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I was in the mood for something light and funny the other day, so I went to see what the internet had to offer in the way of non-Charlie Chan novels by Earl Derr Biggers. I found Love Insurance, which was exactly what I was looking for, except in that it didn’t really thrill me in any way.
The premise is kind of excellent, to a point, and if the book had revolved around Owen Jephson, underwriter for Lloyd’s of London, I think I would have liked it more. Jephson specializes in insuring incedibly peculiar things: he’s insured an actor against losing weight, a duchess against rain at her garden party, etc. I want very badly for Herbert George Jenkins to have written a book about Jephson, but sadly the world doesn’t work that way. And Biggers is more concerned first with Allan, Lord Harrowby, who wants to insure his wedding date, and then, more centrally, with Dick Minot, who Lloyd’s sends to Florida and protect their assets by making sure that Harrowby’s wedding to the beautiful Cynthia Meyrick goes as planned. Minot, inevitably, falls in love with Cynthia almost at first sight, and that’s only the first of many complications — there are jewel thieves, long-lost relatives, blackmail, and a society matron who hires a guy to write bon mots for her. And that list barely scrapes the surface.
In general, I really, really like about the first 3/4 of any given Earl Derr Biggers book, but this one felt more consistent. I never liked it as much as the beginning of Seven Keys to Baldpate or The Agony Column, but I liked it pretty much equally all the way through. Possibly that was because it was pretty intensely predictable, but that was okay, beasue it was all pretty silly and fun, too.
This is one of those books I sort of vaguely like but can’t work up any enthusiasm about, and I don’t know whether that’s my fault, or if it’s that Biggers didn’t expend any effort on characterization, or that the most interesting character disappeared after the first few chapters or what. I suspect a lot of people will enjoy it more than I did.
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By: Melody,
on 10/4/2010
Blog:
Redeeming Qualities
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This was supposed to be a post on Seven Keys to Baldpate, but Seven Keys to Baldpate started out as possibly the best thing ever, and ended up being kind of disappointing, and I can’t think of anything else to say about it. A brief synopsis: first it was a kind of metacommentary on storytelling. Then it was not.
Other books that I don’t, at the moment, have a whole lot to say about:
Fantômas, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. I worry that I just don’t like French detective stories, which sucks, because there are a lot of important ones. Fantômas had it’s moments, I guess, but it had this…tone, I guess, that was similar to all of the earlyish French detective novels I’ve tried to read and given up on. Also I knew who the criminal was far too early on. And I’m not usually that good at guessing the identity of the murderer.
After Fantômas, I picked up Queen Lucia, by E.F. Benson. I really liked David Blaize, and the Mapp and Lucia books are supposed to be Benson’s best work, but I have a hard time seeing why one would enjoy these books, unless one likes really hateful characters.
That said, I’m still reading them. I’m halfway through Miss Mapp, which is book two, and apparently Mapp and Lucia don’t meet up until book four. I’m not sure I’ll last that long. It’s not much fun to spend time with characters who hate each other, and Miss Mapp is an even worse offender on that front than Queen Lucia is.
I suppose I will post next when I find a book I actually like.
So, you can thank Earl Derr Biggers for my meditations on racism yesterday. Reading up on Charlie Chan before I started The House Without a Key, I found an incredibly wide range of opinions on whether or not the depiction of Chan was racist, from “of course it isn’t; he’s a good guy,” to “the broken English and the servility are both kind of massively offensive.” So of course I read the book with the intention of forming my own opinion. And I did. I formed two, actually. One is that any depiction of a Chinese-American as a main character and a good person in the mid-1920s is a really good thing. The other is that consistently having the point-of-view characters be shocked and skeptical that a Chinese man could be a detective is kind of upsetting — and kept interrupting the flow of the story for me. Also I have issues with the way Biggers has the central character duplicate all of Chan’s work.
That said, I’m really enjoying Biggers’ books. I like his plots. I like his atmosphere. I like his characters, even when they think thoughts along the lines of “I seem to be involved with three different women. Huh.”
The House Without a Key is mostly about the Winterslips, a family of a type beloved by adventure novelists — the kind where most of them are perfectly normal and sedate, and every so often one of them is born with wanderlust. The father of Dan and Amos Winterslip was one of those, so Dan and Amos were born in Hawaii and have lived there all their lives. Their cousin Minerva has a touch of it, too, so she keeps prolonging her visit to her Hawaiian cousins, much to the chagrin of the Winterslips back at family headquarters in Boston. They send John Quincy Winterslip, a nephew who seems to have escaped the “gypsy strain,” to bring her back.
John Quincy is happily leading a fairly dull life. He’s genuinely interested in his job, which has something to do with bonds. He plays a lot of golf. He’s engaged to a girl called Agatha. You get the picture. Except that when he arrives in San Francisco on his way to Hawaii, he has the feeling he’s been there before. It’s less of a hint of the supernatural than a combination of déjà vu and love at first sight, as far as I can tell. And when he gets to Hawaii, he likes it there too, and quickly adjusts to the slower pace and the surroundings.
His arrival is complicated by murder of Dan Winterslip, which takes place shortly before his arrival on the island. For various reasons, John Quincy joins the police investigation of the murder, and finds himself collaborating with Charlie Chan, formerly of China, but a twenty-five year resident of Hawaii. He has a large English vocabulary and uses lots of flowery language, but he’s got little knowledge of English grammar, and he says “are” instead of “is” a lot.
Really there are three investigations going on simultaneously and occasionally intersecting: John Quincy’s, Charlie’s, and the chief of police, Hallett’s. Each of them has things they’re not telling the others, and each of them has some favored suspects — and there are a lot to choose from, because Dan Winterslip wasn’t well liked, and for good reason. The several investigators allowed Biggers to keep a lot of storylines going at once, although I was kind of disappointed by the fact that the one person I thought was going to be a major suspect was basically the one character who wasn’t investigated at all. Also, there’s John Quincy’s three girls, to choose between, although it’s obvious pretty early on how that’s going to pan out. Mostly, though, The Hous
It’s really hot in London, and Geoffrey West is coping by going to the Carlton for breakfast every morning, partly because it’s a bit cooler there, and partly because it’s the only place where you can still get strawberries. The American girl who comes in with her father one morning has the bad taste to prefer grapefruit to strawberries, but she shares West’s fondness for the Personal Notices section of the Daily Mail, AKA the agony column. People use it to discreetly send messages, whether they be love letters, “fly at one; all is discovered,” or cryptic remarks about fish. And so it seems perfectly reasonable, if a little unconventional, for West to use it to communicate with the girl, with whom he has fallen in love at first sight.
For some reason, she demands that he write her a letter a day for a week. In the first, he tells her about the flat he’s renting, and his building’s wonderful garden, and his slightly awkward relations with the man who lives upstairs. In the second letter, he tells her about the man who lives upstairs’ murder.This is very successful at engaging her attention.
There were two twists in The Agony Column (by Earl Derr Biggers, author of the Charlie Chan mysteries), one of which I saw coming miles away, the other of which I should have seen, but didn’t. I enjoyed noticing the first and I enjoyed being surprised by the second. Now I just have to figure out whether The Agony Column is a romance disguised as a mystery, or a mystery disguised as a romance.
I think I’ve talked about this here before, but I’m still not sure how to deal with racism and xenophobia when they show up in the books I talk about here. And they show up a lot.
Every time all the black characters are stupid, or the author talks about the whites of their eyes a lot, or Chinese people are conniving opium addicts, or the entire Italian population of New York lives for the opportunity to steal a white man’s job, it’s offensive. It’s never not going to be offensive. And if I’m already not really liking a book, an instance of blatant xenophobia will probably make me stop reading it.
But what about the books that have a lot going for them until the narrator takes a trip through his local Chinatown and shudders with disgust at the population?
You can’t judge an author writing in 1900 for their racism the same way you could if they were writing now. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they get a free pass, either.
Basically, racism makes me uncomfortable and unhappy, but it doesn’t stop me me from loving, say, Marie Conway Oemler, whose black characters are mostly benevolent, superstitious nonentities. Oemler isn’t a great example, because the first part of The Purple Heights is a good argument for her awareness and disapproval of institutionalized racism. But that’s part of the problem. There’s a spectrum of writing quality from, let’s say, extremely enjoyable to not enjoyable at all. And there’s a spectrum between not noticeably racist and massively racist. And where a book falls on one spectrum isn’t correlated to where it falls on the other.
In the last few days I’ve been reading a couple of books by Earl Derr Biggers. One is the first Charlie Chan mystery and the other is an unrelated romance/mystery. But have some really interesting characterization and plotting. Both give me trouble on the racism front. I don’t know how I want to feel about them, or how I actually do feel about them.
The worse the stereotyping is, the easier it is to deal with, somehow. Take Sax Rohmer, for instance. I read the first Fu Manchu book. I found it impossible to take seriously (actually, I have a fantasy that someday someone will make a movie of this book in which Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie are paranoid crazies and there is no conspiracy at all. It wouldn’t require many changes). It’s the prejudice that’s interwoven into a more general view of society that’s difficult to know how to deal with.
I also suspect there’s a lot of more subtle stereotypes that I miss, just because I’m white, and American. On the other hand, I’m hyper-aware of antisemitism — for which reason I don’t talk about it much. But there are books that I love that tell me that because I’m Jewish, I’m incapable of being a decent person — for some reason, adventure novels are really bad about that. And for some reason. I’m inclined to let those antisemitic stereotypes pass.
I don’t know. I guess what I’m saying is that this is a complicated issue, and one that I often think about. And I would welcome discussion of it.
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Hmmm, based on your summary and the title I can guess where this book is going.