Another of my favorite fictional detectives visits us today from ancient China, though it's worth noting that he really did exist. Judge Dee was a court official in China more than a thousand years ago, a magistrate in the civil service system of justice that was well-organized in the China of the seventh century. Judge Dee was a real person - though the stories told here are the creations of author Robert Van Gulik. I've reviewed a number of Van Gulik's books about Judge Dee, all of which are certainly worth your reading time. Here's the (slightly edited) review I wrote of The Lacquer Screen:
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Come back in time with me to seventh-century imperial China. Judge Dee, the magistrate of the district of Peng-lai, is on his way home from an official conference. He stops along the way in another district, called Wei-ping, hoping to take a few days off from the duties of his demanding office. Instead, he finds himself pressed into service by the magistrate of Wei-Ping to solve three puzzling cases – including the murder of that magistrate’s wife. A murder which may have been predicted by the curious and inexplicable changes made to a scene on the magistrate’s lacquered screen. It happens in The Lacquer Screen, a Judge Dee mystery by Robert van Gulik.
Robert Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat who spent many years in China. He was an authority on Chinese culture and loved the many ancient Chinese detective stories. Most of them were written in the 18th century, but were set more than a thousand years earlier. In the 1940s, he translated and published one such book as The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, featuring a character who was an actual magistrate and later court official in China during the seventh century. At the end of the book, Van Gulik issued a challenge to other authors to come up with new stories, in the traditional mode, about Judge Dee. Nobody did – so Van Gulik himself went on to write sixteen books featuring the investigations of Judge Dee. All are set in the seventh century and they contain fascinating pictures of everyday life in ancient China.
The Lacquer Screen tells of a visit paid by Judge Dee to the home town of another, more senior magistrate. He arrives at a time of crisis for that magistrate, whose wife has disappeared. The magistrate tells Dee that he believes he is losing his mind. He shows his visitor a beautiful, four-panel lacquer screen on which the image of a pair of lovers has been altered to show the man stabbing the woman. The magistrate fears that he may have murdered his wife – who, in fact, has been murdered.
That is only one of three interconnected cases that Judge Dee must solve, in order to help the other magistrate but also – more importantly, in Judge Dee’s mind – to preserve the order and sanity of the world around him. The role of the Chinese magistrate was central to the organization of China’s vast civil service system; the magistrate was called the “father and mother official,” with power over virtually every aspect of everyday civilian life.
At the same time, Judge Dee must try to solve the mystery of a wealthy local businessman who appears to have gone mad and committed suicide. And there is also the matter of an apparent embezzlement of a large sum of money from that same local businessman.
In order to solve the crimes that confront him, Judge Dee must take extraordinary measures – at one point going incognito disguised as a roving thief, a position which brings him into contact with a wonderfully colorful character known as “The Corporal,” the head of the town’s underworld. In the course of his investigation, Judge Dee learns a new respect for “The Corporal” – and is left to question the integrity of the town’s magistrate.
According to Van Gulik, it was quite common for the local magistrate to be forced to solve multiple crimes at once. He relied for help on a few carefully chosen assistants, along with the local constables and other petty officials. It was Van Gulik’s genius to take this framework and rework it into a fashion that would be both exotic and familiar to modern Western readers. Speaking personally, the Judge Dee mysteries pushed me into reading a few basic books about Chinese history, to learn more about an ancient and honorable culture. The Judge Dee books can be read in just about any order; events in The Lacquer Screen take place early in Dee’s fictional career, although the book itself was the eighth original work written by van Gulik.
I have thoroughly enjoyed every one of the books, and that is certainly true of The Lacquer Screen. It provides an excellent look at a very different culture from most of the Western world, and it is filled with fascinating characters – the corporal, the underworld boss, is really a piece of work. Robert Van Gulik’s books, including The Lacquer Screen, are available both in print editions and as e-books, and they are highly recommended.
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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.
Next: The Fourth Door, by Paul Halter
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