Word: chan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...challenge only the grading that relegates the Master Sherlock Holmes to Straight City, after running him, blasphemously and preposterously, with Charlie Chan, who gets into Valhalla. Chan, an amusing charlatan, should have been paired with Mr. Moto, and that correct company could well sustain your preference. But Holmes should be paired either with Dr. Watson or Conan Doyle (proving again that the creature can be greater than the creator); in any case, to make this correct evaluation is to place Sherlock Holmes automatically into the "Yes" column. If you placed Conan Doyle beside Edgar Allan Poe, then certainly Doyle would...
...Charlie Chan Sherlock Holmes
Actually, the sayings are those of that less celebrated but no less sage Oriental, Charlie Chan. To the world's most renowned Chinese detective, life was just a bowl of fortune cookies, to be cracked continually like homicide cases. Created in the late '20s by Earl Diggers as the hero of a whodunit series, Charlie had the shortcoming of his country's cooking-two hours after he solved a case, audiences were hungry for another sleuthing. Hollywood tried to oblige: between 1926 and 1949, it turned out 47 Charlie Chan features and serials. There were also such...
...supersleuth, Charlie was portrayed by six actors, none of them Chinese.* Best remembered are Warner Oland, a Swede, who appeared in 16 features, and Sidney Toler, a Missourian, who lumbered woodenly through 22 pictures portraying Charlie as the still life of the party. Made on B-picture budgets, the Chan films show their age with simple-minded mysteries solvable in the second reel by any post-Bond youngster of eight. They also rely heavily on antique comic relief as subtle as a pig bladder. Charlie's No. 1 and No. 2 sons incessantly glue up the clues...
Clearly, what brought audiences back to the Bijou time and again was not the thrill of solving the mystery before Chan did but the homely wisdom of the sub-gumshoe, a man who always had an axiom to grind. With articles and conjunctions thrown to the wind, Charlie's observations usually made up in specific gravity what they lacked in grammar...