Earl Derr Biggers
3 books
- Chan spends half this one trying to catch a boat home to Honolulu (his new baby's waiting) and keeps getting pulled back by a murdered Scotland Yard man and a woman who vanished in India fifteen years earlier. Unhurried, courtly, satisfying puzzle stuff, if you like your detectives patient.
- Charlie Chan spends most of this one undercover as a houseboy on a desert ranch, quietly seething at the disguise, and watching him work a murder with no body and only a dead parrot as witness is good fun. Unhurried, dry, very 1920s.
- You get a pleasantly unhurried Honolulu mystery, with John Quincy Winterslip poking through family secrets and Charlie Chan solving things through patience rather than theatrics. The island atmosphere carries it, though the early-twentieth-century racial attitudes and Chan’s stylized speech can make parts feel dated.