Juanita Sheridan and The Lily Wu Quartet: A Rediscovered Gem from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

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My initial exposure to Juanita Sheridan was harrowing:  I’d just sent my publisher my first Hawaiʻi murder mystery when a friend asked, “Have you read the Hawaiʻi mysteries of Juanita Sheridan?”  Unsettled, I scrambled to find Sheridan’s books – all out of print, so it wasn’t easy.  When they finally arrived, I opened The Kahuna Killer at random and found to my consternation that Sheridan had ended a chapter this way: “Pilikia. That word means trouble.”  I’d ended a chapter of my book nearly identically: “Pilikia. Trouble.”

Yikes!  I snapped her book shut and resolved not to read another word until I’d completed at least my second Hawaiʻi murder mystery.  I didn’t want my books influenced by hers, much less did I wish to be thought a plagiarist.  

I stuck to my resolution, so two years passed before I picked up Juanita Sheridan’s books again.  But wow, I’m glad I finally did.

For those unfamiliar with Sheridan – which seems to include practically everyone who reads or writes about murder mysteries, although this may soon change (see below) – she was once, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a best-selling writer of detective fiction.  That says a lot, because back then, according to David Bordwell in Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (2022), fully twenty-five percent of all works of fiction and most radio plays were murder mysteries.  Then as now, it was a crowded field.  Sheridan managed to thrive in it. 

Four of Sheridan’s books feature her Chinese American amateur detective Lily Wu and also Janice Cameron, who serves as Lily’s sidekick and Sheridan’s narrator.  The first volume, The Chinese Chop (1949), is set in New York, immediately after the Second World War.  It’s the book in which Lily and Janice, two young women who happen to hail from Hawaiʻi, meet for the first time.  Janice is the white roommate Lily needs in order to secure a room in Washington Square; at the time no one there would rent to the Chinese, even a Chinese-American like Lily.  

Lily has an undisclosed reason for choosing one rooming house in particular.  And almost immediately, the building superintendent turns up dead.  That’s unnerving for Janice, who’s initially unsure whether Lily committed the crime or intends to solve it.  But Lily herself, we learn, is never unnerved – not in this book, and not in the three set in Hawaiʻi after Lily and Janice return there.

Sadly, no book-length biography of Juanita Sheridan exists.  But the basics of her colorful life – which, she acknowledged, would not be credible if they appeared in fiction – are well summarized in the late Todd and Enid Schantz’s introduction to their Rue Morgue Press edition of The Chinese Chop (2000).  Sheridan was born in Oklahoma in 1906.  She spent the last years of her life in Guadalajara with her final husband, who may have been her eighth or ninth.  She died in 1974.  

What a lot she packed into sixty-eight years!  Most notably, after youthful attempts to write short stories in New York and California, she left her toddler son in 1935 and sailed to Hawaiʻi so she could concentrate on writing murder mysteries.  She stayed until 1941, getting back to New York just before Pearl Harbor.  

Sheridan’s six-year island sojourn provided the material for three Lily Wu mysteries set in Hawaiʻi a decade later:  The Kahuna Killer (1951), The Mamo Murders (1952), and The Waikiki Widow (1953).  The latter, widely hailed, was distilled into a 1959 episode for “Hawaiian Eye,” a TV series that made actress Connie Stevens a teenage idol.  Sheridan worked on screenplays for the first episodes, then quit Hollywood in disgust, perhaps over her intricate novel getting mutilated for the small screen.  

Largely forgotten today, Sheridan is fortunate in the devotion of those who do remember – or belatedly discover – her.  Rue Morgue Press re-issued the Lily Wu quartet more than two decades ago, before going out of business; some of those editions can still be found.  And – great news! – Maggie Topkis of Felony & Mayhem Press plans to re-issue the entire quartet herself, beginning with The Chinese Chop in June 2024.

So what makes the Lily Wu quartet, and particularly the three volumes set in Hawaiʻi, so impressive, once one’s been exposed to them?  Their timeless features include excellent writing, compelling plots, and a gratifyingly warm relationship between two talented and forceful women, Janice Cameron (as Watson to Lily’s Holmes) and Lily Wu, the sleuth Anthony Boucher of the New York Times declared the best female detective of the era, and with whom he confessed to be in love.

But the time-specific aspects of Sheridan’s Hawaiʻi tales distinguish them too.  She entered adulthood during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, when female sleuths tended to be inoffensive older white women such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.  Yet Lily Wu is the precise opposite: a forceful young Chinese-American woman prepared to use her fists and feet and any other weapon available – along with her exceptionally shrewd mind – not just to defeat evildoers but to clobber them.  She’s an undeniably unique creation; there was no detective like her in the Golden Age, or even later when Sheridan’s books appeared.

Then there’s Sheridan’s generous and affectionate treatment of Hawaiian and Asian characters, at a time when real world treatment of them, even in Hawaiʻi, was anything but.  The Hawaiʻi of which Sheridan wrote is, fortunately, a vanished one, but she offers a fascinating and diamond-hard glimpse of it for her readers.  In the Honolulu of Sheridan’s books, white matrons as society queens preside over sprawling mansions and provide fancy evenings with lace, crystal, and silver for white luminaries of island society.  

These formidable hostesses can stage a traditional luau with Hawaiian musicians or a formal recital of Mozart by a string quartet, but for help they rely on ill-paid Hawaiians or Asians who speak little (except to Lily Wu), and even then imperfectly and with a good deal of pidgin.  There’s no doubt where Sheridan’s sympathies lie.  Although patronized and treated as insignificant by Honolulu grandees, Hawaiians and Asians are the characters Sheridan imbues with sagacity and dignity.

That might seem unremarkable today.  But consider Sheridan’s times – times when Native Hawaiians were called “kanakas,” an offensive slur nowadays, and when Linda Dela Cruz, the most popular Hawaiian singer of her day, could include these lyrics in her hit song, “Come My House,” and be considered funny:

You come my house for one big luau, that’s the Kanaka style.
You eat and eat ‘til the food all pau, that’s the Kanaka style.
You drink and drink till you just one wreck, that’s the Kanaka style.
Then you stop until the next welfare check, that’s the Kanaka style.

Sheridan was ahead of her time, too, in getting Hawaiʻi right more broadly.  She learned a variety of Hawaiian words and used them sparingly but always to good effect.  She studied and accurately portrayed certain practices of the ancient Hawaiians, including human sacrifice.  

Joyce Carol Oates recently observed on social media that when a murder mystery tries to combine the supernatural with a detective story, it’s the detective story that suffers.  Sheridan avoided that problem by attributing belief in Hawaiʻi’s pervasive supernatural world to her more credulous characters, never to Lily Wu or Janice Cameron.  Like the racism of Hawai’i in her time, belief in the supernatural among Native Hawaiians was something Sheridan observed carefully and could describe deftly without ever relying on it to solve a mystery.  

If anything’s missing from the Lily Wu tales, it’s that although Janice Cameron matures and changes throughout the four books – it’s easy to read Janice, a novelist, as Sheridan’s doppelganger – Lily Wu never does.  In Hawaiʻi she’s the same Lily she was in New York:  elegant (we see a lot of women’s clothing in Sheridan’s books), mysterious, infinitely resourceful, and unfailingly brilliant, yet always patient with the slightly less brilliant Janice.

This constancy is hardly a failing.  It’s Sheridan reaching back well before the Golden Age of Detective Fiction to find a kindred spirit for Lily Wu:  Sherlock Holmes himself, another amateur sleuth who throughout his adventures remains, in personality and psychology, a finished creation, a constant.  

Fortunately for us, the constancy of Lily Wu is merely an intriguing foundation, one on which Juanita Sheridan proceeded to construct her sophisticated, detailed, and engrossing quartet of mysteries.  Kudos to Felony & Mayhem Press for republishing them, seventy-five years after they first appeared, for a prospective new era of admirers.

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