There is, of course, little of Lord Lister in the thoroughly upright Judge Dee, though Dee’s occasional resort to disguise might owe something to Lord Lister’s mastery of this craft (it might equally claim precedent in Sherlock Holmes’s own penchant for disguise). The principal bearer of Lord Lister’s genes would be Tao Gan, whom van Gulik discovered as “a reformed itinerant swindler” in Dee Goong An (9). Van Gulik develops his skills as a confidence man and a master of the sleight-of-hand, setting these skills against the more physical virtues of Ma Joong and Chaio Tai. Tao Gan’s epiphany in The Chinese Lake Murders, when he repudiates his life of deceit and crime and enters the service of the Judge, separates him from hero-thieves like Raffles and Lord Lister, but his cunning and his con man’s toolkit allow van Gulik to draw upon the tradition of the gentleman cracksman.
Philo Vance & Nero Wolfe
Philo Vance (twelve novels, 1926–39) and Nero Wolfe (33 novels, 39 short stories, 1934–1974) may be taken as embodiments of the Great Detective, the ratiocinative master mind who was the epitome of the fictional detective in the main line that runs from M. Dupin through Holmes and Thorndyke to Poirot, Wimsey, and a host of Golden Age detectives. Vance and Wolfe belong to the extreme wing of the party: the self-conscious master minds. Holmes on occasion declared his superiority to the common run of Scotland Yard detectives, but he also acknowledged failures. Following a misguided investigation in “The Yellow Face,” Holmes advises Watson: “If it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.” Dr. Thorndyke, with gentlemanly modesty, professes himself to be merely a competent medico-legal practitioner who applies his expertise with scientific rigor. Sir Peter Wimsey covers his light with a bushel of persiflage. In similar fashion, many of the Golden Age’s Great Detectives—Albert Campion, Inspector French, Sir John Appleby, Anthony Gethryn, Roderick Alleyn—solve murder mysteries that only they can solve, but do so without asserting openly and repeatedly their exceptional excellence. Vance and Wolfe are unabashed in proclaiming their own infallible genius, a genius that justifies them in living by their own eccentric rules. Philo Vance identifies himself as a Nietzschean übermensch, an aesthete not bound by the herd morality of good and evil. Nero Wolfe barricades himself inside his brownstone, with its gourmet kitchen and dedicated orchid room, and he refuses to leave or to accommodate himself to the schedules of his clients, the city police, or even the federal government. The detective in this form is the highest authority, unlimited by any considerations of ordinary social obligations.
Judge Dee is the antithesis of the entertainingly vain Great Detective like Vance and Wolfe. He is more deferential even than Dr. Thorndyke or Sir Peter Wimsey, and his deference is not just a matter of social grace. The Great Detectives take, as their default position, a loyalty to their state. Dupin acts on behalf of a royal personage; Holmes fires bullets into his wall to shape a VR (Victoria Regina); in a crisis—World War II—even Nero Wolfe makes gestures toward subordinating his idiosyncrasies to the national war effort. But Judge Dee is essentially a creature of his state; he is profoundly deferential to the emperor. He is a detective not because he possesses extraordinary skills—though, like all Great Detectives, he does possess extraordinary skills. He is a detective because his emperor has appointed him a district magistrate, and that appointment requires that he detect crime.
It was the premise of Dee Goong An that Judge Dee’s detective career was a distinct middle phase of his life. Before the Emperor appointed him magistrate, he had been a private citizen, a diligent student and a good son, but not a figure about whom records are kept, or legends created. Then he served as a low-ranking official in the imperial bureaucracy, demonstrating insight, integrity and fairness as a district magistrate. And then, in his third role, he served as a high minister of state in the corrupt court of the usurping Empress Wu. His experience as detective thus served to establish his intellectual and moral bona fides before he rose into a world where, to achieve honorable political ends (the restoration of the Tang dynasty), he must employ politic means.
No prior detective—certainly none of the Great Detectives—was destined to have such remarkable second act to his life. Fictional detectives detect until their author dies (and, given the appetites of the estate, the publishers, and the readers, sometimes not even then) or until their author tires of them (Reichenbach Falls). It is a premise of Judge Dee’s detective career that the career just is a preparatory phase leading to his historic career as a wise statesman in the court of the Empress Wu. Van Gulik depicts the transition from the journeyman detective to the master politician at the end of the fourth novel, The Chinese Nail Murders, when Dee is elevated to President of the Metropolitan Court. And when, as Lord Chief Magistrate in Murder in Canton, Dee finds himself in this high station once again investigating murders, he concludes his investigation explicitly declaring that he has now exhausted his skill as a detective and formally renouncing that identity. It is a gesture without precedent.10
Philo Vance suggests one other aspect of Judge Dee. The arrogant aesthete Philo Vance does not just embody some of the virtues that his author, the arrogant aesthete Willard Huntington Wright aspired to. He is the complete arrogant aesthete; he possesses all of the high-brow authority that Wright had sought, with unequal success, for more than a decade to claim for himself in the literary and art world of New York, and he does so with ease, not suffering the straitened circumstances (often very straitened circumstances) that accompanied Wright’s own efforts to claim to speak the final word as a philosopher and a critic. Judge Dee is surely the beau ideal of a government official—a Chinese district magistrate or a Dutch diplomat. He is impressive physically as well as mentally. He is a beloved leader of men and a beloved husband of wives. He is the master of diverse disciplines, equally able to dissemble as a boxer and as a medical doctor. Van Gulik removes all traces of eccentricity from his detective. In this respect, Judge Dee’s closest Anglophone prototype, unmentioned by van Gulik, would be R. Austin Freeman’s John Thorndyke. But where Dr. Thorndyke is indeed the very model of a British medico-legal specialist, Philo Vance and Judge Dee seem more a reflection of the idiosyncratic excellences of their individual authors.
Perry Mason
Judge Dee’s status as magistrate makes him an officer of the court who acts as a detective. The most obvious Western parallel is Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer-detective, Perry Mason (82 novels, 1933–1973), and the radical differences between the two are as obvious. In his official capacity, Judge Dee acts as prosecutor, jury, and judge. On the one hand, in Confucian thought he is the benevolent “father-mother” official, dedicated to protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty; on the other hand, he wields nearly absolute authority within his courtroom, and, as van Gulik reports in the Postscript to his first novel, The Chinese Bell Murders, the wooden block that he uses as a gavel is known as “wood that frightens the hall” (ching-t’ang-mu). There is no professional adversary—no Hamilton Burger—to contest the Judge’s interpretation of the facts and the testimony. As van Gulik observes in his preface to Dee Goong An, the closest thing the Chinese judicial system had to private attorneys were the professional petition-writers, and they were dismissed as would-be officials who had failed their examinations and were compelled to “eke out a meager existence by drawing up written complaints and defenses for a small remuneration”: “There is no Chinese detective novel that celebrates a figure like Erle S. Gardner’s famous Perry Mason” (xx). And this means that Gardner’s fable of truth emerging through the adversarial courtroom maneuvers of a District Attorney and the defense attorney does not apply. Judge Dee is occasionally opposed by an unusually recalcitrant defendant, most notably in The Chinese Nail Murders, but usually the challenge to the prima facie guilt of the accused must come from the Judge’s own disinclination to accept appearances. It is his integrity and
intelligence that moves the inquiry onward.
Nonetheless, Judge Dee’s sometimes ingenious manipulation of the legal machinery at his disposal does at times echo Perry Mason’s exploitation of whatever courtroom technicalities he can call upon. The Perry Mason novels (unlike the Perry Mason television show) rarely end with a blurted confession in the courtroom, but in nearly all of the 82 Mason novels, courtroom cross-examination are crucial in eliciting evidence that enables Mason to demonstrate the error of the District Attorney’s recreation of the crime and to point to the true solution. In some of the earlier Dee novels, Judge Dee avails himself of the option to employ torture to elicit confession (The Chinese Nail Murders again provides the best example), but, like Mason, he generally relies upon careful questioning and close observation of behavior.
A magistrate’s entitlement to a cohort of assistants also finds some parallel in the Mason series, though again, the differences are most striking. Perry Mason regularly employs the private detective, Paul Drake, as a fact-finder. Drake is a private eye, an entrepreneur who runs a for-profit detective agency as Mason runs a for-profit law practice. Judge Dee has three fact-finders—his official lieutenants, Ma Joong, Chiao Tai, and Tao Gan, each of whom pledges loyalty to the Judge and to the empire that he represents. Each of them is more individualized (and rather less efficient) than Paul Drake, who functions as little more than a transparent device to report just enough details to keep Gardner’s plot moving forward without making the solution obvious. The judge’s lieutenants were also little more than functional agents of the magistrate as van Gulik found them in Dee Goong An, but van Gulik chose to develop their characters with distinctive traits and more detailed backstories. Judge Dee’s men live lives: they engage in relationships; they enjoy good food (and good sex); they like adventure; they exercise initiative; they are never implausibly efficient in acquiring evidence. Mason’s loyal secretary, Della Street, finds a somewhat closer match in Sergeant Hoong. Both assistants are unshakeably loyal (Della has a unique moment of doubt in the first Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws). And both serve as sounding boards for the lawyer-magistrate to verbalize his speculative or retrospective thoughts.
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was already, by 1949, the “Mistress of Mystery.” She had published 39 volumes of mystery fiction. Hercule, Miss Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence had all been launched upon notable careers as fictional detectives. But the Agatha Christie novel that van Gulik mentions in his Translator’s Postscript to Dee Goong An features none of Christie’s principal detectives. Death Comes as the End (1944) is set in Thebes, along the banks of the Nile, in “about 2000 BC” It has been called one of the first historical mysteries, and as such, a precedent for van Gulik’s Tang Dynasty mysteries and a host of other detective stories set in classical Greece and Rome, medieval Europe (Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael series, which began in 1977, seems to have been the more immediate model for the deluge of these novels in the 1980s and 1990s), medieval Japan, 18th-century Europe, 19th-century Europe, and so on.11
Agatha Christie’s second husband, Max Mallowan, was a prominent British archaeologist who supervised major excavations in Mesopotamia. Christie met him in 1930 while he was working on the site of ancient Ur, and in the following decades, she often accompanied him as he worked at other Mesopotamian sites, such as Ninevah and Nimrud. Christie thus acquired some expertise as an archaeologist, though she never presented herself as a scholar in the class of van Gulik’s status as a Sinologist.
When she decided to set a mystery novel in the ancient world, she chose not to place it in the culture she and her husband had devoted themselves to, but rather in ancient Egypt.12 Egypt was, of course, the better known culture: Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure (1798–1801) had created a vogue for Egypt, and the celebrated discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 had renewed interest. The immediate stimulus for the novel came from the English Egyptologist, Stephen Glanville (1900–1956), who, in 1943, “bullied” Christie into attempting the feat (Christie 598). Christie read some half dozen books on Egypt to prepare herself, and as she wrote the novel, she consulted Glanville about details of daily life, which Glanville then researched for her. For the patterns of human behavior, Christie adapted the types she had already played with in her prior detective stories; as she wrote, “People are the same in whatever century they live, or where” (598). She did identify a specific source for distribution of her principal characters: “some recently published letters from a Ka priest in the 11th Dynasty” (Christie 599). These letters were the Heqanakht (Hekanakhte) papyri, discovered in 1921–22. Heqanakht was a ka-priest of the Vizier Ipi and a native of Thebes. His letters to his eldest son, Mersu (Merisu), full of detailed instructions, provided Christie with models for her ka-priest, Imhotep and his eldest son, Yahmose. Like Heqanakht, who instructs Mersu to indulge his younger brother, Snerfu (Snefru), Christie’s Imhotep has a spoiled younger son, Ipy. Heqanakht’s household, like Imhotep’s, includes his mother, a widowed daughter, and a new young concubine (second wife) named Iutenhab (Iut-en-hab) (Lockard 62; The Heqanakht Papers). Iutenan becomes, in Christie’s novel, Nofret, the concubine whose arrival in the household precipitates as sequence of murders. The story is narrated primarily from the point of view of Imhotep’s widowed daughter, named Renisenb in the novel.
Again the differences are clear. Christie had to swot up her Egyptology; van Gulik had already devoted years to the study of aspects of Chinese culture. Christie wrote the novel as a one-off: the closest thing to a detective in Death Comes as the End is the scribe, Hori, and at the end of the novel, with seven of the twelve main characters dead, Hori is accepted as the husband of Renisenb. He has no future as a detective; there will be no sequel. Judge Dee, like all Chinese magistrates (Judge Bao has his one hundred cases), is a career detective. He will, in fact, once marry a young woman involved in one of his cases (Miss Tsao from The Chinese Gold Murders), but she is a minor character, and she becomes a third wife.
The key similarity lies in that realization of Agatha Christie: “People are the same in whatever century they live, or where.” This is the basis of all historical detective stories that followed Death Comes as the End. The subgenre assumes a universality of human nature that allows modern readers to recognize the motives and actions of people of any time and any culture. Given English or continental names, Imhotep, Yahmose, Renisenb, Hori and the rest could easily have performed their lethal drama in Styles Court or on the Orient Express. What the historical mystery adds to that commonalty is the frisson of the exotic. The names are not Arthur Hastings and Emily Cavendish, Colonel Arbuthnot and Count Andrenyi. The customs of the country are not those of Europe and the 20th century. As Stephen Glanville urged Christie, “One ought to have a detective story written so that someone who enjoys reading detective stories and reading about those times can combine his pleasures” (qtd. in Christie 598).
This might be called the Michener effect. The reader enjoys a predictably exciting narrative and is instructed about Hawaii or (the Jews, Colorado, the Chesapeake, Poland, Texas, Alaska, etc.). The detective story, which by its nature requires close observation of physical environments and normal/abnormal behaviors, lends itself readily to providing the supplemental didactic element. The main action—crime and its investigation—follows a familiar, even formulaic, pattern; the strange superficial customs and manners are thus rendered interesting, rather than unsettling. This bonus of novel strangeness may, as Glanville implies, appeal to the expert who already knows the alien time and place, and so has the satisfaction of viewing his or her specialty through a demotic lens, as well as to the novice, who is pleased to learn that in 2000 BC the Egyptians used “Brother” and “Sister” to signify lovers and spouses, or that in 690 AD the Chinese used “Elder Brother” to signify a senior colleague.
Christie used “Brother” and “Sister” in the novel, but to be clear to her non-expert readers, she added an “Author’s Note” to clarify this and a
few other points (including a brief account of her principal source text, the Heqanakht papyri). Van Gulik famously expanded this practice. Reviews of his novels sometimes specifically noticed the extended essays that van Gulik attached as “Postscripts” to his novels. Philip John Stead, in a Times Literary Supplement review of The Chinese Nail Murders, for example, observed that “for many readers the commentary which the author is in the habit of appending to his stories must be by no means the least interesting part of the book” (31 March 1961: 206). These Postscripts can fill a half dozen pages in the early novels; they dwindle to just a couple of pages in the later novels, but they are always present as proof that instruction in Chinese culture that has been slipped into the murder mystery is historically accurate.
Sherlock Holmes
“The immortal Sherlock Holmes” surely merits the adjective that van Gulik applies to him. For more than a century, he has been the universally recognized icon of the fictional detective. For several decades following Holmes’s rise to notoriety in The Strand in the 1890s, any writer interested in exploiting the newly popular genre (and not only for its predictable profitability) either slavishly followed the Holmes template, or explicitly repudiated it. A host of brilliant but eccentric detectives professing a method and a host of unmethodical unexceptional narrators capable of endless astonishment at their companions’ deductions filled the pages of magazines and books. Some writers dispensed with the narrator and his astonishment; some dispensed with the detective’s eccentricity; some even dispensed with the pretense of method. By the time van Gulik entered the genre, Holmes was a name to conjure with, but there was no longer any advantage either to offering the public additional Holmeses or anti–Holmeses. The genre had moved toward the Golden Age novel, with its complex plots and confined scenes. Judge Dee did not need to be a detective in recognizably Holmesian mold. He has no Dr. Watson; he professes no Science of Deduction; his mastery of calligraphy and the Chinese lute are the competencies of a Chinese gentleman, not the bohemian practices of a bachelor who plays his violin “thrown across his knee,” fires a V R into the plaster wall of his sitting room, and injects himself with a seven-percent solution.
The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik Page 5