13

The House Without a Key

J. A. GILMAN RESIDENCE, HONOLULU, 1908. THE HOUSE WAS PART OF THE HOTEL RUN BY MRS. LA VANCHA GRAY IN THE 1920S (Photo by L. E. Edgeworth, courtesy of Bishop Museum)

In an obscure corner of an inside page, I found an item to the effect that a certain hapless Chinese, being too fond of opium, had been arrested by Sergeants Chang Apana and Lee Fook, of the Honolulu Police. So Sergeant Charlie Chan entered the story of The House Without a Key.

—E. D. Biggers

AFTER THE SUCCESS of Seven Keys to Baldpate, Earl Biggers continued to produce at a rapid pace. In addition to writing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, the American Magazine, and the Ladies’ Home Journal, he also published Love Insurance, a romantic farce, in 1914, as well as Inside the Line, a play. The Agony Column, a novella, quickly followed in 1916. Particularly during the last part of that decade, he concentrated on drama and collaborated with a number of Broadway and Hollywood producers. “At one point,” according to his biographer Barbara Gregorich, “Biggers was writing and rewriting two plays a day, attending rehearsals for one in the morning, the other in the afternoon.”¹ Such a frantic pace wreaked havoc with his health, resulting in a doctor’s recommendation of a long, therapeutic vacation, which took him to the sandy white beaches of Waikiki.

Biggers arrived in Hawaii in April 1920, at a time when narcotic arrests and police graft scandals were making daily headlines in Honolulu newspapers. Standing at the crossroads of the Orient and the United States, Hawaii was then a major transit point as well as a destination for opium traffic. According to an article published in the Honolulu Advertiser, dope traffic had the islands in its “horrid grip.” By 1924, an estimated two thousand addicts in Hawaii were spending $6,000,000 a year on opium.²

“Officers Seize Opium; Arrest Two Japanese,” screamed one headline in the Advertiser on March 9, 1920. In this bust, federal agents confiscated $7,200 worth of opium. On April 7, Arthur McDuffie’s team uncovered another opium store and found eight tins of narcotics in a garage. But the biggest headline of those spring months was the arrest of Moses Needham, captain of police in Honolulu, for failure to report opium confiscation. According to an Advertiser article on March 23,

Captain of Police Moses Needham was arrested at 3 o’clock yesterday afternoon on Alakea Street by United States Marshal J. J. Smiddy on a warrant which charges that on the evening of February 29 he took from a Chinese six tins of opium and $211 in cash and failed to make a report of the matter to the headquarters. Needham’s bond was fixed at $1,000 and he was released from custody at 3:45 o’clock yesterday afternoon at the marshal’s office.³

These news stories clearly made an indelible impression on Biggers, who was relaxing his nerves under the tropical shade in Waikiki: his first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key, involves opium trafficking on the islands. Biggers stayed for three months at one of the cottages run by Mrs. La Vancha Maria Chapin Gray on the beachfront that still bears her name—Gray’s Beach. When he first checked in, Biggers asked for the key to the cottage. “What key?” retorted Mrs. Gray. In those days, no one in Waikiki would lock their doors. That brief exchange—culture shock for a Bostonian—would eventually inspire the title of the first Chan book.

Biggers was sitting on the lanai of the cottage one evening. A tropical scene of “semi-barbaric beauty” unfolded in front of him that he would later immortalize at the very beginning of The House:

It was the hour at which [Miss Minerva Winterslip] liked Waikiki best, the hour just preceding dinner and the quick tropic darkness. The shadows cast by the tall cocoanut palms lengthened and deepened, the light of the falling sun flamed on Diamond Head and tinted with gold the rollers sweeping in from the coral reef. A few late swimmers, reluctant to depart, dotted those waters whose touch is like the caress of a lover. On the springboard of the nearest float a slim brown girl poised for one delectable instant. What a figure!…Like an arrow the slender figure rose, then fell; the perfect dive, silent and clean.⁴

A strong swimmer who can make a silent, clean dive turns out to be the novel’s cunning killer. As the crepuscular light faded in front of his lanai, Biggers saw the looming outline of a ship anchored not too far offshore. It must be a ship that had arrived too late to be cleared by the authorities to dock at the harbor, he thought, just as would occur with the steamer that transported the murderer in his novel. The ship’s lights twinkled in the vast expanse of a darkening ocean. To his left, Biggers could see the winking yellow eye of the Diamond Head Lighthouse; to his right, the lanterns of swift Japanese sampans glowed intermittently. An idea suddenly dawned: he could write a novel in which the killer swims ashore from a ship docked beyond the harbor, commits the murder, and then swims back to the ship, allowing himself a perfect alibi. The idea became the basis for the murder plot in The House Without a Key.

At this point, there was still no Charlie Chan. If the novel was conceived on the cool lanai of Mrs. Gray’s beach cottage in the spring of 1920, Chan would be born four years later in the stuffy, hushed reading room of the New York Public Library—or at least that was Biggers’s claim.

Having conceived of this new novel, the workaholic Biggers could no longer sit still, despite his doctor’s orders to take a break from writing. He tried to rent an office in downtown Honolulu, but the owners of the few vacant places looked askance at Biggers—renting a business office in order to write a book must have been too exotic an idea for the locals. So Biggers ended up renting a room in a dingy, small hotel. Having put his desk and typewriter there, Biggers would go downtown at about nine every morning, feeling good in the cool breeze. It got hot fairly quickly in Honolulu after sunrise, and before long the harsh sun would sap his energy. The hotel room had a cozy double bed, and the temptation to lie down for just a few minutes was too strong. A nap that started out in midmorning often ended in time for supper, a tropical phenomenon experienced by John Quincy in The House, when he first landed in the lotus land: “Lazy, indeed. John Quincy had a feeling for words. He stopped and stared at an agile little cloud flitting swiftly through the sky—got up from his chair to watch it disappear over Diamond Head. On his way back to the desk he had to pass the bed. What inviting beds they had out here! He lifted the mosquito netting and dropped down for a moment.”⁵ Thanks to the distracting balmy weather in Hawaii, Biggers did not complete his Waikiki murder mystery there. Instead, he finished it at a lodge in Williamstown, Massachusetts, during the long, cool summer of 1924.

Upon returning from Hawaii, Biggers continued to mull over the Waikiki novel while selling his short stories. On October 23, 1922, Biggers wrote to his editor, Laurance Chambers, “I am, as I told you on the street, contemplating a novel—a mystery story of Honolulu, which I have promised to the Post as a serial. I have it pretty well worked out, and expect to go to work on it after I do about two more short stories to get money enough to keep me going while engaged with the longer work.”⁶

Two months later, Biggers reported to Chambers on the progress of the novel, which he tentatively titled Moonlight at the Crossroads:

I enclose a couple pages regarding the projected novel…. I have a large list of characters with which to play here—army people, traders, planters. An Americanized Chinese house boy—the star pitcher on the All-China baseball nine—the lawyer for the opium ring—an Admiral of the Fleet who introduced the two-step to Honolulu society in the days of King Kalakaua—an old Yankee from New Bedford who came over sixty years before, married a Hawaiian, and never went back—a champion Hawaiian swimmer—beachcombers—the picturesque keeper of a run-down hotel at the beach who is the younger son of a good English family—his daughter—the president of the Japanese bank.⁷

Still there was no Charlie Chan.

In the winter of 1923, Bigger’s health declined again, leading him to consider selling his house in Pelham Manor and moving to warmer climes for good. As he wrote to Chambers, “I haven’t been quite so well as I hoped, but it may be that the coming of spring will finally drive out the poisons, tonsorial and otherwise…. The doctor says I should never spend another winter in a cold climate, and was particularly anxious for me to get away this winter. But alas, no one has bought the house, and I seem marooned here.”⁸

The following summer brought good news. “The house deal was settled yesterday,” he wrote Chambers on June 11. “Hope to have a good manuscript for you soon.” While en route to the Berkshires, his usual summer hideout, Biggers stopped by the cavernous New York Public Library to do some reading and refresh his memories of Hawaii. It was in the Reading Room, while browsing through a big pile of Hawaiian newspapers, that Biggers supposedly came across the name of Chang Apana: “In an obscure corner of an inside page, I found an item to the effect that a certain hapless Chinese, being too fond of opium, had been arrested by Sergeants Chang Apana and Lee Fook, of the Honolulu Police. So Sergeant Charlie Chan entered the story of The House Without a Key.”⁹

If Biggers’s claim were true—that the chubby Chinese detective, who would charm millions of readers and viewers, was indeed born in that dim, hushed Reading Room—then Charlie Chan certainly would be in good company. As the Great Depression sent the country into a tailspin, a generation of 1930s writers, including Henry Miller and Henry Roth, would make good use of the Reading Room inside Forty-second Street’s stone-lion–guarded building. Chan would have been born, then, in the same cradle as Miller’s semiautobiographical alter ego and Roth’s Yiddish-speaking David Schearl.

Biggers’s claim, however, cannot easily be verified.

My careful examination of the two major Honolulu newspapers being published in 1924, the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, failed to locate the item Biggers specified. The only Apana news that came close was an equally obscure item published in the “Brevities” section of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on June 6, 1924, which reads: “Arrested for Assault—Tong Kut Lum, alleged assailant of Lai Tin, was arrested this morning by Detective Chang Apana. He is alleged to have struck Lai yesterday, following an altercation. Both men were members of a Chinese theatrical company. Tong was charged with assault and battery.”¹⁰

While it is quite possible that Biggers was reading newspapers from previous years, further evidence from the Honolulu Police Department seems to suggest that Biggers might have conflated events. In a letter dated February 26, 1979, Earl Thompson, assistant chief of the Administrative Bureau of the HPD, replied to a query from a Mr. J. David Reno of Boston, Massachusetts, obviously a Charlie Chan aficionado: “Regarding your inquiry of Lee Fook, complete checks of our records fail to identify this person as a police officer with our department.”¹¹

Without Lee Fook, the news item regarding Apana and Lee making opium arrests appears as fishy as the fifth ace on the river.

Just to be thorough, I also checked with the New York Public Library and was told by their research division that there was no record of the library’s having subscribed to either of the two Hawaii newspapers before 1924.¹²

Such a legalistic attachment to historical facts may take just a bit of the romance out of Charlie Chan’s legendary birth. But, regardless of how or where Biggers first encountered Chang Apana, it is certain that Charlie Chan arrived fully formed—like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus—in that distant summer of 1924. And those summer months, as we will see, proved to be a turning point in American culture.