On the Classic Mysteries podcast this week, let's look at some short tales set in ancient China and featuring another of my favorite detectives. Judge Dee was a real historical character who lived during the T'ang Dynasty in China during the 7th century. For centuries, stories about the judge have been popular in China. The Dutch diplomat Robert Van Gulik took the character of the real Judge Dee and wrote several new fictional adventures for him to solve. That includes 17 novels and also a single volume of eight short stories entitled Judge Dee at Work. If you'd like to listen to the audio review, please click here.
During the years covered by these short stories, Judge Dee was a village magistrate, which Van Gulik tells us was one of the hardest jobs in the Chinese civil service of the time. He was generally overworked and usually had to handle virtually all the tasks of a senior official, including carrying out the investigation of multiple cases at once. In Van Gulik's novels, the judge usually works on three simultaneous cases which often turn out to be intertwined. In the eight short stories of Judge Dee at Work, because we are reading short stories and not novels, the judge usually works on one or at most two cases in each of the stories. The cases generally involve murder, with a couple of forays into political intrigue and even treason. As always with Van Gulik's work, we are given a good feeling for what we are told were the realities of everyday life at that time and in that place, for a magistrate such as Judge Dee would be brought into contact with all layers of Chinese society. The stories are excellent, and I recommend the book heartily.
There's another reason to consider getting a copy of this book for your own collection: To me, one of the most interesting and useful features of Judge Dee at Work is a four page time-line chart inserted at the end of the book which gives a complete outline of nearly all the fictional cases solved by Judge Dee, listing these eight short stories and 14 of the 17 novels based on the order of Judge Dee’s fictional career. While the books were not written by Van Gulik in the order of Judge Dee’s offices and cases – the way, for example, many of today’s mysteries feature detectives and supporting characters who “get older” from book to book – the books and stories do take place at various clearly-defined points in the judge’s career. That’s why I say, the time-line chart in Judge Dee at Work is an invaluable addition to our tools for figuring out the order in which the judge held his magistrate positions and solved his many cases. It's very definitely worth having.
Comments