Scott Kikkawa’s latest book “Char Siu” is his third book in the series featuring Honolulu Police Department homicide detective Francis “Sheik” Yoshikawa.

This book, as well as his earlier two books, takes place in 1950s Hawaii – the period before Hawaii’s statehood. It’s a gritty and dark Hawaii that bucks the image of the paradise that’s often portrayed in media. The writing is in the classic noir and hard-boiled detective/private eye novel styles of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. If you’ve seen the movies “The Big Sleep” or “The Maltese Falcon” or read the books, you’ll have a sense about Scott Kikkawa’s books. Just imagine a Japanese American detective in the roles played by Humphrey Bogart.

LC: Scott, let’s start with your background. Please tell us a little bit about your education and work. I understand that you are a graduate of New York University and are a federal law enforcement officer. Your background has similarities with your main character Sheik Yoshikawa. You both studied medieval and renaissance literature and have careers in law enforcement. But is that where the similarities end?

Where do your backgrounds merge and diverge? What did you draw upon from your own experiences and what was from your imagination and research? For example, your details on the experience of seeing dead decomposing bodies are quite explicit and detailed. Did you have similar experiences to draw upon?

I always tell people that though I create these characters, including the Sheik, and put words in their mouths, they are not me, including him. It wouldn’t be true, though, to say that I did not draw on personal experience to create him. This is with the caveat that he is a product of a different time. Some of the experiences I draw from are universal, and some still hold true today as they would have when I went through them or when this character would have gone through them decades earlier. One such experience is that of being a Hawaii boy going to New York City for college. I found I had more in common with people in New York than I had with people from other parts of the U.S. Like people from Hawaii, New Yorkers think they live in the greatest place on earth, so nobody moves. It’s also a city of immigrants, like Honolulu. This became the Sheik’s experience, too.

The fact that I am a law enforcement officer and my main character is also a law enforcement officer means we’re similar in occupation only. Law enforcement has changed a great deal from the 1950s until today, and the era in which my main character operates is on the eve of a major overhaul for police work. Key Supreme Court decisions, such as Miranda v. Arizona and Gideon v. Wainwright came in the early 1960s. Today, I do my job in an environment of lawsuits, DNA identification, electronic research and media micro-coverage. Beating confessions out of suspects is not considered to be a good practice anymore. Gone are the days of mistaken identity and killing other people for cash—cash! I believe there was a golden age of crime and crime fiction, and with apologies to my friends who write contemporary crime fiction, that era is not today. I don’t think contemporary crime, as it is in real life, makes for good reading. My job and my protagonist’s job are vastly different.

What still exists, though, are the politics and the red tape, and frustration with those obstacles are something I imbue the Sheik with. Otherwise, his experiences are the product of my imagination checked by lots of careful research.

LC: Can you tell us about what got your started in writing your novels? I heard you mention in other interviews that you didn’t really have any thoughts about writing novels till 2011, but I imagine that with your educational background, you must have had an inkling that you could write pretty well. Were you involved with any writing workshops prior or after your initial impetus to write a novel? In your other interviews, you’ve mentioned the help you’ve received from the people with your publisher Bamboo Ridge. It sounded kind of like an advanced writers group. Can you mention what they did to help you with your writing projects?

I have no formal “training” as a fiction writer; I didn’t enroll in creative writing classes in college (except for maybe one 100-level course), and I wasn’t an MFA candidate, like many who write fiction. My first novel, Kona Winds, was the result of a drunken dare. A friend challenged me to write a “good” mystery set in Hawaii after I complained that most were lame colonial/tourist narratives. In college, I was the campus newspaper cartoonist, and I thought if I pursued any kind of creative expression, funny animals would be it.

Bamboo Ridge Press miraculously picked up my work; its reputation is built on putting out the best literary fiction and poetry in Hawaii, and at this point, they’ve been doing it for 45 years. I thought they’d never give a detective story a second look, but they did, and here we are. Christy Passion, my friend and award-winning Bamboo Ridge poet, asked me if I’d like to be a part of the Bamboo Ridge Study Group, a writers’ group made up of Bamboo Ridge writers with a history going back almost to the press’ founding. Christy told me that my membership in the Study Group had been proposed, but that a decision may take some time as any candidate had to have unanimous approval from all Study Group members to join. I was lucky as hell everyone agreed to let me in. Membership is made up of Hawaii’s most well-respected writers: Eric Chock, Darrell Lum, Juliet Kono, Mavis Hara, Wing Tek Lum, Gail Harada, Lisa Linn Kanae, Christy Passion, Ann Inoshita, Jean Toyama, Marion Lyman-Mersereau, Michelle Cruz Skinner, Brenda Kwon, Lee Cataluna and Donald Carreira Ching to name those who have been in since I started and who have all contributed greatly to my work with their comments. Those names should be familiar to anyone who is familiar with the breadth of AAPI literature.

Char Siu was the first of my novels that had the benefit of a complete review by the Bamboo Ridge Study Group. They reviewed it in submissions of one or two chapters each month. Wing Tek Lum, whom I affectionately refer to as the Dean of Chinatown, and Lisa Linn Kanae, who red-penned my submission chapters, were particularly influential. Two members who are sadly no longer with us, Marie Hara and Joe Tsujimoto, helped with the opening chapters. Juliet Kono (Lee) and Jean Toyama were my actual editors and Gail Harada copy edited my manuscript. I credit them all with producing something readable. I’m the luckiest detective fiction writer in Hawaii, maybe anywhere.

LC: Each of the plots of your books is loosely based on similar times and happenings in Hawaii. Can you tell us about the real events and how you fictionalize them?

All of my books are set against a backdrop of actual historic events of the period in pre-statehood Hawaii. All involve murder (of course) interwoven with the events of the time, which are ironically rarely discussed today in Hawaii. Kona Winds imagined the fallout of the key sugar and dock strike of 1949. Red Dirt was set against the real-life Smith Act trials of the so-called Hawaii Seven which was the culmination of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anticommunist investigations in Hawaii. Char Siu imagines who might fill the vacuum left by the purge of the real-life Honolulu Police Department Vice Squad extortionists in the late 1940s.

The murders, and the parties involved in them, are, of course fictitious, but the events they are set against are real. It’s really a matter of using what James Ellroy refers to as the “wiggle room in history”, finding spaces between real-life events, people and institutions and setting a plausible story. My made-up murders didn’t really happen, but my goal is to convince the reader that they could have happened.

I don’t craft plots which would have changed the course of history and created an alternate history. Science fiction is not my aim.

ST: It seems there were a lot of crooked cops in your stories. Was that a common occurrence in police departments in those days? Was it the low salary or being so close to all the vice they saw and gradually getting sucked into it? Has policing changed a lot since the 1950s?

“Crooked” is a relative concept; by our standards today, most cops from the 1950s would be considered “crooked,” but in their own time, many considered their practices “effective.” In an age before litigation and key Supreme Court cases, a lot of police and investigative tradecraft involved brutality, coercion, routine civil rights violations and deception. Many considered the “protection money” they extorted out of establishments of ill-repute to be an acceptable way to enhance their income, though in varying degrees from person to person, as with other occupations. Ethics was a different creature then, but not just in police work: public corruption was commonplace in every government office, especially in elected offices.

We are not free of corruption today, though I think today’s examples are fewer and much more sophisticated than they were in the era I write in.

Policing has changed a great deal. Law enforcement officers are now held legally accountable for their decisions and actions in ways never imagined 70 years ago. The stress of liability is in many ways a bigger burden for today’s law enforcement officer than the fear of bodily injury. I’d say that my own basic training as a federal law enforcement officer was 25% tactical (firearms, defensive tactics, arrest techniques, etc.) and 75% legal. I’d venture a guess and say you could probably reverse those percentages for a cop of the 1950s.

I think law enforcement has transformed into a highly professional and legally responsible occupation compared to what it was before the 1960s. But I think that the stories of a rawer, more brutal era were more interesting because they were uglier. This is why I choose to write in a previous time. I don’t think most people would really be interested in reading a novel about my real-life work. I certainly wouldn’t!

ST: I'm surprised Frank Yoshikawa can function as well as he does having had as much liquor in his system as there seems to be. He refers to the pain, is this due to his experiences during the war?

LC: Yes, I was wondering the same thing. How can Sheik function as well as he does considering that he appears to suffer from alcoholism and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from his war experience? Even his chain smoking seems very problematic. Reading the stories from our current day perspective, I’m really rooting for him to get some help. I notice that Ellen is starting to get concerned about his drinking and Sheik’s rebuttal thought was that he thought she drank too much also. Is this your way of saying that they’re starting to realize that they may have problems? I love how the James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice” slips in some anti-smoking lines.

Once upon a time, and not so very long ago in this country, alcohol, cigarettes and red meat were so commonplace they were like basic food groups. As a young child in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I got used to inhaling the second-hand smoke from my father’s cigarettes in his Mercury Marquis; it’s a miracle that I didn’t develop any respiratory issues as a result. The two-martini lunch was something that was flippantly joked about on sit-coms and in movies.

Here in Honolulu, Chief Dan Liu (Honolulu Police Department Chief from 1948-1969, and incidentally, America’s first Chinese American Chief of Police) instituted a no-drinking-on-duty policy for HPD in the early 1950s (this is referenced in Char Siu). Before this policy, there was no such policy, and cops taking a drink on the job was a fairly common practice. This was also the norm nationwide. When Chief Liu instituted his policy, it wasn’t popular with many who were used to the practice and they circumvented it (as the Sheik does). In many ways, Chief Liu’s policy had more to do with morals and the outward appearance of propriety than it did with health and safety.

People respond to alcohol and tobacco use differently. Some have very minor health effects from their use, and others very severe effects. Today, we know both substances to be harmful. In the 1950s, only those who exhibited flamboyant public drunkenness were ostracized as misfits. It wasn’t until the American Lung Association’s anti-smoking campaigns of the 1970s that we saw a real cultural shift on cigarettes. Mothers Against Drunk Driving wasn’t even founded until 1980.

My portrayal of the Sheik as a drinker and smoker was an attempt to portray a realistic character of the period without anachronistically imposing a contemporary sensibility and judgment on his lifestyle. Whether or not he is truly an addict is for the reader to decide. Alcohol was the drug of choice of many—not just war veterans—to deal with emotional pain, which did not carry the clinical labels it does today. Self-medicating with booze did not have the negative connotation it does now, though it was no less ruinous.

ST: You refer to literature in your books. How do you choose which piece to weave into the story? In "Kona Winds," you used "Divine Comedy," in "Red Dirt" you used "Le Morte d'Arthur," and in "Char Siu" you used "The Tempest."

LC: Do you start with a general plot for your books and just imagine what classics you could use for the theme? I must say that many of the quotes are beyond my understanding as to their connection with the plot of your books, but I’m hoping that it will come to me with following readings.

The Sheik’s musings on the works he studied in college on the G.I. Bill are in there to give a sense about his thought process. He draws on these references to give a framework to his thoughts and analysis. Admittedly, I do this myself in my own real-life work, finding analogies to federal law in the Sharia (the Code of Federal Regulations is like Hadith—I was an Islamic Studies major at NYU) or comparing 9th Circuit rulings Vasari’s praise of the Mona Lisa (I was a Medieval and Renaissance Studies minor) and sought to make my main character’s references a window on his past and personality. He is also a contradiction of sorts: a literate former harness bull.

At first, the references in Kona Winds were from many works and authors, but on revision, I eliminated all but Dante’s Divina Commedia to prevent confusion. The practice stuck with the subsequent books and I chose to have Sheik reference only one work throughout each book. Each work referenced is a work that I have enough familiarity with (having read them myself in college). The wonderful thing about most medieval or renaissance literature is that they are universally themed enough where appropriate quotes and ideas are not hard to find for any situation. Each work was also selected for its overall idea and how that idea is analogous to each individual novel: the Divina Commedia is a journey from hell to heaven and is also a satire, which is what I felt Kona Winds was to a large extent. Le Morte D’Arthur is the convoluted account of a quest beset with diversions, like Red Dirt. The Tempest is filled with machinations in a surreal world; Prospero’s island is a proxy for the vice dens of Chinatown in Char Siu.

I don’t bother to explain the references as Sheik himself would not bother to explain them.

LC: Your books are packed with references and metaphors that I’m sure I missed or didn’t understand, especially many of the Hawaiian references. For me, it was like watching or reading a Shakespeare play. Interestingly enough, I think I was able to follow the stories pretty well. Was that what you were going for and why you didn’t bother to include a glossary, annotations, or note section? I notice that your publisher included a notes booklet for "Kona Winds" on their website. Do they plan on doing that for the other books?

Do you have your own notebooks that you put together during the course of writing your books? You have such an amazing wealth of information packed into them. For example, I double checked on one small reference you made to the Jazz musician Paul Desmond because I didn’t think he was that well known in 1953 and found out differently. Anachronisms in historical fiction sometimes ruin it for me.

PC: The period details are fantastic. How was this written? Eyewitness descriptions? Family?

LC: I love how you mentioned that detective work consisted mostly of a lot of research. I imagine that research plays a large part in your writing. As Gid Hanohano in "Kona Winds" says, “knowledge is options.”

Period details are of the utmost importance to me. I, too, find anachronisms annoying and distracting in historical fiction. I don’t like works that impose a contemporary lens on period pieces because I find that such works lack credibility.

I was basically a history major (Islamic Studies, Medieval and Renaissance Studies) in college, so research is something I actually enjoy. A lot of writers I know dread research of this kind. I love it.

My research is archival, anecdotal, and in the field.

Archival research is conducted at home either online or readings from a library I have amassed over the years on Hawaii’s territorial years, with volumes on labor disputes, immigration and immigrant communities, political and economic conditions and change, World War II martial law in Hawaii and internment of Japanese Americans, true crime, Buddhist missions, historic Chinatown, Waikiki and other districts and biographies of key historic figures. I look for opportunities to obtain volumes whenever I can. I have had the privilege of having institutions open their archives to me for research, letting me handle even primary sources. I am a regular presence at the University of Hawaii-West Oahu’s Center for Labor Education and Research (CLEAR), the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, The Nisei Veterans Memorial Center at Kahului, the Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Museum at Puunene and the Grove Farm Museum at Lihue.

Anecdotal research are interviews with people who lived through the period (there are fewer and fewer of them each year, sadly) including my own mother and her contemporaries. They were young people during the era, but I find that those who were teenagers or children at the time are wonderful references for popular culture because they were largely unconcerned with current events.

Field research includes walking excursions of Honolulu’s historic districts and buildings, guided tours of museums and conversations with curators, visits to plantation sites and rural communities and photographs of everything I’m allowed to photograph.

I am aided by the fact that I have an aesthetic obsession with the 1950s, postwar America before the advent of rock and roll. I think the clothes were great—there was never a time in American history when both men and women looked better. And the music of the era is my favorite: Frank Sinatra was the greatest vocalist who ever lived, and it was a golden age of jazz with Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Chet Baker and many others doing their best work.

I’m lucky that I get to work with a copy editor at Bamboo Ridge named Normie Salvador. Normie is the King of Fact Checkers. He told me that Sheik couldn’t watch Ed Sullivan on a Friday night because it only aired on Sundays! Folks like Normie go over my fine-tooth combing with another fine-tooth comb, and keep me from writing myself into error.

ST: Descriptions such as, "big jars of kimchee filled the plywood shelves crammed so close together that even the rats would've died if the place caught fire," or "I was as inconspicuous as a cockroach on a tray of haupia," convey a vivid picture in the reader's mind and lightens up the mundane work that law enforcement entails.

LC: Do you go around thinking in the way that Sheik thinks, finding colorful descriptions that fit what you are observing? I know actors sometime start to inhabit the characters that they portray. In "Kona Winds" I was wondering if you were going to run out of ways to describe the heat and then thought about how the Eskimo-Aleut language has many ways of describing snow. How do you come up with these descriptions?

A lot of the similes I employ are an homage to Raymond Chandler, who was a master of the simile. In fact, the roach-on-the-haupia is a direct tribute to Chandler’s “as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food” line in Farewell My Lovely.

I read all kinds of books in high school and college, but nothing spoke to me like the prose of Chandler. I love his dialogue, description and sarcasm. It’s true that Chandler was notoriously racist and misogynistic in his portrayals, and I am no apologist for him in that sense. I am inspired by his style, though, and sought to craft a protagonist in his mold, one whom he would have referred to as a “Jap gardener.” I think that there is an ironic justice in that.

Heat is something you live with in Hawaii. Admittedly, summers in Georgia, New York City, Tokyo and Singapore I’ve experienced were far more brutal than here at home, but we’re consistently hot throughout the year. You’ll find all kinds of ways to describe the heat and humidity when you live with it, especially when the air conditioner craps out.

LC: Some of the antagonists seem a little one dimensional – the Chinatown criminals in "Char Siu" for example. You even describe the brothel boss as a dragon lady. Have you gotten any push back about stereotypically negative portrayals of Chinese and other ethnic groups in your books?

Of course the books are just from the perspective from a Japanese American cop and others from the 1950s, but I’m wondering if any readers may have difficulty in understanding that you are writing in context for the times and this is the way people may have talked or thought at the time. I almost wonder if there should be some sort of disclaimer for young readers that things like the racism portrayed, language like the use of the J word, and smoking and drinking are just context for the times.

Other authors don’t usually use any disclaimers, but sometime in our efforts to portray AAPIs in the best of light, we forget that we are humans too (not all good or bad). I think that’s what you are trying to do in showing that Sheik has fine ethical lines that he’s having trouble navigating. Char Siu’s lead antagonist Captain Manny Pacheco has complexity too. How about the other characters, do you think you have any obligation to give them that same complexity or is it alright that villains can sometimes just be bad without the need to please people’s desires for ethnic white washing?

I submitted chapters of Char Siu to the Bamboo Ridge Study Group and was aware of stereotypical Chinese portrayals, knowing that those characters had to pass the scrutiny of Darrell Lum and Wing Tek Lum, who were especially keen on looking out for them. The Pearl was a comic figure of sorts, but I think she got a pass because she wasn’t a typical “dragon lady.” She was atypically foul--mouthed and ill-tempered and irrationally irritated. The character of Nappy Lin starts off as a Confucius-spouting caricature, but this is soon revealed to be a façade he puts on for white customers.

I think it’s important not to make disclaimers for a work that seeks to portray a different period authentically. I think it insults the intelligence of the reader to do so. I also think that showing a period and its people as they were, warts and all, so to speak, brings an awareness in literature that nonfiction fails to do in many cases. I was rejected by many literary agents because they didn’t think they could sell a Hawaii as “ugly as the one I portray.” When I read that, I knew I had accomplished my mission.

I decided not to anachronistically make the narrative politically correct, though the Sheik as a narrator is not as repugnantly biased as many of his contemporaries would have been. He’s an equal opportunity hater, fed up with all groups and their irritating quirks, including his own. The appeal of the noir genre for me is that no character is wholly good or evil, including the protagonist. If other characters seem one-dimensional, it’s because the first-person narrator doesn’t bother to get to know them. I think this is one of the facets about first-person narratives which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. While you don’t really see most of the characters in the book as fully-formed human beings, you certainly get to see the protagonist as a very nuanced and complex individual. It’s a trade-off I’ll make any day.

ST: On a more general topic, I was wondering if you had any thoughts about presidential candidates’ promises to get rid of the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies if elected. Trust in federal law enforcement seems to be at a low for certain political factions. Do you have some thoughts on what can be done to restore everyone’s trust?

I think that the media, both left-wing and right-wing, are to blame for overly politicizing the function of federal law enforcement. We don’t exist to persecute the people you think we’re persecuting or to witch-hunt your favorite candidate. We exist to enforce the laws as they are written, whether we personally agree with them or not. The sooner people stop getting their information about the “motives” behind an investigation from media outlets hellbent on selling the most ad revenue, the sooner they’ll come to realize that we swore an oath to uphold and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, not to promote a political agenda.

LC: I understand that you are currently working on another book(s) for the series. Can you possibly give us a sneak peak about what they are going to be about?

The fourth book in the series (I guess it’s now a “series”, isn’t it?) titled Sporting Girl, takes place in late summer/early fall of 1954, and includes flashbacks to 1942, the year of Sheik’s graduation from high school. It’s murder against the backdrop of the pivotal territorial elections of 1954 with reminiscences of government and military-sanctioned prostitution on Honolulu’s Hotel Street during World War II. Bamboo Ridge Press has committed to publishing Sporting Girl, which is projected to be released in late 2025 or early 2026.

The fifth book in the series, Sakura Queen, is Sheik’s investigation of the murder of a Japanese American appliance salesman amid the 3rd Annual Cherry Blossom Festival and Queen Pageant in early 1955. The victim is found with his throat slashed in his car parked in front of a Cherry Blossom Queen contestant’s family’s home. The manuscript is being reviewed by the Bamboo Ridge Study Group, who should be receiving the last chapters in the next couple of months.

I’ve started the sixth book, Hell Valley, and I’m about three chapters in. It’s set in 1955 and dredges up secrets related to Honouliuli, an Army-run internment camp on Oahu, where a number of Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. The Sheik plumbs the depths of Honolulu’s Chinatown and Japantown to find what links recent homicide victims.

I have rough outlines for book seven, Full Count (AJA Baseball) and book eight, Pink Palace (the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in its last days of Matson ownership).

None of these books will be set past 1959 (the year Hawaii became a state).

PC: I was wondering if you have ever heard of Chang Apana, the Honolulu police detective who was the Chinese American inspiration for the Charlie Chan stories and movies. That could be another story idea, about law enforcement in Hawaii in the 1920s and 1930s which would correspond with Sheik’s early childhood and maybe even involving Sheik’s parents. This could be a way of rewriting the Charlie Chan stories with realism and with less of the stereotypical portrayal used in the movies. Perhaps this could be slipped in as another motive for Sheik becoming a cop.

Chang Apana is so much more interesting than the character he inspired! Apana was a former paniolo (Hawaii cowboy) who carried a bullwhip with him on police raids. There are anecdotes of him climbing roofs and single-handedly taking down entire gambling dens. This is a far cry from the inscrutable, dawdling Charlie Chan of the Earl Derr Biggers books and its cinematic portrayals. Chang Apana was a real-life action hero. I don’t think there was a cooler historic cop anywhere.

I have, and am still, thinking about setting a police story in the Chang Apana era, referencing the real-life Apana. He’s really too good not to appear in a book that does him and his time justice. The Sheik as a kid would have known about him and would have idolized him. I’ll definitely work this into the present manuscript (Thanks, and I’ll credit you in the acknowledgements, Philip!)

LC: If all the characters in your books are partially you, do you think you could possibly write a book from Ellen’s (Sheik’s love interest) or Gideon Hanohano’s (Sheik’s boss) perspective? They are such interesting character that I think a book or two from their perspectives would be enjoyable. This is not a criticism, but I was a little disappointed that Ellen didn’t have more of a part in "Char Siu." It’s kind of like sequels to movies where you are hoping your favorite supporting characters are back for the following movies and then you find out that they only play minor roles. Maybe a switch on perspectives would be an interesting twist for the series.

That’s a great idea! Ellen Park Yoshikawa started out as an office girl with a small role in my first draft of Kona Winds but evolved into what would become a lot of readers’ favorite character. She’s smarter than the Sheik. So is Gid Hanohano. Ellen has an interesting perspective: she sees all the mistakes her husband makes. Gid was a young footman in the last days of Chang Apana, and has a lot of his own stories.

I can only hope that there would be enough interest in their stories so that someone would put them in print (How about it, Bamboo Ridge?).

LC: Mahalo Scott, thank you very much for doing this interview for us. We look forward to your future writings.

Mahalo, Leonard, Susan and Philip! This was a lot of fun!

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Char Siu can also be purchased through the publisher Bamboo Ridge