The House Without a Key, Earl Derr Biggers

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language: English
country: USA
year: 1925
form: novel
genre(s): mystery
dates read: 25.3.24-3.4.24

continuing my exploration of early 20th-century detective fiction, I listened to an audiobook of Earl Derr Biggers’s The House Without a Key, the first appearance of his Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan.

in bell hooks’s essay “Eating the Other”, she analyzes cultural narratives around a specific kind of encounter with the Other — often but not always sexual — where a member of a dominant group seeks out the Other in order to be Changed by this encounter with Otherness. this is the plot of The House Without a Key: an uptight Boston banker named John Quincy (lmao) Winterslip comes to Honolulu to retrieve his wayward Aunt Minerva on behalf of the family, only to find that his (distant) cousin Dan was murdered the night before he arrived.

the murder mystery is ostensibly the plot, but Chan doesn’t show up until like a third of the way through the book, and even while he and John Quincy are investigating the main thing the book is interested in is John Quincy’s experience of Hawaii and the way it Changes Him, as he discovers he likes the “rougher”, more exciting life of the West Coast (though of course he settles in more respectable San Francisco rather than in Hawaii itself). it’s very interested in upper class social mores and, especially, the contrast between the sedate Boston Brahmin high society John Quincy belongs to and the “wilder” society culture of the West Coast (the opening chapters are set in San Francisco) and Hawaii. the mystery of manners aspect of the novel was probably the most interesting part. it’s certainly what the book was most interested in — the mystery itself felt mostly like an afterthought.

this aspect of the novel is first and foremost part of a broader body of culture aiming to mediate the colonial occupation of Hawaii for a US audience: the book is significantly concerned with introducing the territory to a (white) American audience and, effectively, teach them to view it not as a “primitive”, “foreign” land but rather as a part of the United States. this is particularly driven home by the wide range of (white, of course) characters who lament to John Quincy over the course of the novel that Hawaii has changed so much since “the eighties” and been, essentially, ruined by becoming part of the US so that it’s now “civilized” — it’s become (or it’s becoming) just an extension of the US, no longer ruled by an exotic Native Hawaiian king (several references to wild, decadent parties at Kalākaua’s court). “actually,” the novel assures its mainland audience, “it’s not much different from San Francisco!”

it is also, though, a really striking document of this transitional period in Hawaiian history. worth a look if you’re interested as a snapshot of the early parts of the process of colonial integration, both in its representation of the population of Honolulu and in the way it addresses itself to a mainland audience.

the handling of Charlie Chan himself is, of course, fantastically racist. Biggers set out to counter Yellow Peril stereotypes and the Fu Manchu archetype, and he did this by invoking a bunch of stereotypes with the opposite valence. Chan is meticuously observant, appropriately subservient to and respectful towards the white characters, vaguely spiritual (he claims that all Chinese people have some kind of mild psychic ability), and full of the equally vague wisdom of the East. it’s arguably better than Yellow Peril narratives, but, like, still very bad.

moods: lighthearted, mysterious


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