Barbara Gregorich

Charlie Chan's Poppa Barbara Gregorich

When she was sixteen years old Barbara Gregorich discovered the Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers on the local-authors shelf of the Warren, Ohio, Public Library. She fell in love with the wisdom, humor, and perceptiveness of the amiable Chinese-Hawaiian police detective, and she admired the author who created him. Although seldom given credit for it, Biggers was one of the first writers to help create mystery's Golden Age on the American side of the Atlantic. His six Chan novels were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Bobbs-Merrill, and sought by Hollywood, and he received fan mail by the bagful. Wanting to know more about Earl Derr Biggers and how he came to write his mysteries, Gregorich researched the Bobbs-Merrill Archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. There she read all the correspondence between Biggers and his editor - correspondence which brings to life the author's struggles to satisfy the Chan-hungry public. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Twenties, mystery scholars are looking back on the writers of that period, starting with Earl Derr Biggers and the 1925 publication of The House Without a Key, his first Chan novel. Charlie Chan's Poppa: Earl Derr Biggers provides an analysis of that novel and the five that followed, tracing not only Biggers' growth as a mystery writer, but also the development of his protagonist, Charlie Chan.