Thank you for your review. I do not believe that I have ever heard a summary of this story before.
"Charlie chan Returns" was the fourth book of a seven-book set that was released in the 1974 by Bantam Books. Here is a small description of this book that I found on the Internet: "Based on a screenplay by Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander. Novelization by Dennis Lynds."
This leads to the question of whether or not this story was originally written for a Charlie Chan movie that was never made. I looked up Spielman and Friedlander at imdb.com, and the records listed did not show any work on the Ross Martin film.
The "get a haircut" line plus the use of a biker bar seem to place the screenplay, at least, in the late 1960s. (By the early to mid-'70s, longer hair was pretty much accepted in general. Also, in the late '60s, there was, as I remember, a rash of "biker" films made.) This would have been the right time period for the screenplay to have been somehow connected to the Ross Martin project, which, although released in 1979 was filmed in 1971. Perhaps this screenplay was rejected and another, by other writers, Gene R. Kearney and Simon Last, was accepted for use in the movie.
Thank you again, Chris. Maybe, besides giving us a nice review, you have opened another mystery!
Well in reading the description to the movie and the cast, there's no comparison at all. Perhaps, as you said, they reject this story for the one they did for the movie. A shame too, for I believe if they stuck with the story I just finished, they'd probably would have kickstarted a whole new series of movies or maybe a television series.
Dennis Lynds has his own website. I think I'll write him and see if he can shed some light. He also wrote two other chan books under a different name. My blog has the listing from July I think.
