Books with author Earl Derr Biggers

Baldpate Inn has a mystery and seven keys. The novelist has one. The other six fall into the hands of six apparent lunatics: 1. a hermit who flees from barbers and women has a key, 2. a peroxide blonde who "just loves" men has a key, 3. a college professor who has been laughed out of his job has a key, 4. a political "boss" who eats cigars has a key, 5. a Belle of High Sociétée has a key and, 6. a bold, bad clubman has a key.

Biggers had always been interested in mystery fiction, but his interest in Hawaii clearly stems from a 1919 vacation in Honolulu. While there, he read a newspaper article on a Chinese detective named Chang Apana. Apana would become the model for Charlie Chan in Biggers' 1925 novel, House Without a Key, and there quickly followed five more Charlie Chan novels. Fifty Candles -- first published in the Saturday Evening Post, just two years after that 1919 vacation -- shows how Hawaii, China, and murder had already begun to come together in Biggers' imagination. The story starts in a courthouse in Honolulu, moves to China, then to fog-shrouded San Francisco. Many of the elements used in the Charlie Chan series are present: Chinese characters (both sinister and sympathetic), the Honolulu legal system, a shrewd detective (in this case, the lawyer Mark Drew rather than a policemen), and a baffling murder complete with red herrings and plenty of suspects. Though Fifty Candles is a murder mystery, it is also a romance, with the romantic elements at times in the forefront. Mostly, though, it is a book that will delight Biggers' many fans as they trace the origins of Charlie Chan.

Biggers had always been interested in mystery fiction, but his interest in Hawaii clearly stems from a 1919 vacation in Honolulu. While there, he read a newspaper article on a Chinese detective named Chang Apana. Apana would become the model for Charlie Chan in Biggers' 1925 novel, House Without a Key, and there quickly followed five more Charlie Chan novels. Fifty Candles -- first published in the Saturday Evening Post, just two years after that 1919 vacation -- shows how Hawaii, China, and murder had already begun to come together in Biggers' imagination. The story starts in a courthouse in Honolulu, moves to China, then to fog-shrouded San Francisco. Many of the elements used in the Charlie Chan series are present: Chinese characters (both sinister and sympathetic), the Honolulu legal system, a shrewd detective (in this case, the lawyer Mark Drew rather than a policemen), and a baffling murder complete with red herrings and plenty of suspects. Though Fifty Candles is a murder mystery, it is also a romance, with the romantic elements at times in the forefront. Mostly, though, it is a book that will delight Biggers' many fans as they trace the origins of Charlie Chan.

DEATH IN SAN FRANCISCO . . . Suddenly from across the hall came a cry, sharp, uncanny, terrible. I ran out in the direction from which it had come and stood on the threshold of the Drew dining room. A table was set with gleaming silver and white linen, and in its center stood a cake, on which fifty absurd pink candles flickered bravely. There appeared to be no one in the room. On the other side of the table a French window stood open to the fog, and I went around to investigate. I had taken perhaps a dozen steps when I stopped, appalled. Old Drew was lying on the carpet, and one yellow lean hand, always so adept at reaching out and seizing, held a corner of the white tablecloth. There was a dark stain on the left side of his dress coat; and when I pulled the coat back, I saw on the otherwise spotless linen underneath a great red circle that grew and grew. He was quite dead. I stood erect, and for a dazed uncertain moment I stared about the room. Beside me, on the table, fifty yellow points of flame trembled like human things terrified at what they had seen.

A light weight writer, Mr. McGee, besides that it is time for him to write a classic novel; in an effort to write this novel he needed to find a place for perfect solitude. That place turns out to be an inn that was closed for the winter high up on Baldpate Mountain. Little did he know that there were seven Keys to Baldpate Inn. With each key can a person or persons with unique characteristics and a good reason for being there. If you can believe who they are and their reasons. Mr. McGee suspects them all of being some part of a convoluted plot which nobody will let him in on.We go along for the ride. There is no use speculating. And Mr. McKee's chivalry may be his undoing. Be sure to read the book to the last sentence.I came to this book after watching the 1935 version of Seven Keys to Baldpate with Walter Brennan as the station master. I have still to see the play however the movie was more based on the play than the book. Some of the statements were directly out of the book but many others had that Cohan feel.

Near Fine book in a Good, essentially complete jacket. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1932. First Edition. Small octavo, 307 pp. Cloth, illustrated endpapers, with the scarce and well-known deco jacket. A Charlie Chan caper, sprinkled throughout with the Asian-American sleuth's proverbial bon mots and keen deductions. Condition: Jacket chipped and with short tears and creases and spine a bit sunned; volume cloth clean and bright; ownership signature at flyleaf; Near Fine in Good jacket which shows several notable chips but which has not been clipped and is essentially complete. See scans. Keeper of the Keys - the only Charlie Chan novel not made into a movie - is also the only one in which he actually did spout non-stop clever one-liners, as we have come to expect after Warner Oland's performances in film; that characteristic of Chan's was in fact much less developed by Biggers in other titles. Keeper also shows Chan's humanistic side: in one passage, he expresses quiet regret that he has not - as his servant Ah Sing has - maintained his Chinese-ness after so many years in America. Chan feels he is neither American nor Chinese; Ah Sing - stateside longer than Chan - has sustained his ethnic identity. See scans. L57n