SOURCE: "Charlie Chan," in The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crimefighters & Other Good Guys, Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1977, pp. 43-50.

In the following essay, Penzler provides a biography of the fictional detective Charlie Chan.

Sinister orientals are not often used in adventure fiction today, but a half-century ago they were one of the favorite cliches of authors who needed genuinely frightening villains. The ultimate "Yellow Peril" was, of course, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, but he had plenty of nasty company in the early years of the twentieth century immediately following the Boxer Rebellion and continuing right up to the Second World War. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took the fun out of fictional menaces from the East.

The concept of an Oriental as a hero, or even as a major benevolent entity, was a new one in 1925 when Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan to serve...