E verybody thinks they know Charlie Chan. He’s a caricature, a cliché, an inscrutable Asian who talks like a fortune-cookie. Isn’t he? No. He was created a hundred years ago by novelist Earl Derr Biggers, to challenge the stereotype of “yellow peril” villains. In Honolulu, he learned about a Chinese-Hawaiian policeman called Chang Apana; and thus inspired, he created a Chinese police detective who could straddle the white and non-white worlds of melting-pot Hawaii. Chan has an accent, and a calm but steely demeanor, and finds hints to solving his cases in ancient words of wisdom. He does not kowtow to any authority but the law. As Asian-studies Professor Peter Feng insists, wherever Chan is on the job, he is “always the smartest man in the room.”

Biggers wrote five Charlie Chan novels, but of the dozens of “Charlie Chan” films that were made, only two draw on plots that Biggers created. The first Chan novel, The House Without a Key, published in 1925, was filmed six years later. An early “talkie,” it starred a Japanese actor as Chan. But that film is lost: no print has survived.

Hal adapted The House Without A Key into a 75-minute one-act stage play, largely true to Biggers's story, and consistent with Prof. Fung's view of the detective. It was produced in Hawaii with a Chinese-Portuguese actor as Chan, and an ethnically appropriate supporting cast.

When a notorious scoundrel is stabbed to death in his home on Waikiki Beach, suspicion falls on the people in his orbit. There’s his fun-loving sister; his angry, moralistic brother; his nephew, freshly arrived from Boston; his daughter, home from college, who’s in love with his lawyer; his neighbor, whom he refuses to talk to; his houseboy, found with stolen property; and his young but unfaithful sweetheart. It falls to Inspector Chan to follow the clues and nail the killer.