ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes genre's impact on racial representation in a body of popular fiction that has shaped European Americans' definition of Asian American identity for more than three quarters of a century: the six Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. It focuses on The House Without a Key, giving peripheral attention to Biggers's later Charlie Chan books and the highly influential Charlie Chan movies. More powerfully than any other Chinese American writer, Frank Chin has conveyed the psychological damage caused by Biggers's creation. Biggers's representations of race were conventional but complex. To advance his reiterated goal of undermining stereotypes of both "Chinatown and wicked Chinese villains", he experimented particularly with genres of locale and of criminality. Until the academy began to turn its attention to popular culture and media studies in the 1970s and 1980s, Charlie Chan eluded the critical gaze of literary and ethnic historiographers.
