Classic Mysteries

Judge Dee and Imperial China

 As part of our contribution to the "Detectives Around the World" theme this week, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a closer look at the Judge Dee mysteries and the glimpse they give us into ancient imperial China. While all mysteries rely on their authors' ability to provide a sense of both the place and the time, that ability is critical to our enjoyment of a historical mystery set - in the case of Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee books - in a place halfway around the world from the United States and nearly 1400 years in the past.

In his combination biography and appreciation of Van Gulik, "Robert Van Gulik: His Life His Work," Janwillem van de Wetering* writes of how Van Gulik, a diplomat and Orientalist, child of a Dutch military family, became an accomplished Chinese scholar, earning his doctorate when he was only 25 years old. His scholarship is evident in his books along with his deep love for China, its language and its people, for he provides an overwhelming sense of the ancient China he studied and loved. His books are illustrated with his own line drawings, and they usually contain detailed, hand-drawn maps showing the layout of the town where the story takes place, along with careful lists of the principal characters in each drama.

Actually, the setting is even more complex than that. Consider:

• "The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee," which was really Van Gulik's translation of an anonymous eighteenth-century Chinese manuscript, deals with the fictionalized events that supposedly took place in the seventh century. In other words, we are seeing the T'ang Dynasty through the eyes of an unknown author who was writing more than a thousand years after the era in which the story is set.
• The other Judge Dee stories, original creations of Van Gulik, were written in the middle of the 20th century, again looking back to the seventh century.
• Most of the books, however, offer what is essentially a view of ancient Chinese society as filtered by a 20th-century writer using stories that had been set down by authors of the 16th to 19th centuries, when many of the early, surviving Chinese detective stories were written.

In other words, you could wind up feeling a bit of temporal whiplash. But that's unfair, I think. What I believe you do find in all of the Judge Dee stories is a terrific sense of place. Van Gulik incorporated what, to western eyes, were very unfamiliar elements in the settings and plots. He showed many of the dividing lines among the different classes of society in imperial China: the educated gentlemen, the merchants and guilds - even a beggars' guild, the traditional family structure (often with multiple wives and concubines), the "brothers of the Green Woods," the soldiers, the prostitutes and, to be sure, the criminals.

All life revolved around a civil service structure which is still regarded as perhaps one of the fairest and most efficient ever conceived. At the bottom of the pyramid structure was the district magistrate - the role held by Judge Dee in most of the stories. This man (always a man) was called the "father-and-mother official" by the people, for he was the first and frequently the only local judicial/police/administrative officer. The magistrate generally had a few hand-picked lieutenants who worked with him over the course of his career, and we meet Judge Dee's regular assistants over and over again throughout the stories. Moving up the civil service pyramid, we find that the higher officials such as prefects supervised the magistrates who were, in turn, supervised at still higher levels, ultimately culminating in the rule of the emperor.

In the Judge Dee books, Van Gulik tries to show us a great deal about everyday life and the administration of criminal justice in ancient China, and I think he succeeds admirably. A number of the books (depending on the edition you find) have introductions and/or postscripts by Van Gulik, explaining some of the curious facts revealed in the settings for his books. If you can find some of the older University of Chicago editions, you will also find a first-rate introduction by Donald F. Lach which provides much interesting and useful background about Van Gulik. Lach calls Judge Dee "The Sherlock Holmes of China." That's not too far off. But just as Holmes would have been unthinkable anywhere but in England, so too it is impossible to imagine Judge Dee in another time and place other than ancient China.

* - By the way, van de Wetering is also the author of a couple of series of very good mysteries set in the Netherlands. Jennifer at the Literate Housewife Review blog reviews one of his books as part of the Detectives Around the World week festivities.

Championship Round

OK, it's time. You have until this Friday, April 16, to vote for the winner of the World's Favorite Detective contest. Only two detectives have survived, out of the 64 who began this contest - now it's up to you to determine a winner. The choices in the championship round are:

Hieronymous ("Harry") Bosch, created by Michael Connelly

OR

Phillip Marlowe, created by Raymond Chandler.

Now, I'm a classic mystery kind of person - so I think my choice should be obvious. But what's yours?

Go to Jen's Book Thoughts Blog now and cast your vote.

The Children's Mystery Challenge: "The Bodies in the Bessledorf Hotel"

Consider the circumstances: you are an eleven-year-old boy, with younger and older siblings. You live in a hotel, where your father is the manager. One day, the hotel maid runs downstairs into the office to announce she has just found the dead body of a guest in one of the rooms. You and your father go upstairs to the room and find - nothing. The body and the guest have disappeared.

And that's just the beginning. It happens again...and the owner of the hotel threatens to fire your Dad if the disappearing bodies damage the hotel's business...

Welcome to "The Bodies in the Bessledorf Hotel," a 1986 novel by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor and our entry for April in the Children's Mystery Challenge. On the second Tuesday of each month, now through June, we're looking at some mysteries which can introduce younger readers to the kind of mysteries we adults enjoy so much. In the case of this blog, obviously, that would include the kind of mysteries we think of as classic mysteries, where readers are given clues which they can piece together (along with the central characters in the story) to find the one true solution to the mystery.

That's what happens in this book - which, by the way, has been republished now with the title "Bernie Magruder and the Disappearing Bodies." Bernie Magruder is the eleven-year-old hero of the book, and most of the action is seen through his eyes. With the help of his siblings and a couple of his good friends, it's up to Bernie to figure out what's really going on at the Bessledorf Hotel - and to unmask (and capture) the villain of the piece...even if he WOULD rather be concentrating on getting his skateboarding exploits into the Guinness Book of World Records.

It's a legitimate, well-plotted mystery, nicely executed, with valid and clever clues along the way. It's a good enough mystery that it was nominated for a 1987 Edgar Award in the Juvenile category. It's intended for readers in the 9-12 age group, although I think it certainly can be enjoyed by older readers as well. I think it's a great introduction to this kind of mystery story.

"Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee"

In honor of "Detectives Around the World" week at Jen's Book Blog, our featured mystery this week stars a detective from halfway around the world - and nearly 1400 years back in time. The detective is Judge Dee, a real figure who lived during the T'ang Dynasty in imperial China during the seventh century.

Judge Dee became the central figure in a series of novels written by Robert Van Gulik. But his first appearance was in Van Gulik's book "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee," which is actually a translation of an eighteenth-century Chinese detective novel. Van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat and Orientalist, translated this marvelous mystery and provided extensive notes and an introduction which explained a great deal about Chinese detective stories and about life in seventh-century China itself. Van Gulik also issued a challenge in his book to other authors, who might be intrigued by Judge Dee, to write some "new" mysteries in the same style. When nobody took him up on his challenge, Van Gulik himself wrote 14 more novels and ten short stories featuring the Judge and his assistants.

In "Celebrated Cases," Judge Dee must solve three unrelated mysteries in his district. There is a double murder among some traveling merchants; an old murder case is reopened; and a young bride is poisoned on her wedding night. The judge and his assistants must use every technique, from deduction and observation to dream analysis, to solve the mysteries. You can listen to a full review on the podcast. The judge - district magistrate, really - was the central figure of ancient Chinese authority in every village, referred to as the "father-and-mother official" because of his critical role in everyday life. Van Gulik - and the anonymous author of the original Chinese novel - provide an overwhelming sense of what that everyday life might have been like. In all the books, including this one, Van Gulik was careful to provide an overview of what Chinese society was like in imperial China, which, for me, adds to the fascination of the Judge Dee books.

A word about Detectives Around the World week: Jen Forbus, at Jen's Book Blog, has invited a number of bloggers to contribute posts this week about authors and their detectives who operate in different places all around the world. In Judge Dee's case, he also works in a different age. But he - and the other detectives you will meet at the link - clearly demonstrate the importance of the setting an author chooses to use for his/her characters. I'll have more to say about Judge Dee, Robert Van Gulik, and the settings of these marvelous mysteries later this week.

Grumble

All right, we're up to the final week of the World's Favorite Detective contest on Jen's Book Blog - and what do I find? My two favorites among the Final Four, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, have both been eliminated. GRUMBLE. Harrumph.

So, after eliminating 62 of the original 64 detectives in the contest, we're down to a final championship match between Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch.

Voting begins Monday and runs through next Friday. Be sure to be counted!

Goldfingers?

Well, not exactly. At least, James Bond's occasional enemy, Auric Goldfinger, doesn't appear to have been overly involved. But, for Ian Fleming fans, yesterday's auction at the Swann Galleries in New York of portions of Otto Penzler's large and valuable collection of British espionage and thriller fiction was definitely worth noting, for a fair amount of gold, both literary and monetary, appears to have been involved.

As I noted last month, the auction featured a number of Penzler's valuable autographed first editions of Fleming novels - and some of them seem to have pulled in quite a good price: a first edition of Fleming's Moonraker, in its dust jacket and signed by the author, was sold for $50,400. The top seller turned out to be an exchange of correspondence between Fleming and the artist who provided his dust jackets, Richard Chopping, which sold for $57,600. There were other authors represented, too - Geoffrey Household, Eric Ambler, John Le Carre and Graham Greene were among the other familiar names whose books were sold from Penzler's collection. Click here to see the full sale catalogue at the Swann Galleries site..

In all, it looks as if the books brought in more than $350,000, which was more than anticipated. According to one of Swann's literary specialists, the top nine lots were bought, not by dealers, but by avid individual collectors. May they provide good new homes for these books.

World's Favorite Detective: The Final Four

Okay, this is going to be tough.

At Jen's Book Thoughts, Jen Forbus's "World's Favorite Detective" contest is down to its final four candidates, from the 64 who began. Now, once again, it's time for you to vote.

I'm in mourning for several of my favorites - but I'm really a fan of three of the remaining four (and have reviewed some of the books in which they appeared). It's not an easy choice - not for me, anyway.

What are you waiting for? Go vote! The ballot box closes on Friday.

"Death in the Quadrangle"

A few weeks back, I reviewed the second of three mysteries by the late Irish writer Eilis Dillon, called "Sent to His Account." I'm delighted to find that the third, and last, Dillon mystery, "Death in the Quadrangle," has now been published by the Rue Morgue Press. It's the subject of our review this week on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here.

It's a marvelous book. Set in a fictional college in Dublin, it reunites two characters from Dillon's first novel, "Death in the Quadrangle": retired Professor Daly and Irish Police Inspector Mike Kenny. Professor Daly is invited back to deliver a series of lectures at his old college - but finds, when he arrives, that the college president has something else in mind. The president has been receiving threatening messages and wants Daly to find out who has been sending them. Daly quickly discoveers that virtually every professor on the staff has a virulent - and probably deserved - hatred for the president. When disaster strikes, and Inspector Kenny arrives on the scene, he finds that he needs Daly's help to make sense out of the goings-on.

All of this is well-handled in a fine, classic mystery story, written with much gentle humor and a fine sense of both character and place. Irish mystery writers were still fairly rare in the 1950s, when these books were written, and Dillon provides an excellent picture of Dublin and of university life. It's good to have all three of Dillon's mysteries back in print - take advantage of the opportunity!