Inspector Duff of Scotland Yard is strangled while visiting his friend Charlie Chan in Honolulu. Duff had been on the trail of a party of ten who were about to leave to sail for San Francisco. Chan swears to avenge his friend's death as an extra motivation to bring a serial strangler to justice. There's another strangulation murder at a hotel and then the action moves aboard ship.
This Chan plot is very good so it's brilliant that Fox made this one because the earlier lost Warner Oland version of the story has never turned up as yet. There are intriguing decoy ploys involved and the compulsion of someone's complicity that needs to be worked out. The revenge killings of the murderer involves the Judas curse of thirty pieces of silver which is transferred here to a stringbag containing 30 dimes presented to the victim before they die. A mysterious beggarman character keeps popping up to add to the intrigue.
This has a good supporting cast including Lionel Atwill and Leo G. Carroll who are always welcome in mysteries. Then there is a great comic turn from Cora Witherspoon who utters lines just like the way Agnes Morehead would do in later films. Her best line comes at the expense of the Mrs Walter's otherworldly character who is always in touch with the dead. In the morgue scene at the end she tells Mrs Walters to move into the morgue saying "You'd love it here."
Jimmy Chan pops up through a hotel window and then later as a stowaway aboard ship and helps Pop's investigations in an even more chaotic way than usual. Charlie uses his bag of tricks methodology to eventually bring the murderer to justice.
This Chan plot is very good so it's brilliant that Fox made this one because the earlier lost Warner Oland version of the story has never turned up as yet. There are intriguing decoy ploys involved and the compulsion of someone's complicity that needs to be worked out. The revenge killings of the murderer involves the Judas curse of thirty pieces of silver which is transferred here to a stringbag containing 30 dimes presented to the victim before they die. A mysterious beggarman character keeps popping up to add to the intrigue.
This has a good supporting cast including Lionel Atwill and Leo G. Carroll who are always welcome in mysteries. Then there is a great comic turn from Cora Witherspoon who utters lines just like the way Agnes Morehead would do in later films. Her best line comes at the expense of the Mrs Walter's otherworldly character who is always in touch with the dead. In the morgue scene at the end she tells Mrs Walters to move into the morgue saying "You'd love it here."
Jimmy Chan pops up through a hotel window and then later as a stowaway aboard ship and helps Pop's investigations in an even more chaotic way than usual. Charlie uses his bag of tricks methodology to eventually bring the murderer to justice.