Charlie Chan's Poppa: Earl Derr Biggers - Paperback

by Barbara Gregorich (Author)

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 Cha

Author Biography

Barbara Gregorich was first published at the age of eleven. That's when she knew she would become a writer. This already put her six years behind Earl Derr Biggers, who reached the same conclusion at the age of five. But it wasn't until she reached the age of sixteen that she learned about the Warren, Ohio, author who created Charlie Chan. Not the stereotyped Chan that Hollywood created, but a more complex, more interesting Chan.

Gregorich has read each of the six Chan novels four times, and each time she sees something different in them: something deeper and more complex. Which is not only why she keeps reading them, but also why she wrote Charlie Chan's Poppa: Earl Derr Biggers.

Equally at home with fiction and nonfiction, Gregorich was first published as a novelist, with the well-received, She's on First. This story of the first female major leaguer was praised by Publishers Weekly, which wrote that "all baseball fans will appreciate Gregorich's sure feel for the game . . . ."

After writing the fictional version of women in baseball, Gregorich began the long job of researching the true story of women who played hardball. The result of that research was Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, published by Harcourt, 1993. Women at Play won the SABR-Macmillan Award for Best Baseball Research of the Year. In 2013 Women at Play was included in Ron Kaplan's 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. In 2017 Francis Ford Coppola, when asked by The New York Times Book Review which book readers would be surprised to find on his shelf, replied: "Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball," by Barbara Gregorich."

Gregorich also writes mystery fiction. Her novel Dirty Proof introduced Chicago private eye Frank Dragovic. Sound Proof is the sequel. In 2014 she published Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Lots of Examples, Plus Dead Bodies, based on her years of teaching writing skills and reading mystery novels.

Gregorich studied at Kent State University, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard. Before becoming a writer she worked as an English instructor, a typesetter and a letter carrier. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Phil Passen, who plays the hammered dulcimer.