The News Journal/JENNIFER CORBETT
Howard Berlin has written numerous books, mostly about electronics, but only two of them bespeak his real passion -- Charlie Chan movies.
 

T
he News Journal/JENNIFER CORBETT
"Chan always battled for truth and justice," Berlin says of his favorite fictional detective. "He outwitted his adversaries, and fought discrimination."
Berlin appears in a feature accompanying 20th Century Fox’s recent release of a boxed DVD set of four Chan films from the 1930s starring Warner Oland in the title role.




Charlie Chan’s No. 1 fan



Wise men say Wilmington author knows his favorite detective better than just about anyone


By VICTOR GRETO
The News Journal
07/17/2006

WILMINGTON — There’s something about being an amateur that suits Howard Berlin just fine.

Retired now at 59, he had conquered the professional route long ago, as an electrical engineer and analyst for the Defense Department at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

It was there he patented three inventions and wrote several best-selling books in the field.


None of the inventions (One was a device for identifying waveforms in a multiple oscilloscope display; another was a perturbation device for measuring airway resistance.) made him well-known. Nor did his books on electronics, from his first, “The 555 Timer Applications Sourcebook with Experiments,” published in 1976, to a “Guide to CMOS Basics, Circuits, and Experiments.”

But being a household name has nothing to do with excelling in a field whose details – how does a remote control, or a timed windshield wiper, really work? – are as mysterious to some as the labyrinthine folds of theology.

And that was fine with him.

But, away from the pristine order of the home he shares with his wife of 31 years, and into the sequestered clutter of his office just off his living room, Berlin has helped categorize, define and explain the cinematic life of the world’s foremost Chinese detective, Charlie Chan.

That’s brought him some attention.

The question is, for a man who has written more than 30 books of eclectic interests, why Chan?

There are boyish reasons. Serious, boyish reasons.

“There were classy detectives in the early part of the 20th century,” Berlin says.

They dressed nice and were cool – just think of Dick Powell’s 1930s “Thin Man” movie series, Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe.

Berlin likes those, but he actually prefers the quirkier ones, like Warner Oland’s portrayal of Charlie Chan, or Peter Lorre’s Mr. Moto, both from the 1930s.

“Chan always battled for truth and justice,” he says. “He was honest, faithful and polite, had a large family” – 14 kids by the time the series of movies ended in 1949 – “and he had all the good qualities a person should have. He used his brains rather than pure muscle. He outwitted his adversaries, and fought discrimination.”

Besides his two books on the subject, 2000’s “The Charlie Chan Film Encyclopedia” (McFarland & Company, Inc, $39.95) and 2001’s “Charlie Chan’s Words of Wisdom” (Wildside Press, $24.95), Berlin now appears in a feature accompanying 20th Century Fox’s recent DVD release of four Chan films from the 1930s.

The movies star Oland as Chan and a young, excitable Keye Luke (who later played David Carradine’s “Kung Fu” master in the 1970s television series) as his No. 1 son.

Two other actors went on to play Chan: Sidney Toler, from 1938 to 1947, and Roland Winters, from 1947 to 1949.

The character was created by author Earl Derr Biggers in 1925. But Biggers’ six Chan books did not approach the popularity of the 44 movies made between 1931 and 1949.

For a guy who has written books on electronics, world monetary units and a buyer’s guide to treasury securities, the movie world of Charlie Chan is a great place to inhabit.

Berlin is seriously indulging as an adult in what delighted him as a teen, when he stayed up nights during the late 1950s to catch those old movies on TV.

“Howard knows more than any human being has a right to know about these movies,” says Tom Leitch, a University of Delaware “theorist of popular culture,” who makes a living contemplating and teaching the stuff Berlin does for fun.

“Part of the charm of this is that the movies themselves are trivial,” Leitch says.

That’s not an insult; it in part explains the lasting power of Hollywood movie-making during the studio era.

“The appeal of something like the Chan movies is that you’re completely comfortable in the world that it offers you because it’s not the most complex one,” says Leitch, who ought to know. He recently wrote a book about the television series “Perry Mason.”

“Once you see two to three of them, as soon as you see the next one, you’re already getting comfortable in the world and you know what’s going to happen as soon as the credits roll.”

The whodunit plots of Chan and Mr. Moto and the Thin Man series are the only unpredictable aspect of them, Leitch says. At least on the first viewing.

To compile the information for his Chan encyclopedia, Berlin watched all 44 Chan movies he had taped from TV or had found in stores. Over six months, he painstakingly compiled tables of murders and victims, giving brief summaries of each movie and the characters that appeared in them. He even recorded the telephone numbers and amounts of money discussed by the characters, among a plethora of other trivia.

On Amazon.com, one fan wrote of the Chan encyclopedia: “It contains insights to the subject of Charlie Chan that represent a thoughtful approach to a fictional character that spanned generations and different interpretations.”

Besides churning out books, Berlin also collects war medals (his collection includes a Congressional Medal of Honor) and plays his favorite bluegrass music on banjo and guitar.

Not bad for a person who was born deaf; he now can hear out of his left ear, thanks to an operation when he was 16.

A frequent traveler, he goes to Israel every year. This has inspired an idea for two more books he wants to write.

He wants one to be about the Via della Rosa, or Way of the Cross, which he has walked in Jerusalem and chronicled through thousands of photographs. He plans to meticulously describe each of the 14 stations of the Cross, as well as the shrines around them, in a coffee-table book.

The other book would be about the walls and gates of Jerusalem.

And he’s not done with American popular culture, either.

He’s working on a book about the 26 two-hour Perry Mason episodes that ran from 1985-1993, starring Raymond Burr.

Nor is he done with 1930s Hollywood detectives.

On Aug. 1, Fox is scheduled to release a set of the Mr. Moto film series with Peter Lorre, whose entire run of eight movies were produced from 1937 to 1939.

When John Cork, the producer of the documentaries that appear in the Chan DVDs, came to Berlin’s Wilmington home to interview him about Chan, he also talked to him about Moto.

Which makes sense, because another book by Berlin, “The Complete Mr. Moto Film Phile: A Casebook” (Wildside Press, $19.95) published last year, has made him the go-to expert to explain the phenomenon.

For more information about Berlin and his books, you can go to his web site at www.drberlin.com.

Contact Victor Greto at 324-2832 or vgreto@delawareonline.com.