The Steamy East

John Ball is best known as the creator of Pasadena Police Department homicide detective Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night (1965), which won an Edgar Award. His wife was Nan Hamilton, the creator of Sam Ohara in The Shape of Fear (1986).

Virgil Tibbs novels

Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger played detective Virgil Tibbs and police chief Bill Gillespie in the 1967 film adaptation of In the Heat of the Night. The movie won five oscars and cinced both Tibbs' and Ball's fame.

Tibbs starred in seven of Ball's novels, two set in Asia and a third involving Asia and Asians.

1965 In the Heat of the Night [Wells, small town in deep south]
1966 The Cool Cottontail [Pasadena, San Bernardino Mountains]
1969 Johnny Get Your Gun [Pasadena, Disneyland]
     aka Death For a Playmate
1972 Five Pieces of Jade [Pasadena, Chinese]
1976 The Eyes of Buddha [Pasadena, Nepal, Katmandu]
1980 Then Came Violence [Pasadena, Africa]
1986 Singapore [Singapore]

Other novels and non-fiction

John Ball wrote about a dozen other novels, most of them crime mysteries. He spent some time in Japan, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia, the setting of a couple of Tibbs' stories but also of two other novels and a non-fiction work.

Other novels set in Asia

1968 Miss One Thousand Spring Blossoms [Japan]
1989 Kiwi Target [New Zealand, Hong Kong]

Non-fiction book about Taiwan

John Ball
Dragon Hotel
New York/Tokyo: Walker/Weatherhill, 1969
149 pages, hardcover
Drawings by Hiroshi Manabe

With a BA in literature from Harvard in 1907, Biggers turned to writing popular fiction. His first novel, published in 1913, gained him a reputation as a writer of humorous mysteries, most of them forgettable in the wake of his Charlie Chan stories.

Biggers wrote the following novels and novellas in addition to his Charlie Chan stories.

1913 Seven Keys to Baldpate
1914 Love Insurance
1915 Inside the Lines (with Robert Welles Ritchie)
1916 The Agony Column (aka Second Floor Mystery)
1926 Fifty Candles (later published with The Agony Column)

Life of Thomas Burke

Forthcoming.

Works by Thomas Burke

1911 Pavement and Pastures: A Book of Songs
     London and Norwich Press, 47 pages
     One-hundred copies are said to have been printed
     by Burke himself and distributed to friends and
     the press.  He is rumored to have withdrawn the
     book and destroyed remaining copies.
     (Peter Ellis, Bookseller, London, Abebooks.com)

1915 Nights in Town: A London Autobiography
     London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915, 410 pages
     London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917, 287 pages

     Published in US as "Nights in London"
     New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1916, 270 pages
     New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1918, 270 pages

1916 Limehouse Nights: Chinatown Tales

     Published in US as "Limehouse Nights"

1917 London Lamps: A Book of Songs
     London: Grant Richards, 1917, 48 pages
     New York: Robert M. McBride, 1919, 48 pages

1917 Twinkletoes: A Tale of Chinatown
     London: Grant Richards, 1917, 214 pages
     London: Readers Library, 1920s

     US edition "Twinkletoes: A Tale of Limehouse"
     New York: Robert M. McBride, 1918, 259 pages

     New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924, 259 pages
     With b/w photos from the movie.
     Photoplay edition with scenes from the
     First National picture starring Colleen Moore.

1919 Out and About: A Note-Book of London in War-Time
     London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919, 142 pages

     Published in US as "Out and About London"
     New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1919, 190 pages

1921 Whispering Windows: Tales of the Waterside
     London: Grant Richards, 1921, 309 pages

     Published in US as "More Limehouse Nights"
     New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921, 282 pages

     Republished in UK as
     "Whispering Windows: More Limehouse Nights"
     London: Cassell and Company, 1928, 309 pages

1921 The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London
     London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921, 221 pages
     New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921, 221 pages
     New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1921, 221 pages

1922 The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels
     London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922, 318 pages
     New York: George H. Doran, 1922, 324 pages

1924 The Wind and the Rain: A Book of Confessions
     London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1924, 288 pages
     New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924, 309 pages

1920 Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse
     [Transcribed by Thomas Burke]
     London: George Allen & Unwin, London, 1920, 40 pages
     New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1920, 67 pages

     "Poems with a Chinese persona living in Limehouse,
     in the East End of London by the Thames"
     (Brews 'n Browse, Raumati South, New Zealand)

     "Sixty-six poems, not in dialect,
     supposedly written by a Chinese resident of London's
     Limehouse District"
     (McBlain Books, Hamden, Abebooks.com)

In Chinatown

1926 East of Mansion House
     New York: Doran, 1926

     London: Cassell and Company, 1928, 270 pages
     Red cloth, first edition

     London: Cassell and Company, 1930, 270 pages
     Green cloth, popular edition

     Note: This collection of 12 stories did not appear
     in the UK until two years after the US edition.

     According to an undated letter written for Burke
     by his secretary, G.M.Y, in response to a query
     from a U.S. collector named P. L., dated "Sept. 23rd",

        "There is no English edition and will not be.
        Mr. Burke does not care very much for it,
        and will not allow it to be published on this side."

     [Copy of letter retained by Henry A. Schwab, with his
     letter to P. L. dated  "February 11th, 1932" in
     green cloth Cassell edition of "East of Mansion House"]

1929 The Bloomsbury Wonder [novella]
     London: The Mandrake Press, 1929, 103 pages

1931 The Pleasantries of Old Quong
     London: Constable, 1931, 279 pages

     Published in US as "A Tea-Shop in Limehouse"
     Boston: Little Brown, 1931, 263 pages

1932 City of Encounters: A London Divertissement
     London: Constable, 1932
     Boston: Little Brown, 1932

1935 Night Pieces: Eighteen Tales
     London: Constable, 1935
     New York: Appleton, 1936

1935 Billy and Beryl in Chinatown
     Illustrated by Will Fyfe
     London: George C. Harrap & Co., 1935

     "Billy and Beryl are taken round London's Chinatown
     by their friend Old George, a cab driver.  Colour
     frontispiece of the children talking to George
     in his 1930s cab; numerous full-page and smaller b&w
     illustrations." (Ripping Yarns, London, Abebooks.com)

1944 Dark Nights
     London: Jenkins, 1944

Forthcoming.

Forthcoming.

James Clavell (

Asia Saga series

1. 1952  King Rat
           Japanese POW camp in Singapore, 1945
2. 1966  Tai-Pan
           Hong Kong, 1841
3. 1975  Shōgun
           Japan, 17th century
4. 1981  Noble House
            Hong Kong, 1963
5. 1986  Whirlwind
            Iran, 1979
6. 1993  Gai-Jin
            Japan, 1862

See reviews and commentary at The Return of SHOW-gun: Keeping the samurai mystique alive.

Forthcoming.

Forthcoming.

Forthcoming.

See Eisler's website for more.

Forthcoming.

Leslie Glass writes very fashionable police procedural, featuring two NYPD cops in the throes of multiethnic relationship, and a psychiatrist who sheds light on criminal motivation. She herself confesses to being a criminal investigation buff who also takes American multiculturalism very seriously.

Most of Glass's novels have featured April Woo and Mike Sanchez, but April Woo is clearly the lead.

April Woo series

 1. 1993 Burning Time
 2. 1995 Hanging Time
 3. 1996 Loving Time
 4. 1998 Judging Time
 5. 1999 Stealing Time
 6. 2000 Tracking Time
 7. 2002 The Silent Bride
 8. 2003 A Killing Gift
 9. 2005 A Clean Kill

Why Glass writes Chinese

Leslie Glass belongs to the majority of authors who feel they need to explain why they write what they write (her website).

People often ask how Leslie Glass, a non-Chinese who grew up in the Bronx, Martha's Vineyard and New York City, came to write about a Asian American female cop from Queens, but it seems perfectly natural to Glass: "A Chinese couple lived with my family, and I grew up in a Chinese kitchen. It was like having two sets of parents," she says. "And my Chinese parents definitely ruled the roost."

If April Woo and Mike Shanchez reflect Glass's "passions for law enforcement, the diversity of American culture, and the Asian-American experience", the psychiatrist Dr. Jason Frank expresses her interest in "people's motivations for their actions, and the effect therapy has on their lives". She created Frank "to show how a psychiatrist would approach suspects, and crime, as a counterpoint to the law enforcement strategies used by the police" (website).

Ethnic toothpaste

Characters like April Woo seem to be useful in English fiction only as "ethnic" entities. They cannot be simply "Americans" or "British" or pray tell "human" -- but have to be "Chinese" as well.

Glass has clearly contrived April Woo as a foil for expounding on "Chinese" this and "Chinatown" that. Glass squeezes April Woo for all the "Chineseness" that an ethnic determinist author expects from a character with a "heritage" like Woo's (website).

An ABC -- American Born Chinese -- April is quick to set straight anyone who underestimates her. And like millions of first generation Americans, she is torn between two powerful cultures: the old world of China that her parents left long before she was born, and the new world of America where she was born and raised, and whose values and culture are deeply her own.

Why not a third, fifth, tenth generation ACA -- an American who just happens to have some Chinese ancestry in their family tree? Apparently such Americans would not be exotic enough for "diversity" enthusiasts like Glass.

Fajitas, Chinese-style

Glass devotes an entire section of her website to "Cooking with April Woo". The section has several seasonal pages. "April and Mike's Fourth of July Feast" features recipes for Chinese Spare Ribs, Twice Cook Chicken Wings, and Emperor Shrimp Noodles -- Three Way.

Mike's favorite foods get almost equal time. "Mexican Fiesta Birthday Dinner for April Woo" includes recipes for Guacamole, Sopa Seco De Fideos (Dry Noodle Soup), Queso and Refried Bean Quesadilla (Mexican Pizza), Camarones con Limon (Lime Shrimp), Skirt Steak Fajitas (with soy sauce, Chinese-style), and Flan (Traditional style, the way Maria likes it).

TV and movie options

No series today has so many made-for-tv features: two NYPD cops, a female detective and a male captain, both oozing ethnicity, sexuality, and attitude up to their Asian the Hispanic eyes, who cooperate, compete, and get it on, in the pursuit of justice in the Big Apple. And according to Glass, the April Woo series is under option for something.

See Glass's website for more.

Nan Hamilton created Japanese American police lieutenant Sam Ohara in The Shape of Fear (1986). Ohara inspired the short-lived ABC series Ohara, starring Noriyuki "Pat" Morita (1932-2005) as Lieutenant Ohara.

In 1942, Hamilton married John Ball (1911-1988), the creator of Virgil Tibbs (In the Heat of the Night) and the author of a number of novels set in Asia, where the couple lived for a while. She wrote several short stories, many of them set in Japan or featuring things Japanese, including the following from EQMM (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) and AHMM (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine).

The Masks of Noh, EQMM, February 1983, 81(2)475
Masugi's Final Masterpiece, EQMM, mid-December 1986, 88(7)525
Now You See It... Now You Don't, EQMM, August 1992, 100(2)601
Seeds of Murder, AHMM, 9 December 1981, 26(13)
Too Many Pebbles, EQMM, September 1978, 72(3)418
EQMM January 1989, 93(1)552
Uncle Ushiro's Fish Story, EQMM, October 1984, 84(4)496
The Visit of Uncle Ushiro, AHMM, 21 May 1980, 25(5)

Naomi Hirahara was born and raised in Pasadena, California, home of John Ball's homicide detective Virgil Tibbs.

Hirahara's father, Isamu "Sam" Hirahara, was born in Watsonville, California but was taken to Hiroshima when a child. He was a teenager, in the basement of Hiroshima train station, when the city was atomized on 6 August 1945.

Hirahara's mother, Mayumi "May", was born in Hiroshima, and was a child when the city was bombed. She had been sent away to a Buddhist temple, though, but her father was near the epicenter and his body was never found.

After the war, Sam returned to California and became a gardner. He married May in Hiroshima in 1960. Hirahara and her younger brother Jimmy were born and raised in California, in Altadena and South Pasadena, the settings of the Mas Arai mysteries. Arai, like Hirahara's father, is a Hiroshima survivor and gardener.

Hirahara worked as an editor for The Rafu Shimpo, a Los Angeles newspaper published in both English and Japanese. She has also edited, co-authored, and written a number of biographies and other non-fiction works for various organizations.

Mas Arai mysteries

Hirahara has written three Mas Arai mysteries to date.

2004 Summer of the Big Bachi
2005 Gasa-Gasa Girl
2006 Snakeskin Shamisen

Non-fiction works

Hirahara came to writing fiction from a background as an editor and author of biographies of Asian Americans and books about gardeners and gardening. The following titles are a sampling of her non-fiction work.

2000 Editor
     Greenmakers
     (Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California)
     Southern California gardeners' Federation

2001 An American Son
     (The Story of George Aratani, Founder of Mikasa and Kenwood)
     American Profiles, Japanese American National Museum

2003 By Manabi Hirasaki, with Naomi Hirahara
     A Taste for Strawberries
     (The Independent Journey of Nisei Farmer Manabi Hirasaki)
     American Profiles, Japanese American National Museum

2003 Distinguished Asian American business leaders
     Distinguished Asian American series

2004 With Gwenn M. Jensen
     Silent Scars of Healing Hands
     (Oral Histories of Japanese American Doctors in
       World War II Detention Camps)
     Michi Nishiura and Walter Weglyn Multicultural Publications
     Center for Oral and Public History California

See Hirahara's website for more.

See also Mark Schreiber's interview with Hirahara, It would be a crime to underestimate the gardener (The Japan Times, 22 October 2006).

Early short stories

"A Strange and Sometimes Madness"
"Waiting For J"
"Getting Poisoned"

All three of these stories can be found in:
Kazuo Ishiguro, J.K. Klavans, Steven Kupfer, Tim Owens, Amanda Hemingway (contributors)
Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers
London: Faber and Faber, 1981
255 pages, hardcover

Novels

1982 A Pale View of Hills
1986 An Artist of the Floating World
1989 The Remains of the Day
1995 The Unconsoled
2000 When We Were Orphans
2005 Never Let Me Go

Ishiguro's language and literature are English

Ethnic clinging

I have a certain aversion to regarding fiction as a vehicle for understanding minorities as opposed to understanding human beings. I am also deeply suspicious of critics who impute the credibility of a minority character to the race or ethnicity of the writer.

Many years ago I coined the term "ethnic clinging" to describe the phenomenon of identifying with another person simply because one imputes some sort of ethnic connection with the person. The sentiment is perfectly natural. A dog sees or smells what seems like another dog. A man or woman two heads taller than a crowd sees another head rising from the masses and feels a rush of empathy, curiosity, and maybe even rivalry.

Japanese scholars and journalists sometimes write about Americans of Japanese ancestry as though they were somehow Japanese and not really Americans. References to their "Japanese blood" are common. Japanese Americans coming to Japan might be described as having "returned" even though it was their first visit to the country.

Ethnic expectation

People who are likely to be objects of ethnic clinging also tend to objects of "ethnic awe" and "ethnic expectation" -- terms I have coined to describe the treating of people like fruit. If you see an apple, and you like apples, you are awed by the sight of the apple. And if it looks like an apple, then you expect it to taste like one.

Kazuo Ishiguro has a "Japanese" name and he "looks" like his name. So he was first awed for writing about things he was expected to write about -- "Japan" and "the Japanese".

The problem is, people are nothing like fruit. What you see is not what you get.

The remains of a childhood

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954 and moved with his family to the United Kingdom in 1960. So it is not entirely improper to think of him as "returning" to Japan when he comes here. Yet Japan is no longer his home. And he is no longer Japanese.

His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), suggest that Ishiguro was clinging to a Japan he barely remembered from his childhood, a Japan which had become little more than an illusion and even a delusion. In interviews, he has said that he looks back on these two works as something he had to write in order to get Japan out of his system, so he could write stories about things he actually knew and understood.

The Remains of the Day

Ishiguro's first two novels were appreciated for the wrong reason -- his Japanese ancestry at the height of a wave of interest in exotic English fiction by exotic writers.

His third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), was praised for precisely the right reason: It was a superb story, superbly told, having nothing to do with his name or appearance, but only to do with who he really was.

Ishiguro is British, and his literature is English

Not everyone has been willing to accept Ishiguro as just a British writer of fine English fiction. Here is my an unpublished letter I sent to The Japan Times on 27 December 1989 concerning one critic's attempt to turn him into something else.

Sheng-mei Ma's racialization of Ishiguro

Michigan State University professor of English Sheng-mei Ma has accused Ishiguro of writing "whiteface" fiction in his attempt to escape his "Anglo-Japanese ethnicity". For more details, see my Steamy East review of Ma's The Deathly Embrace (Orientalism and Asian American Identity), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating, best known as HRF Keating, has also written three novels under the name Evelyn Hervey. Born at St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex, he was educated in England and Ireland.

Keating was working as a newspaper subeditor when he published his first and second novels, Death and the Visiting Fireman and Zen There Was Murder, in 1959 and 1960. At this point he quit his job and resolved to write a book a year. (Meera Tamaya, H.R.F. Keating: Post-Colonial Detection (A Critical Study, 1993, page 21).

Harry Stephen Keeler

Harry Stephen Keeler is a long, entertaining overview, by William Poundstone, of the life and writing of one of most idiosyncratic pulp fiction writers of his day. May of Keeler's were of the Steamy East variety.

Ramble House

Ramble House, though a commercial publisher, is exceptionally linked here -- not because the website offers inexpensive reprints of practically all of Keeler's works -- but because the Harry Stephen Keeler section has a list of Keeler's stories and plot summaries.

Keeler's Steamy East titles

Harry Stephen Keeler wrote many novels of the Steamy East variety. Here is a very selective list of titles and brief plot summaries.

The Green Jade Hand, 1930
A mystery set in Chicago's Chinatown. Features the first appearance in fiction of the half-wit detective Simon Grundt.

The Box from Japan, 1932
Set in a futuristic 1942, which has 13 months per year. Japan, Germany, and Mexico are plotting to take over the world, and they intend to do so using the Panama Canal and another canal through Nicaragua. Cactus food is everywhere, 3D TV is right around the corner, and in a box from Japan is a mysterious blue dye from ancient China.

The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, 1934
A poem and a mysterious handbag lead a man to a cemetery for circus freaks. There he finds the grave of Legga, the Human Spider, a woman with four legs and six arms. Legga was born in Canton, China and died in Canton, Ohio.

The Five Silver Buddhas, 1935
Penn Harding, an unsuspecting young American, came into possession of one of five little statues of Buddha. Horror chilled his soul!

The Case of the Crazy Corpse
Inside a coffin the police have dredged from Lake Michigan is a nude body. The top half, of a Chinese woman, and the bottom half, of a black man, are stuck together with a green gum.

To be continued.

John Marquand, very popular in his time, is no longer read except by historians of mid-20th-century American fiction -- and by Mr. Moto fans. He might rather be remembered for The Late George Apley (1937), which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Or even for follow-up bestsellers like Wickford Point (1939) and H. M. Pullham, Esquire (1941). But social historians will observe that Mr. Moto has had a greater on the human condition than George William Apley.

Martha Spaulding calls John Marquand an "Martini-Age Victorian" and sums up his rise to fame as follows (The Atlantic Monthly, May 2004, 293(4), pages 139-141).

For almost twenty years the forty-four-year-old John Marquand had been churning out formulaic stories and serials for mass-circulation magazines. (He had also created Mr. Moto, a scrupulously polite Japanese secret agent, wildly popular in six books and on the screen, where he was played by Peter Lorre in eight movies from 1937 to 1939.) But Apley, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, marked the beginning of his career as a novelist. His next three novels sold so well that in 1944 Life magazine called Marquand "the most successful novelist in the United States." In 1949, after two more, he was featured on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

This is the only mention Spaulding makes of Mr. Moto, and she is not concerned about his other pulp fiction, including Ming Yellow, which came out in 1935 before the first Mr. Moto story.

Richard Mason, best known as the creator of Suzie Wong, was born and raised in England but he lived for nearly four decades in Rome, where he passed away. He seems to have written only four novels -- the last about the time he moved to Rome.

Sujata Massey describes herself as born in Sussex, England to "a father from India and a mother from Germany" (her website). Her family emigrated to the United States when she was five. However, she is still "a passport-bearing citizen of the United Kingdom who has held an American green card since the age of two" (website). She married a Navy medical officer with whom she came to Japan in 1991. She and her husband returned to the United States in 1993.

Massey is the creator of Rei Shimura, an antique dealer with a master's degree in Japanese art history and a penchant for getting involved amateur sleuthing. The Rei Shimura novels began coming out at the rate of nearly one a year since 1997.

Rei Shimura novels

1. 1997 The Salaryman's Wife
2. 1998 Zen Attitude
3. 1999 The Flower Master
4. 2000 The Floating Girl
5. 2001 The Bride's Kimono
6. 2003 The Samurai's Daughter
7 .2004 The Pearl Diver
8. 2005 The Typhoon Lover
9. 2006 Girl in a Box

Massey and Shimura

Massey asks herself, where does Sujata stop and Rei Shimura begin? (Website)

I purposely chose to write about a foreigner who can almost pass for Japanese because that was my experience, and I thought it would be helpful for an amateur sleuth to be able to mask her identity when she needs to. Rei Shimura is multicultural; born in California, she has a Japanese father and an American mother. . . . The most important similarity I share with my sleuth is confusion over ethnic identity. Rei would like to be treated like a Japanese native, but her manners aren't quite right, and she speaks her mind too freely. At the same time, she battles a longing for Western luxuries and wonders whether it would be appropriate to consider romance with a Western man, given the number of foreigners who have used and abandoned women in Japan.

See Massey's website for more.

Melville, a former official of the British Council in Tokyo, is best known as the author of thirteen short and sweet mysteries featuring the life and work of police superintendent Tetsuo Otani of Hyogo prefecture.

 1. 1979 The Wages of Zen
 2. 1980 The Chrysanthemum Chain
 3. 1981 A Sort Of Samurai
 4. 1982 The Ninth Netsuke
 5. 1983 Sayonara, Sweet Amaryllis
 6. 1984 Death Of A Daimyo
 7. 1985 The Death Ceremony
 8. 1986 Go Gently, Gaijin
 9. 1987 Kimono For A Corpse
10. 1988 The Reluctant Ronin
11. 1989 A Haiku For Hanae
12. 1990 The Bogus Buddha
13. 1992 The Body Wore Brocade

Melville wrote two other novels about Japan, The Imperial Way (1986) and A Tarnished Phoenix (1990). He is also the author of two diplomatic and spy thrillers featuring Ben Lazenby, an official with the British Council. As Hampton Charles he has written three Miss Seeton mysteries.

Forthcoming.

Peter May, born in Glasgow, is now a resident of France. He has said he doesn't like to be put in a box, and so his novels blur the distinction between thriller and police procedural.

To make them more authentic, he claims on his website that he "has gained unprecedented access to the homicide and forensic science sections of Beijing and Shanghai police forces and has made a painstaking study of the methodology of Chinese detectives and pathologists."

May says his novels are not political but only about people. However, he also feels that stories set in China cannot ignore the political issues that beset the country.

"Crime is a great way of examining the human condition because it is looking for flaws under stress effectively and crime is always stressful, both for the perpetrator and the victim," May said in an interview. "So a crime story of any kind is putting the human condition under a microscope in a very stressful situation and that's great, because that's where we get under people's skins and into people's heads and the stories."

Earl Norman was actually Norman Thomson, a radio, stage and film actor. As an actor, Thomson performed in Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast, and along with Welles himself on stage in "Julius Caesar". He was also a founding member of the Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He appeared in 23 films, including Orson Welles' "The Lady from Shanghai" (1948) and John Houston's "The Barbarian and the Geisha" (1958).

For more than three decades after World War II, he worked as Department of Defense entertainment supervisor for U.S military bases throughout the Far East, booking entertainment for U.S. servicemen. He also wrote about ten novels, most of them in the "Kill me" series featuring the PI Burns Bannion.

In 1978, after living in Tokyo for over thirty years, he resettled in Los Angeles. He passed away in Pasadena on 3 February 2000, and is survived by a wife and four children.

Corky Alexander on Norman Thomson

Here is what Corky Alexander (1929-2002) wrote about Norman Thomson in his "This Week at Weekender" column in the 3 March 2000 issue of Tokyo Weekender.

Phantom series

As for the hang me, bang me, maul me, and club me titles -- featuring the celebrated pull-cart cab coolie Rick Shaw -- it was, at the time I read this, my humble opinion that Alexander's tongue was deep in his cheek. Fans and collectors, including yours truly, would hope such titles existed. After fruitless searching, however, I concluded that the closing anecdote was Alexander's tribute to the sort of humor that probably passed between him and Norman Thomson -- ending, as it did, with a punch line alluding to yet another phantom title, which could not have been printed in the Weekender. Boys having fun.

John Apostolou, seeing this website, on which I had posted my take on Alexander's article, kindly informed me by email, dated 21 June 2008, that Hang Me in Hong Kong exists. His mail included the following text from a 2003 auction offering, and the image, which I have copped and cropped to the right.

Hang Me in Hong Kong by Earl Norman, who has had the gall to name his hero Rick Shaw and female lead, Rococo Baroque. Printed Tokyo: Jade Norman, 1976. And signed by the author, too! Author photo on rear dustjacket flap explains much. Prose of such hilarious awfulness that no way will you be able to resist torturing your hapless spouse with it. And the cover! Eurasian cutie in sky-high minidress and come-hither pose, heedless of guy swinging from noose about a foot away from her. Yay! In really near-perfect condition. This author's books very scarce in hardcover.

Then in 2019, I found an excellent copy of Hang Me in Hong Kong, inscribed by Earl Norman, no less, to Tokyoite and journalist Bill Hersey. The publishing particulars are as follows.

Right
Hang Me in Hong Kong
Earl Norman, 1976
Image copped and cropped from
photo sent by John Apostolou

Earl Norman
Hang Me in Hong Kong
[A Rick Shaw Adventure]
Tokyo: Jade Orient, 1976
212 pages, hardcover

See Hang Me in Hong Kong under "Burns Bannion" on the "Heroes" page
for several images of this copy of the book, in Yosha Bunko, and other comments.

Ozaki was in his early thirties when he turned to fiction after World War II. Before that he had been a newspaperman, a tax accountant, and an artist. He was also the proprietor of the Monsieur Meltoine beauty salon in the Gold Coast section of Chicago.

The beauty salon inspired the setting for Ozaki's first mystery, The Cuckoo Clock (1946). The story was recently revamped by his daughter, Gaila Ozaki Perran, as Ticked Off! (2003).

Ozaki's background

Two footnotes in Pronzini et al, 2006 (see links below) provide the most complete overview I have been able to find about Ozaki's family history.

From crime writer to scam artist

Between 1946 and 1960 Ozaki wrote 24 novels. Then suddenly he gave up writing and proceeded to get in trouble with the state of New York (Pronzini et al., 2006).

In 1973 the former president of the Chicago chapter of the MWA [Mystery Writers of America] made small headlines in the Washington Post and the New York Times in quite a different way. Having moved to Colorado, Milton K. Ozaki became the self-named president of all but non-existent Colorado State Christian College of the Church of the Inner Power, Inc. Headquartered in a small cabin on an isolated mountain road, the school offered doctorates in many specializations in exchange for donations of $100 or more. The New York State Supreme Court took exception to this scheme.

Ozaki's novels

Ozaki's first two mysteries, the only two to be published in hardcover, by Ziff-Davis, featured the Holmesesque Professor Androcles Caldwell, head of the psychology department at North University in Chicago, and his Watson sidekick Bendy Brinks. In both novels, the equivalent of a Scotland Yard inspector was Lt. Percy Phelan of the Chicago Police Department.

After these two novels, all of Ozaki's books were printed in paperback only, some as double books with titles of other writers. Most of his stories to published in various editions, sometimes with title changes.

From 1949 to 1956, Ozaki used the name Robert O. Saber in addition to Milton K. Ozaki. Of his 23 different novels, he first published 11 under his own name and 12 as by Robert O. Saber. Two of the Saber novels -- Murder Doll (1952, 1959) and City of Sin (1952, 1962) -- first published in the early 1950s, were reissued under his own name in the late 1950s and early 1960s, after he had stopped using the penname.

Writing as Milton K. Ozaki

Non-series stories

1952 The Deadly Pick-Up
1957 Case of the Deadly Kiss
1958 Case of the Cop's Wife
1959 Wake Up and Scream
1960 Inquest

Caldwell, Brinks, and Phelan

1946 The Cuckoo Clock [set in beauty salon]
     aka Too Many Women (abridgment)
1947 A Fiend in Need
1951 A Dummy Murder Case

Rusty Forbes

1954 Dressed To Kill

Carl Guard

1955 Maid for Murder

Bob Wherry

1956 Never Say Die

Writing as Robert O. Saber

Non-series stories

1951 The Dove
     aka Chicago Woman (1953)

Phil Keene and Hal Cooper

1949 The Black Dark Murders
1954 Out of the Night

Bob Stille

1950 The Affair of the Frigid Blonde

Carl Guard

1951 The Deadly Lover
1951 The Scented Flesh
1952 No Way Out

Carl Good

1952 Murder Doll [Robert O. Saber]
     also by Milton K. Ozaki (1959)
1954 Too Young to Die
1955 Sucker Bait

Pete Mallary

1952 City of Sin [Robert O. Saber]
     also by Milton K. Ozaki (1962)

Max Keene

1955 A Dame Called Murder
1956 A Time For Murder

Ozaki sources

There is preciously little well-organized material about Ozaki's work and even less about his life. The two best web sources are both on Steve Lewis's Mystery File site.

Detailed overview of Ozaki's fiction

Bill Crider
Milton K. Ozaki: A Collage and Homage
Originally written and compiled for EyeCon, 1995
Mystery File, 2006

Details about Ozaki's family and life

Bill Pronzini, Victor Berch, and Steve Lewis
A Complete Set of Fingerprints -- Milton Ozaki
(An Annotated Checklist of the Fingerprint Mystery Series
published by Ziff-Davis)
Mystery File, 2006

I.J. Paker, aka as Ingrid J. Parker, has written a series of novels and several short stories set in 11th-century Japan and featuring a Justice of Ministry bureaucrat who now and then does some off-the-record sleuthing -- at a time when there were as yet no official detectives.

Sugawara no Akitada novels

1. 2005 The Dragon Scroll
2. 2002 Rashomon Gate
3. 2003 The Hell Screen
4. 2006 Black Arrow

Sugawara no Akitada short stories

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

 1. "Instruments of Murder" (October 1997)
 2. "The Curio Dealer's Wife" (November 1997)
 3. "A Master of Go" (December 1998)
 4. "Akitada's First Case" (July/August 1999)
 5. "Rain At Rashomon" (January 2000)
 6. "The New Year's Gift" (April 2001)
 7. "Welcoming the Paddy God" (December 2001)
 8. "Death and Cherry Blossoms" (June 2002)
 9. "The O-Bon Cat" (February 2003)
10. "The Kamo Horse" (October 2003)
11. "The Tanabata Magpie" (September 2005)

Interest in Japan

Ingrid J. Parker was born in Munich, and her native tongue is German. After graduating from the University of Munich, she went to the United States and earned an MA from Texas Technological University and a PhD from the University of Mexico. She retired from a teaching post in english and foreign languages at Norfolk State University in Virginia, where she continues to live and write.

Parker was a student of English literature and her academic work was on the poet Shelley. She did not begin studying Japan, at first through its classical literature, until later in her career.

Ancient hype

Most writers of historical fiction seriously try to achieve a high level of authenticity. Parker is no exception. She reads a lot and is not afraid to ask questions as an "outsider" (as she calls herself) on "learned" listservs like pmjs (founded in 1999 as "premodern Japanese studies mailing list" but now known by its acronym).

Parker's laudable efforts to be authentic are limited by the usual difficulties of describing 11th-century Japanese society in English that makes sense to uninitiated readers. The biggest barriers to authenticity, though, may be some of the blurbs and cover art.

The covers of Parker's Akitada novels bear the statement "A Mystery of Ancient Japan" -- although the Heian period is in no sense "ancient" in the framework of Japanese history. The covers of German and other European editions depict men and women mostly as they appear in kabukiesque uikyoe prints of the Tokugawa period -- half a millennium later.

Chosen by publisher

Though The Dragon Scroll was the third Akitada novel to be published, it was the first one Parker wrote, and its story is also the earliest. The sequence got straighted out after Parker switched publishers from St. Martin's Press to Penguin in 2004.

According to Parker, "For some reason, my previous publisher wanted to start with Rashomon Gate" (website). As though this were not enough, the title "Rashomon Gate" was also, Parker declares, "chosen by the publisher!" (pmjs).

Practically all writers have similar horror stories, which testify to the power publishers have, especially over writers who are desperate to break into print.

Belated first novels

Many writers who have had difficulty publishing their first novels get later novels in print before a publisher agrees to put out earlier unpublished efforts. This also happened to Jay McInerney, who wrote Ransom (1985) first but did not get it published until after he had made a huge name for himself with Bright Lights, Big City (1984).

John Grisham's A Time To Kill (1989), brought out by a minor publisher, had all but been forgotten until The Firm (1991) and The Pelican Brief (1992) had made him the hottest selling author at the time.

While A Time To Kill may well be Grisham's best novel, Ransom is probably McInerney's worst, set in Japan and partly inspired by his own life in Tokyo while working there as a textbook editor for Time-Life in Japan. As for I.J. Parker's The Dragon Scroll, it certainly should have been published first, if only because Akitada is younger and not yet married.

Serious fun

Despite the political battles, Parker seems to be having fun exploiting the "mysteries" of a faraway period in a faraway country for readers who want to be far away. And fiction like Parker's should be about having fun -- even when the stories are serious.

See Parker's website for more.

Forthcoming.

See Phillips' website for more.

Forthcoming.

Laura Joh Rowland, according to her website, has a background in microbiology and public health. She had worked as a sanitary inspector and quality engineer, then studied to be children's book illustrator, but discovered she like writing better.

"heritage, love, circumstance"

She writes mysteries, she says, because of "heritage, love, and circumstance" (website). The "heritage" comes from her father, who was an avid reader of mysteries. The "love" is her own love of books. The "circumstance" exists where these come together (website).

By a stroke of luck, heritage and love intersected with fortunate circumstance. This circumstance was the radical change that the mystery novel underwent during the late 20th century. The field opened up to include a diverse array of detectives, settings, and time periods. Lucky for me, there was even room for a samurai detective in 17th century Japan.

As for why a samurai detective in 17th century Japan -- the first century of the Edo or Tokugawa period (circa 1600-1868) -- you can read her own rather convoluted account on her website. Suffice it to say that, regardless of what motivates her to write, no current author has been cranking out fiction related to Japan, past or present, as regularly and for as long as Rowland.

The Sano Ichiro mystery series

 1. 1994 Shinju
 2. 1996 Bundori
 3. 1997 The Way of the Traitor
 4. 1998 The Concubine's Tattoo
 5. 2000 The Samurai's Wife
 6. 2001 Black Lotus
 7. 2002 The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria
 8. 2003 The Dragon King's Palace
 9. 2004 The Perfumed Sleeve
10. 2005 The Assassin's Touch
11. 2006 Red Chrysanthemum

Five pages a day

Rowland is productive because she is a creature of habit (website).

Every weekday morning I take a 2 mile walk and plan what I'm going to write. Then I come home and write for 5 or 6 hours. I work from a synopsis, because it's easier when I don't have to figure out what to say and how to say it both at once.

This, she says, results in five pages a day. Still she has time for cats, email, books, writer group meetings, a husband, and painting. Her website features examples of her work, including a couple of self-portraits, and some photographs.

See Rowland's website for more.

Sax Rohmer was born Arthur Henry Ward in 1883 in Birmingham, England, to Irish parents who had recently settled there. About the time of his mother's death in 1901, he adopted the name Sarsfield as another middle name, thinking he might be related to Patrick Sarsfield, a 17th-century Irish general his mother imagined had been an ancestor. As late as 1931 his "real name" was sometimes given as Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward. (Van Ash and Rohmer 1972:19).

By 1912 he was writing under the byline Sax Rohmer, and though formally he sometimes went by Ward, he signed even his will as Rohmer, so completely did he eventually become the persona of his exotic penname. According to his own account, "sax" meant "blade" and "rohmer" was phonetic for "roamer". (Ibid. 39)

In 1950, Rohmer published "Wulfheim", a mystical play he had written in the 1920s and dusted off and rewritten as a novel, to show that he could write something more artistic. But he published it as Michael Furey, using his mother's maiden name. (Ibid. 278-279)

To be continued.

See Dr. Petrie falls in love with Karamenah for a detailed look at "Yellow Peril" and "Karamenah" in The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu.

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Master of Villainy Van Ash and Rohmer, 1972 Yosha Bunko scan Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer Master of Villainy (A Biography of Sax Rohmer) Bowling Green (Ohio): Bowling Green Popular Press, 1972 ix, 312 pages, softcover After World War II, during the last years of his life, while cranking out a few Sumuru stories, Sax Rohmer continued to exploit the theme of Oriental despotism, but found it less receptive in both Britain and the United States. In Britain, he teamed with a man named Michael Martin-Harvey to create a musical based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Chinese Nightingale". With the help of Van Ash, he incorporated a Japan peril ploy into the story. (Ibid. 272-273). So far as the plot went, not a great deal was required. As with all musicals, the songs were the main cocnern, and these were excellent. For the rest, Sax devised a historical story of ancient China, very tenuously linked with the theme of the fairytale, in which -- obviously enough, just then -- Japan was to be the villain. Here I was privillege to actd as the authority. Having been engaged on a close study of Japanese affairs ever since leaving high school, I liked to feel that if I was in any way useful to Sax, it was as his "Far East consultant." We ascribed some thoroughly libellous behavior to Fujiwara Kamatari, Japan's last envoy to the Chinese court in the seventh century, and finished up with waht was, I think a story sound enough to support the notably fine lyrics and music. However, the theatrical people who commissioned the musical rewrote everything to the point that not much of what Martin-Harvey and Rohmer had written remained. Rohmer went to see it on the first night and adivsed Van Ash not skip it. Van Ash took Rohmer's advice, and six weeks later the production folded. America not interested The following episode illustrates the nature of the obstacles Sax Rohmer faced when he tried to make a go of it in postwar America (Van Ash and Rohmer 1972:281-282). Just as in England, the rising generation of those who had been born too late to suffer directly from the war years failed to cultivate a taste for reading because their attention was captivated by the new alternative of television. It became obvious to Sax that, if his efforts were to be a widely appreciated as they had been hitherto, he must now attempt to give them expression in this medium. Here he thought again, first, of Fu Manchu. With the active collaboration of Elizabeth, he wrote a script which, after some considerable negotiation, appeared on television screens in the form of a "pilot film." In line with all Sax's theatrical endeavors, there was no lack of famous names in the cast . . . Nevertheless, no backers came forward to sponsor a series. The position of the United States vis/a/vis Chinese villainy remained somewhat equivocal. On the one hand, they disapproved of Red China; on the other, they supported Chiang Kai-shek in Formosa. Sax's attempts to make headway, not only with Fu Manchu but with other projects, seemed during this period to be met with an undefined yet unmistakable opposition. Time and again, plans would be carried through every preliminary stage with glowing prospects of success, onlyi to be vetoed at the last moment. Given the relationship between its authors and subject, this bibliography cannot be other that sympathetic. Yet it very readably captures Rohmer's strengths and weaknesses as one of the more interesting writers of his generation. (WW)

Forthcoming.

On her own website, S.J. Rozan bills herself as "a native New Yorker" and "former architect in a practice that focussed on police stations, firehouses, and zoos". Practically all of her novels feature Lydia Chin and Bill Smith.

Bill Smith - Lydia Chin mysteries

1. 1994 China Trade
2. 1995 Concourse
3. 1996 Mandarin Plaid
4. 1997 No Colder Place
5. 1999 A Bitter Feast
6. 1999 Stone Quarry
7. 2001 Reflecting the Sky
8. 2002 Winter and Night

Absent Friends (2004) is a break in the series. According to Rozan (website):

After 9/11, moving right into the next Lydia Chin book, set in downtown New York, was impossible for me. I needed Smith and Chin to get some time and distance from 9/11; I needed to see what New York would become before I wrote about their New York again.

She promises that Bill and Lydia will be back -- they're just on vacation -- and will appear in short stories while she's working on their next book.

See Rozan's website for more.

Lisa See did not turn to fiction until after she had published On Gold Mountain (1995), a biography of her own extended family. Subtitled "The one-hundred-year odyssey of a Chinese-American family", the book became a minor bestseller.

Since then, See has published a series of novels featuring the twosome Liu Hulan, a Beijing detective, and David Stark, an California public prosector.

Liu and Stark series

1997 Flower Net
1999 Interior
2003 Dragon Bones

Why Lisa writes about China

Lisa See's website has an FAQ section, and one question she is frequently asked is why she writes about China (See's website).

I'm part Chinese. My great-great-grandfather came here to work on the building of the transcontinental railroad. My great-grandfather was the godfather/patriarch of Los Angeles Chinatown. I don't look at all Chinese, but I grew up in a very large Chinese-American family. I have hundreds of relatives in Los Angeles, of which there are only about a dozen that look like me.

See claims she writes about what she knows, and what she knows is her family. She feels she straddles "two cultures" -- by which she means her "American side" and her "Chinese side" -- though she does not say why she regards either side as singular.

See claims she tries to bring what she knows from "both cultures" into her work. And to help her achieve this are two tour guides, one on either of her putative sides, each with a different objective (website).

The American side of me tries to open a window into China and things Chinese for non-Chinese, while the Chinese side of me makes sure that what I'm writing is true to the Chinese culture without making it seem too "exotic" or "foreign." What I want people to get from my books is that all people on the planet share common life experiences -- falling in love, getting married, having children, dying -- and share common emotions -- love, hate, greed, jealousy. These are the universals; the differences are in the particulars of customs and culture.

Two halves don't make a whole

None of See's fashionable talk about having "two sides" rings true in the light of what she has said about her family background in other publications. As a contributor to Half and Half, subtitled "Writers on Growing Up Biracial + Bicultural" (Claudine Chiawei O'Hearn, editor, New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), she says this toward the end (page 138).

You may have noticed that I have labeled everyone in this piece. My white grandmother. My Japanese aunt. My African American stepmother. My family is strong because of its many races and cultures."

What happened to See's many other sides? Or is she mostly interested in her "Chinese side" because that most intrigues her? And because it is easier to market a simplistic "American" and "Chinese" dichotomy in a market that has a huge appetite for books on China, Chinese, American Chinese, and Chinese Americans?

Don't get me wrong. See's family history is very interesting. And her novels are thrilling reads. I just can't understand the fuss she makes about her "sides" in relation to her fiction -- as though she wants readers to think her Chinese settings and characters are authentic simply because of her family ties.

What is Chinese "cash"?

Another FAQ concerns the meaning of "cash" in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), a novel set in 19th-century China (website).

Cash was a type of money used in China. It was round and usually had a square cutout in the middle.

The word "cash" or the redundant "cash coins" refers to the low-denomination metal coins, typically with square holes in them, that came to be used throughout East Asia, the East Indies, and parts of India. They were common not only in China but in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

The word "cash" in reference to such coins apparently comes from Portuguese caixa, via Tamil kâcu, which means "a small coin", circa late 16th century.

The word "cash" was part of the port lingo used among traders. Ordinary people would not have used such an exotic word to refer to such coinage, but would have said just "coins" -- or "coppers" or "money" or whatever the closest English equivalent would have been to what they would have said in Chinese.

What more, though, can China-mystified American readers expect from a novel that one reviewer ranked with "the best fiction of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, the modern luminaries of Chinese storytelling" (See's website)? Neither Kingston nor Tan are known for the accuracy of their writing about China.

See See's website for more.

See Edith and Winnifred Eaton on the Konketsuji website for details.

Cay Van Ash was born in Sussex and lived in London and Wales before moving to Asia, where he took up residence in Japan and taught at Waseda University.

See also Mark Schreiber's 1988 article, Cay Van Ash: A Footnote on the Yellow Peril, based on an interview with Van Ash.

Born in Rotterdam in 1931, Van de Wetering started his writing carreer as a bit of a vagabond. He has traveled, engaged in business, studied at a Zen Monastery in Japan (1958-1959), and was a policeman in Amsterdam. In 1975, he settled on the coast of Maine in the United States.

As he describes part of his life on a commercial website (1997):

For ten years (1965-1975) van de Wetering knew prosperity while building an export network for his wife's family's company's textile product. Philosophical curiosity was aroused again when he met Trungpa Rimpoche at a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in Scotland. Studies at "The Tail of the Tiger" led to visits to another metaphysical hot spot. "Moon Spring Hermitage", led by a fellow, much senior disciple of the, now dead, Japanese abbot, on the Maine coast, U.S.A. Meanwhile, back in Holland, van de Wetering had joined the Amsterdam Reserve Constabulary. Having traveled as a young man in territories beyond Dutch jurisdiction without keeping in touch with Dutch authorities brought a charge of dodging the draft. Military Police suggested that, in order to avoid arrest, it would be appropriate to serve the queen in voluntary law enforcement. The period was to be for four years (two years training, two years patroling Amsterdam evenings and weekends) but got extended to seven years as subject passed sergeant and inspector exams. The idea of being an anarchist in police uniform seemed surreally interesting. The textile trade was "getting old" by then and, looking for a way to change his career he had his Zen journals, referring to both the Japanese and American monastic periods, published.

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The Empty Mirror Janwillem van de Wetering, 1972 1974 Hougton Mifflin edition Yosha Bunko scan Janwillem van de Wetering The Empty Mirror (Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery) New York: Hougton Mifflin Company, 1974 (1972, 1973) 145 pages, hardcover First published in The Netherlands under the title De Lege Spiegel, Amsterdam: De Driehoek, 1972. Forthcoming

Robert Hans van Gulik (1910-1967) was a Dutch diplomat and authority on China who spent most of his life in Asia. He is best known as the creator of Judge Dee, based on the real life Di Renjie or Ti Jen-chieh (630-700).

Robert van Gulik & Judge Dee

Robert van Gulik & Judge Dee is the portal of a "webring" which describes itself as "just a small network of pages on the two characters, designed by some enthusiasts. The pages are located on different sites."

To be continued.

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Robert Van Gulik: His Life His Work Janwillem van de Wetering, 1998 Yosha Bunko scan Janwillem van de Wetering Robert Van Gulik: His Life His Work New York: Soho Press, 1998 149 pages, paperback Forthcoming.

See Edith and Winnifred Eaton on the Konketsuji website for details.

Christopher West traveled and lived in China, and wrote Journey to the Middle Kingdom in 1991, before turning to fiction in the mid 1990s. His purpose, according to his own post on Amazon.co.uk, is to entertain with a traditional whodunnit, and to introduce the culture of China. He refers to the novels of Tony Hillerman, and "all the marvellous writing coming out of India", as models of such fiction.

Forthcoming.

Forthcoming.