Charlie Chan, family man

Even the casual Charlie Chan fan knows that Hawaii’s most famous fictional Chinese detective had a wife and lots of kids. Some of the Chan films made the most of the offspring, especially Charlie Chan at the Circus and Charlie Chan in Honolulu. In the movies Chan’s older children and their sometimes helpful, often comical, activities made them easy targets for Charlie’s trademark aphorisms. 

Just how big was the Chan family?

When Earl Derr Biggers wrote one Charlie Chan novel after another—six in all—he developed the character, and the size of his family, from book to book. The number of Chan children was nine in the first mystery, The House Without a Key; ten in The Chinese Parrot; and eleven in Behind that Curtain. In the movies the number ranged from eleven to fourteen. The film series proper (not counting the three 1920s efforts) lasted from 1931 to 1949, and it’s understandable that over eighteen years its many scriptwriters paid little attention to certain details. In some of the movies the actual number was mentioned. In others, glimpses of family were offered—sometimes Charlie looked fondly at a group photograph he carried on his travels.

How many can you name?

Charlie Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers named just four kids in his six books: Henry, Rose, Evelyn and Barry. Movie Chan kids had lots of names: Lee, Jimmy, Charlie Jr., Tommy, Frances, Ling . . . the list was long and subject to the discretion of Hollywood writers.

The surviving script for 1933’s Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case (the film itself is considered lost) identifies the detective’s oldest son as—my favorite Chan family name of all—Oswald. Perhaps those involved in the Chan film machinery had second thoughts about that name. Charlie solved cases without any children appearing in the next two films in the series, and in 1935’s Charlie Chan in Paris Keye Luke debuted as the oldest Chan son, Lee. Oswald vanished into the mists of Charlie Chan lore.

Naming names of Charlie Chan’s children

When setting out to write the first of my Charlie Chan Returns series, Death, I Said, I wanted to continue the Earl Derr Biggers timeline in several ways. Reviving the Biggers version of Chan was my goal, and it seemed appropriate to start by giving some of Charlie’s kids (the few who were named in the original novels) roles that built on Biggers’s descriptions.

Mr. and Mrs. Chan’s oldest daughter, Rose, appears in 1929’s The Black Camel, and Chan mentions her several times in subsequent books as attending college “on the mainland . . . in south California.” So Death, I Said begins with an update on Rose. She has apparently completed college and is about to study law in San Francisco, and her father comes to visit—and to investigate suspicious doings at the request of an old friend.

My second effort, The Tangled String, provided an opportunity to name the seven Chan children that Biggers had no time to christen. It became something of a necessity after I determined that the story should take the detective, his wife and their entire brood to Boston. Checking in at a hotel required entering the names (including that of Mrs. Chan), and I stepped far out onto a limb of the Chan family tree accordingly.

Full disclosure: The Tangled String’s identification of all eleven Chan children contains an error, which—who knows?—may be corrected in the third book in the series. Or maybe in some future series entry; I’m in no hurry.

Naming the kids that Biggers left unnamed is just one of the ideas that have bubbled up since this humble Charlie Chan revival began. Others will occur. Some will vanish, others may come to fruition in due course.

As Charlie Chan said in The Black Camel: “In time the grass becomes milk.”