It's a shame that Earl Derr Biggers only wrote six of these jewels. They hold up well and are very entertaining. The Black Camel is no exception. A clever plot, a clever detective and way too many suspects in the death of a Hollywood starlet who is passing her prime. The solution wasn't telegraphed, but it also wasn't hidden. Charlie Chan is smart, humble, droll and pretty dang funny. What's not to like? ( )

Promoted from Sergeant to Inspector, Charles is now in charge. And that is true on a number of levels. First and foremost, Charlie stands completely alone in solving this case. Gone are the help of past novels, the society men, the reporters, the district attorneys. In fact, the people supposed to help in this novel do anything but. Biggers has brought Charlie Chan into full maturity in The Black Camel. His character, too, has changed. He is more grizzled and tough. This is a detective who actually shoves people around when he feels it necessary. Looking back on the Charlie of the first novel, he is almost obsequious in comparison. This Charlie Chan is even closer to the hard-boiled detective than in the last book, Behind That Curtain.

The same goes for the setting. Chan is once again in Honolulu, after trips to Southern California in book two and San Francisco in book three, but this is not the same Honolulu of the opening novel. Not only is the story spread out, from bungalows on the beach to grand hotels and police offices, but it also ventures into the city's slums. The passage that describes the trip into this place, in fact, is told in hard-boiled prose, while Charlie seems tougher and the locales resembles something from a film noir movie.

This is a superior piece of detective fiction. And one more thing: the mystery itself is the best yet. In each successive book, in fact, the complexity and surprise accompanying the solving of the crime becomes more intense. The solution to the case shocked me. I had it figured out--all wrongly. Well done, Earl Derr Biggers. Now, for book number five.

*A note on the 1931 film version. Of the first five Charlie Chan films, only The Black Camel remains. The others have been lost. A pity, because the film is largely faithful to the book but for a slight twist at the end involving Jessop and Smith. The film was made the same year as Universal's classic, Dracula. That is worth pointing out because both Bela Lugosi (Dracula) and Dwight Frye (Renfield) also appear in The Black Camel. Frye appears as Jessop and Lugosi as Tarneverro, with Lugosi's part much more active and talkative than in Dracula. Also notable is the mobility of the camera early in the film and, later, the downright Expressionistic scenes of horror mystery with Tarneverro's crystal ball and as Chan begins to uncover the murder. Similar, too, is the presence of Chan's understudy, a Japanese detective in training made out to be a comic fool. Yes, there is a racial hierarchy in both the novel and film, with the Chinese above the Japanese, something made all the more clear in the novel when Chan travels into the Honolulu slums. ( )

In his fourth adventure, Charlie is back in Hawaii, albeit still dealing with California types. This time, he must investigate the murder of a hugely famous Hollywood actress. She had been filming in Tahiti, or some such place, and was going to finish up the final scenes in Hawaii. She had just arrived, was setting up a household on the beach, and had gathered a bunch of friends for a dinner party. She didn't make her expected grand entrance into the party, she was found stabbed to death in a pavilion across the beach from her house.

There are lots of possible culprits, including the man who wanted to marry the actress, her psychic advisor (whom she had just called to Hawaii to help her decide to accept the marriage proposal), some of her film buddies, a local tycoon married to a former Hollywood actress friend, the very proper British butler, and so forth. The psychic advisor, in particular, appears to be trying to help Chan all the while also trying to derail Chan's investigation. One can never figure out if he's a good guy, despite being a charlatan, or a not-so-good guy, in keeping with his being a charlatan (all self-styled psychics are charlatans by definition). Whatever, Charlie figures it all out in the end.

Interestingly, given that the book came out in 1929, this woman's being a hugely successful Hollywood star meant that the was a star of silent films, maybe like Clara Bow or Theda Bara, the first sounded feature-length film having only just come out in late 1928.

I don't know if I'm just getting used to Charlie, or if things really have changed by the fourth book. It seems to me, however, that Charlie's bizarre grammatical constructions are toned down in this book from those in the earlier books. I think, perhaps, Charlie is taxed with a greater share of the dialog this time around, and that writing all that tortured syntax just got too tough for Biggers. Whatever, it's still a good enough book. Well worth the download from our friends at Roy Glashan's Library. ( )

3 and a half stars ( )

As I have said elsewhere, I like best the Chan novels such as this one which are actually set in Hawaii. This one involves the murder of a slightly over the hill movie star. ( )