 201n20, 202n26, 208n2 Hoover, Herbert 9, 125, 161 “The House on Turk Street” 93, 136–3 7 The House Without a Key 4, 15, 28, 67, 72, 74, 76, 78–81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 126–27, 150, 159–60, 198n10, 205n16, 208n7 Howells, W. D. 31, 156 Huang, Yunte 205n11 I Used to Be a Highbrow, but Look at Me Now 32, 165, 174, 176 “Idle Hands” 158 If You’re Only Human 151 Immigration policy 26, 68–69 Informing a Nation 172 Inside the Lines 154 International Workers of the World 121, 122 Isaacs, Harold R. 68 Iwerks, Ub 7

James, Henry 12, 78, 168, 205n16 Johnson, Paul 9 Karloff, Boris 161 The Keeper of the Keys 75, 76, 77, 84, 95, 128, 163, 164, 203n32 Kennedy, Craig (fictional detective) 48– 49 The Kennel Murder Case 52, 90, 94, 123, 177 Kennerly, Mitchell 34, 168 The Kidnap Murder Case 90–93, 140 King, Dorothy “Dot” 110–15 Knopf, Alfred 17, 183 Knox, Ronald A. 66–67 Lao Tse 91 Lasch, Christopher 38, 200n10 Lecoq, M. (fictional detective) 44–45 Lee, Manfred see Ellery Queen Lippman, Walter 147, 200n11 Lobsenz, Dr. Jacob Munster 174–75 Loughery, John 4, 27, 30, 93, 129, 165, 177 Love Insurance 152 Lowbrow see Highbrow Macdonald-Wright, Stanton (brother) 34, 166, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 178 The Maltese Falcon 17, 27, 120, 138, 141–42, 183, 203n35, 209n12 A Man of Promise 32, 129, 166, 171 Mantle, Burns 157–58 Marlowe, Philip (fictional detective) 203n34 Marple, Mrs. (fictional detective) 124 Marquand, John P. 205n14, 210n16 May, Henry 31 McPherson, Aimee Semple 21, 25 Mencken, H.L. 32, 167, 168–71, 181, 199n1, 199n2 Misinforming the Nation 172 MLA International Bibliography 27 Modern Painting 34, 171 Morley, Christopher 157 “Murders in the Rue Morgue” 41–42, 44, 46, 200n13, 200n14, 208n1 “Mystery of Marie Rogêt” 98, 200n14, 200n15, 208n1 Naish, J. Carrol 70 Nash, Ogden 7–8 Nathan, George Jean 169, 170, 181

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Index “The Naval Treaty” 45 The New Adventures of Charlie Chan 70 New International Encyclopedia 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich 31, 33, 59, 99, 172 Nightmare Town 29 “Nightshade” 206n23

69, 70, 74, 75, 123, 127–28, 149, 154, 156, 163, 164, 187 Sayers, Dorothy 3, 124, 202n24 The Scarab Murder Case 23, 52, 92–93, 123 Schmitt, Carl 154–55 “The Scorched Face” 24, 136 Scotland Yard 85 The Second Floor Mystery 162 See-Saw 157 Selected Letters 61, 179 The Seven Arts 33 Seven Keys to Baldpate 103, 151–52, 154, 159, 170 Shaw, Joseph Thompson 182 Shiel, M.P. 66 “Slippery Fingers” 136 Smart Set 30, 32–33, 109, 149, 168–70, 180, 181 Sojin, Kamayama 160 Spade, Sam (fictional detective) 8 Stearns, Harold 31, 37, 46 Steiglitz, Alfred 31, 32, 34, 52 Stein, Gertrude 38 Stoddard, Lothrop 69 Stout, Rex 203n30 A Study in Scarlet 45, 201n20, 202n26 Stuyvesant Club 202n28 Sun Yat-sen 81, 91–92, 94, 206n20 Symons, Julian 1, 5, 198n9, 202n24

O’Keefe, Georgia 32, 34, 172, 178, 199n3 Oland, Warner 70, 162, 204n5 “$100,000 Blood Money” 182 O’Neill, Eugene 210n13 Panek, Leroy 182 Park, E.L. 161 Parker, Dorothy 135 Perkins, Maxwell 54, 97, 98, 146, 147–48, 166, 175, 207n1 Pinkertons 61, 121, 179–80 Plato 41, 55–56 Poe, Edgar Allan 25, 31, 41–44, 50, 53, 55, 124, 200n13, 200n14, 201n16; “The Gold Bug” 201n6; “Murders in the Rue Morgue” 41–42, 44, 46, 200n13, 200n14, 208n1; “Mystery of Marie Rogêt” 98, 200n14, 200n15, 208n1; “The Purloined Letter” 42–43, 200n14, 208n1 Poirot, Hercule (fictional detective) 8, 10–11, 26, 48, 65, 124 Pollard, Percival 168, 199n1 Post, Melville Davisson 12, 13, 27, 49 Pound, Ezra 32, 155, 169 Powell, William 162, 175 “The Problem of the Stolen Rubens” 49 “The Purloined Letter” 42–43, 200n14, 208n1 Queen, Ellery 8, 57–59, 203n30; The Roman Hat Mystery 57–58 Red Harvest 4, 17, 26, 27, 63, 64, 120–22, 123, 138–40, 183, 198n12, 203n35 Reeve, Arthur B. 48–49 Rinehart, Mary Roberts 13–14, 27, 48, 61, 124, 151, 168 “The Road Home” 18 Rohmer, Sax 66, 86, 204n2 The Roman Hat Mystery 57–58 Russell, Morgan 34, 169, 172, 178 Rzepka, Charles 70, 71, 72, 74 Santanaya, George 146, 166 Saturday Evening Post 12, 28, 60, 66, 68,

Tammany Hall 207n5 Taylor, William Desmond 116–18 “The Tenth Clue” 136 Terence 53, 202n27 Thales 201n17 Thayer, John Adams 151, 168–70 The Thin Man 27, 138, 142–43, 183, 203n35 Three’s a Crowd 157 Toler, Sidney 70, 163 “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” 203n1 Upfield, Arthur W 204n9 Vance, Philo (fictional detective) 23 Van Dusen, Prof. F. X. (fictional detective) 49, 51 Walker, Jimmy 105, 207n6 Walzer, Michael 40 Wendell, Barrett 165–66

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Index What Nietsche Taught 172 Wheelock, John Hall 147, 148, 166 Whitlock, Brand 155–56, 161, 203n33 “The Whosis Kid” 137 Wilson, Edmund 35, 174, 199n4 Wilson, Woodrow 8, 155 Wimsey, Peter (fictional detective) 10–11, 48, 124 Wine of the Puritans 35–36 The Winter Murder Case 7, 177 Winters, Roland 70, 163 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 198n11 Wolfe, Nero (fictional detective) 203n30 “Women, Politics and Murder” 208n9 Woolcott, Alexander 157 Wright, Annie Van Vranken (mother) 165 Wright, Archibald (father) 165, 170 Wright, Beverly (daughter) 167, 168 Wright, Claire de Lisle (2nd wife) 177 Wright, James 179 Wright, Katherine Belle Boynton (wife) 167, 168, 173 Wright, Willard Huntington 30–35, 164–78 and passim; The Benson Murder Case 7, 29, 51, 53, 56–57, 98, 104–110, 119, 120, 122, 129–30, 175, 202n25,

207n3, 207n6, 207n7; The Bishop Murder Case 29, 50, 52, 133, 175; The Blue Moon Murders 177; The “Canary” Murder Case 53, 98, 113–14, 122, 130–31, 175, 176, 202n28; The Creative Will 34, 52, 199n3; Europe After 8:15 169; The Future of Painting 34, 174; The Garden Murder Case 52, 123–24, 208n8; The Gracie Allen Murder Case 29; The Great Detectives 49–50; The Greene Murder Case 29, 99, 131–33, 175; I Used to Be a Highbrow, but Look at Me Now 32, 165, 174, 176; Informing a Nation 172; The Kennel Murder Case 52, 90, 94, 123, 177; The Kidnap Murder Case 90–93, 140; A Man of Promise 32, 129, 166, 171; Misinforming the Nation 172; Modern Painting 34, 171; The Scarab Murder Case 23, 52, 92–93, 123; “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” 203n1; What Nietsche Taught 172; The Winter Murder Case 7, 177 Wu, William F. 204n8 “Zigzags of Treachery” 135

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