One of this writer’s joys in exploring the world of classic detective fiction over the past ten years has been the discovery of some marvelous authors whose long-forgotten status has nothing to do with the quality of their work but, perhaps, their all-too-small output. Why did Harriet Rutland only write three books? Or Lange Lewis five? These are two of my favorite discoveries, and I haven’t even gotten to Elspeth Huxley (3 mysteries, out of countless other books), Dorothy Bowers (5), or Marion Mainwaring (2).

To this list, we can now add Juanita Sheridan who, despite having her four mysteries featuring Chinese detective Lily Wu republished by Rue Morgue Press in the mid-1970’s, has fallen out of our memories (she’s not even listed on the mighty GADetection Wiki!). My friend Kate Jackson has been championing Sheridan’s work for the past ten years on her blog Cross-Examining Crime. I might have paid Kate’s praise little mind, except for two things: first, somebody left four pristine copies of the Rue Morgue reprints at my favorite used bookstore, and I snapped them up for twenty dollars! (Mystery readers love to say, “These books were a steal!!”) And secondly, this month marks the 100^th anniversary of the most famous Asian detective of all time, Inspector Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department. I recently reviewed one of the six Chan novels and next month will be taking an extensive look at the Fox Chan films. The total run of Chan films ended at Monogram Studios in 1949, which coincidentally is the year that Juanita Sheridan published The Chinese Chop, her first solo mystery (she had co-written one in 1943. 

Lily Wu may not have been the first Asian female fictional detective, as the book’s introduction tells us, but she is the most distinctive, and she paved the way for the modern young women sleuths that began to proliferate the scene about the time that Rue Morgue Press published this. The introduction also speaks all-too-briefly about Sheridan’s life, which was easily as colorful as any fiction: “. . . she came by her knack for murder naturally since her maternal grandfather was killed by Pancho Villa in a hold-up while her own father may possibly have been poisoned by a political rival.” 

Young Juanita became a single mother during the Depression, foisted her young son on a rich foster family (before he was adopted at six by his grandmother), and then went forth to live life to the fullest, including the collection of eight husbands. After dropping off her son in Beverly Hills, Sheridan made her way to Hawaii and began writing; in addition to her five novels (the first co-written with her dentist in exchange for braces for her son!), she also wrote screenplays. Life was never easy, but it was always colorful: “To those people, editors included, who thought her plots contained more than a touch of melodrama, Sheridan said she was only writing from life, having been clubbed by a gun, choked into unconsciousness by a man she never saw, and on two occasions ‘awakened from a sound sleep to find a pair of strange hands, reaching for me through the dark . . . ‘ (but she) never used much of the material she cleaned from real life, figuring that no one would believe it.”

While Books Two – Four of the Lily Wu saga actually take place in Hawaii, The Chinese Chop is set in post-World War II New York, where narrator and ostensible leading lady Janice Cameron, is has left her beloved Hawaiian home to deal with the frigid weather and a housing shortage in order to pursue her budding career as a writer. Her modest success has even endowed her with a little money, but at the moment, she is trapped in a squalid room in Mrs. Finney’s rooming house – and she’s about to lose that to a merchant marine who has paid six month’s rent in advance. In desperation, Janice springs for an ad to find a room and/or a roommate, which is how she meets Lily Wu. 

Lily has found the perfect spot in Washington Square, but she needs a “front” – a Caucasian girl who can pave the way for the landlord to rent to a Chinese girl. Having spent time in Hawaii, Janice has no prejudices to get in the way of a budding friendship, and the girls find themselves sharing a large, comfortable room with a varied group of fellow boarders. Janice’s relief is short-lived, however: soon after their arrival, Lily is attacked in their suite by an unknown assailant, and then the brand-new superintendent is found dead in his basement room. It looks like natural causes – until the medical examiner discovers recent evidence of torture which must have prompted the man’s heart attack. 

And while Janice finds the boarding house teeming with a diverse array of suspects – a French artist, a well-known children’s book author, a radio actress, and a frustrated musician among them – the most suspicious of them all turns out to be Janice’s own roommate. What secrets is Lily hiding? Did she maneuver her way into the boarding house for some nefarious purpose? Why does she seem to know the dead man? And why does Lily play different parts for the people she meets? 

The answers to most of these questions are . . . interesting enough. In fact, the mystery itself is a moderate success for me. It has all the aspects of a classic puzzle mystery: the closed circle in an interesting setting, the unmasking of a truly nasty killer in the end. And the bit about the Chinese chop itself – which I’ll leave for you to discover – makes for a fascinating dip into another culture. What the book lacks is a real puzzle: in form and substance, it feels like a Nancy Drew mystery for adults. 

I swear I don’t mean this in a bad way!! Its depiction of young people living in late-40’s New York, navigating the social, economic and sexual scene, is refreshingly frank, without stinting on the nostalgia. And it’s an exciting read, crowded with incident and with cliffhangers awaiting us at the end of every chapter. There are murders, attempted murders, near escapes, and so many head injuries that I started to worry how Janice’s cranial health will fare by the end of the series! And there are a few clues, mostly negative ones that cross suspects off the list – although the fact that some of them are also murdered accomplishes this just as well. No, I’ll be interested in seeing how Sheridan fares in the puzzle department as the series continues.

The main source of fun is in the budding relationship between Janice and Lily. It’s clever of Sheridan to introduce Lily Wu as a borderline suspect/detective so that, like Janice, we are unclear of her status until well into the novel. Then it’s nice to watch how Lily, like Charlie Chan before her, utilizes the prejudices of the white people around her to her advantage. And Lily, who is young, rich, and beautiful (author/critic Anthony Boucher, a real fan of the books, claimed to be in love with her) and living in post-war America, has advantages that her predecessor, Inspector Chan, never possessed. 

I want to say that she is as smart as Charlie Chan at solving mysteries, but in this first case everything comes down to luck and intuition. I’m grateful to have the three follow-up novels waiting for me on my TBR pile. Sheridan’s style is breezy and full of exciting things. I can see these books working beautifully on film, and indeed, one of the books was sold as a pilot for a TV series. I wish it had all worked out, but Sheridan evidently met the Hollywood folks, “couldn’t stand the hypocrisy,” and left with no deal. It seems to me, then, that another republication of the Lily Wu mysteries is in order, one that will hopefully produce some excitement from those TV folks once again. Meanwhile, you can bet that I’ll be covering the next three books in the series!