The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik

by J. K. Van Dover

  2. Freeman naturally saw the inverted form as his own innovation, not as an adaptation of a Chinese tradition of which he was unaware: “Would it be possible to write a detective story in which from the outset the reader was taken entirely into the author’s confidence, was made an actual witness of the crime and furnished with every fact that could possibly be used in its detection? Would there be any story left when the reader had all the facts? I believed that there would; and as an experiment to test the justice of my belief, I wrote “The Case of Oscar Brodski.” Here the usual conditions are reversed; the reader knows everything. The detective knows nothing, and the interest focuses on the unexpected significance of trivial circumstances” (“Preface” 1)

  3. After surveying the corpus of short stories attached to Judge Pao (Judge Bao), Vincent Starrett, in 1942, had singled out the Chinese novel, “Wu T’se T’ien Chih An” (the text which van Gulik would, in the next few years, translate as Dee Goong An) as a superior example of the Chinese detective: “It must be admitted that Di Jen-djeh, like so many of his descendents is simply an inspired guesser, but he is an engaging fellow, and his adventures make for excellent entertainment” (21).

  4. King-Fai Tam lists a number of other prominent writers and translators of detective stories active between the late 1910s and the 1930s: Lin Shu, Ch’en Leng-hüeh, Pao T’en-fen, Lu Tan-an, and Chang Pi-wu (115).

  5. A collection of Huo Sang stories was titled Chung-kuo Fu-erh-mo-ssu Huo-sang t’an-an (Cases Investigated by the Chinese Sherlock Holmes) (Link 22). “Fu-erh-mo-ssu” is a Chinese approximation of “Sherlock Holmes.”

  6. Cheng was a scholar of the genre. His 1946 article, “On Detective Fiction,” has been called “the first comprehensive attempt to trace the development of the genre in China” (Zhang 111). Weisl discusses Cheng’s theory of the genre in her chapter “Cheng’s Position On Literary Theory: The Function of the Detective Story” (20–28).

  7. Charlie Chan also provides some precedent for affiliating the detective with the state authority. Freeman Wills Crofts Inspector French of Scotland Yard debuted in 1924, a year before Detective Sergeant Chan of the Honolulu Police Department. Of course, no Western precedent was needed for making Judge Dee an officially authorized detective: all traditional Chinese detectives had been magistrates.

  8. By the 1970s, on the other side of the Judge Dee series, the detective’s family is not only important, it may be very present in every story, constituting a central element in the appeal of the series. And the detective’s “family” often include unconventional members—unmarried partners, gay partners, deceased partners, adopted children, intimate neighbors.

  9. It was the cinematic Charlie Chan that often attributed his aphorisms to Confucius: “Confucius say, ‘No man is poor who have worthy son’” (Charlie Chan at the Race Track, 1936); “Confucius say, ‘Luck happy combination of foolish accidents’” (Charlie Chan at the Opera, 1936); “Confucius has said, ‘A wise man question himself, a fool others.’” (Charlie Chan in City in Darkness, 1939); “Confucius say, ‘Sleep only escape from yesterday’” (Shadows Over Chinatown, 1946); “Confucius say, ‘Luck happy chain of foolish accidents’” (The Chinese Ring, 1947)

  10. E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case (1913), as its title suggests, might have been a precedent. But then, in 1936, Bentley (with H. Warner Allen) published a second Trent novel, Trent’s Own Case, set at least seven years after Trent’s “last” case. And two years later, in 1938, he published a volume of Trent short stories, Trent Intervenes.

  11. A few isolated instances antedate Death Comes as the End: Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner stories, set in antebellum western Virginia were popular in 1911, and Lillian de la Torre began her series of Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector stories (set in 18th-century London) in 1943.

  12. Christie did set novels in the region where she assisted her husband in carrying out excavations, but they are not set in the past. Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) employs an archaeological dig as its setting; They Came to Baghdad (1951) involves Cold War politics, but does feature an archaeologist as a major character.

  13. It is not possible to determine the extent to which the evolution of van Gulik’s fictional project was planned in advance, and to what extent it grew organically. It certainly was not initially conceived with the precision of the ten ten-chapter Martin Beck novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1965–75). But it is also clear that van Gulik came to see that by shaping the overall development of his detective’s life, he could add an additional dimension to the value of the stories.

  14. In setting his stories in seventh-century China, van Gulik was in the vanguard of a small but fruitful line of writers of “historical” detective fiction. In addition to Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner tales (begun in 1911) and Lillian de la Torre’s Johnson and Boswell tales (1943), there had been a few noteworthy one-off detective novels published prior to van Gulik, such as Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End (1944) or John Dickson Carr’s The Bride of Newgate (1950). After van Gulik, beginning in the 1970s, but flourishing in the 1990s, there would be the deluge, with novel series featuring ancient Egyptian detectives, ancient Greek detectives, ancient Roman detectives, medieval detectives in England, Wales, Ireland, Italy, Turkey, and Japan; and a host of detectives in 19th-century Europe.

  15. Fists, though not guns, do function in Judge Dee’s China. The Chinese Maze Murders opens with Judge Dee engaging in a vigorous sword duel with two highwaymen who challenge him on his way to his first appointment in Peng-lai. The highwaymen, bested by the muscular young judge, enlist as his lieutenants and frequently thereafter employ their courage and their prowess in service of the Judge’s investigations. They have all the strength and the street-smarts (and the sexual appetites) of the hard-boiled gumshoe, though as agents of the magistrate, they conspicuously lack his cynicism and mistrust. And though Judge Dee himself succeeds in Golden Age style by thinking through his problems, he too remains capable of strong physical exertion when it is necessary. An unhappy New York Times reviewer even observed, “The judge acts like any tough private eye,… and Old China just as well might be New Chicago” (16 May 1971: BR 40).

  Chapter Three

  1. Taylor had earlier encountered many actual Chinese immigrants when he visited California in 1849 to cover the Gold Rush. His account of that experience, El Dorado; or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1950), frequently notices the presence of the Chinese, sometimes with respect and never with disgust. It may be that his visits to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Canton in 1853 led him to revise downward his estimate of the Chinese character; it may be that he was influenced by the jingoism of Greeley (who was Taylor’s editor at the Herald Tribune).

  2. If the disgust of Greeley and Taylor be attributed to genteel middle-brow chauvinism, it might be observed that Ralph Waldo Emerson saw China as “that booby nation,” that “reverend dullness!” that “hoary idiot!”; as less than “miserable Africa”: “All she can say at the convocations of nations must be—‘I made the tea” (Emerson 378–79).

  3. The emphasis on Chinese poetry—the poetic tradition in China and what was seen as the poetic essence of the Chinese language—was not limited to Anglophone Modernism. Yvonne Y. Hsieh opens From Occupation to Revolution: China through the eyes of Loti, Claudel, Segalen, and Malraux with a quotation from Gabriel Germain: “for twenty-six years, from 1895 to 1921, China was the laboratory for high French poetry [la haute poésie française]” (1). All four of Hsieh’s authors actually lived in China (Claudel 1895–1909, Loti 1900–01, Segalen 1909–14, Malraux 1925) and produced poetry and fiction influenced by that experience. It is worth observing that, with the exception of Eugene O’Neill, who spent a few unhappy weeks in Shanghai in 1928, none of the Anglophone Modernists had direct experience of China, and there are no Modernist novels in English set China that are comparable to Segalen’s René Leys or Malraux’s La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate).

  4. Pound’s Confucian translations: Ta Hi
o, The Great Learning of Confucius, 1928; The Great Digest, 1942 (Italian), 1947 (English); The Unwobbling Pivot, 1944 (Italian), 1947 (English, with a new translation of “Ta Hio” as The Great Learning); The Analects, 1950, and The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, 1954.

  5. In his attempt to make poetry new, Pound had concentrated upon the Chinese poetry of the Tang dynasty. In the 1940s, he was briefly impressed with the works of an unlikely contemporary Chinese poet, Mao Zedong. Hugh Kenner reports: “at first he thought the poet Mao possessed ling [sensibility], but before long Mao’s men were harassing Confucians” (15). John P. Sisk notes that both Pound and Mao were strong swimmers, both had been teachers, then poets; and both became zealous proponents of a simplistic economic solution to what they saw as a broken culture (70). These coincidences are only suggestive.

  6. China itself spent much of the 20th-century debating the relevance of Confucian thought to the modern condition. Confucius might be seen as the source of China’s weakness relative to the West and Japan, or as the source of the restoration of China’s greatness. Chiang Kai-Shek’s ambivalent embrace of Confucius did nothing to inspire America interest in the sage. (By contrast, Mao Zedong’s rethinking of Marx and Lenin, inspired volumes of enthusiastic or horrified commentary.)

  7. Blofeld, who came to know van Gulik well in wartime Chongqing, observed that van Gulik appeared largely immune to the attractions of the more mystical dimensions of Chinese thought: “he was never attracted … by the numinous components of Chinese and Indian religions” (qtd. in van de Wetering 40). Jan van de Wetering counters, making the case that van Gulik was not, in fact, indifferent to the spiritual dimensions of Chinese culture, and citing the frequent encounters that van Gulik sets up between the Confucian Dee and a variety of Daoist (and Buddhist) monks, but it is true that Judge Dee never makes any references to the I Ching.

  8. Han Suyin is again in some measure an exception, and while determinism should be avoided, her own bi-national origin surely affects her autobiographical novel. In A Many Splendored Thing, her Eurasian protagonist identifies wholly with the Chinese half of her heritage, but she finds herself in Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong, with British as well as Chinese friends and associates, and she is totally absorbed by her affair with her British lover. But even the lover is not presented as a viable alternative to China; A Many Splendored Thing is clearly Sino-centric.

  9. Edith Maude Eaton’s sister Winnifred chose Japanese culture for the vehicle of her literary career. Between 1899 and 1922, using the pen-name Onoto Watanna, Winnifred published a series of very popular romances with Japanese characters and settings. As Winifred Eaton Reeve, she received seven writing credits for Hollywood films, including two with Chinese themes: East Is West (1930), about a Chinese girl brought to San Francisco, featuring Lupe Velez as Ming Toy (and Edward G. Robinson as Charlie Yong, the Chop Suey King), and Shanghai Lady (1929), about an ex-prostitute and ex-convict who meet in Shanghai.

  10. Given Pearl Buck’s commitment to depicting the lives of the common people of China, the observation that Miln “specialized in tales of the wealthy and aristocratic in China” (Bickers 110) would seem to undercut the parallel.

  11. Chinese students in London protested (without success) the stereotypes in Mr. Wu: “The plot is unchinese and we were afraid that the attempt to foist it upon the British public as a specimen of modern Chinese civilisation might engender prejudices unfavorable to the Chinese in their midst” (qtd. in Witchard 93). Harry Vernon, like Sax Rohmer (who published The Insidious Fu-Manchu in the same year as Mr. Wu), disclaimed any direct knowledge of China, but asserted a relevant knowledge of the “denizens of Chinatown” (qtd. in Gan 441). Vernon’s Chinatowns were those of New York City and San Francisco.

  12. Robert A. Bickers, in Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900–1949, describes Miln’s Mr. Wu as a “caricatured Chinese sadist” (49). The Mr. Wu of Owen and Vernon’s play may be such a caricature, but Miln goes to great lengths to establish respect and even a degree of sympathy for the Mandarin in her novelization. This does not, of course, mean that Miln comprehends and accurately conveys fully the point of view of a Chinese gentleman; she does not transcend her occidental biases, but she neither intends nor achieves caricature. Bickers is sensitive to Miln’s weaknesses as a commercial writer with an early 20th-century tolerance for racial hierarchies—“Miln wrote with an eye to the market (including her own Limehouse book, Red Lily and Chinese Jade (1928), to popular theories on race and to a readership receptive to her romantic tragedy.”—but he acknowledges that “she also wrote as a sympathetic novelist of the politics and history of treaty port China” (113).

  13. Miln did excise the play’s intimation that Wu Li Chang’s animus against the British might have a more than personal dimension. Owen and Vernon have him prophesy: “All through the ages China has been waiting—waiting….Soon she will wake, cast off her oppressors, arm herself, take her place among the nations” (qtd. in Diamond 32).

  14. And their timelessness: Miln’s China, like so many Western Chinas, seems to have escaped history. Buck’s peasants may live in timeless world of Chinese agriculture, but as Wang Lung and O-lan discover in Nanjing, history is invading China. The Good Earth celebrates endless cycles of life as the rise of Wang Lung is counterpointed in the novel by the fall of the House of Hwang (where O-lan had been a servant). But when Wang Lung and his family are forced to move to the “southern city,” they encounter the turmoil of the Xinhai (Hsin-hai) Revolution which, in 1911 overthrew the Qing dynasty that had governed China since 1644, and replaced three millennia of dynastic empires with a modern (and unstable) republic. Buck’s China is not immune to irreversible change.

  15. Keith L. Justice’s Bestseller Index indicates that Hobart’s other novels, while not achieving the popularity of Oil for the Lamps of China, also broke into the bestseller list. Pidgin Cargo, reissued as River Supreme following the success of Oil, spent 8 weeks on the bestseller list in 1934 and her third China book, Yang and Yin, spent 20 weeks on the list in 1936–37. Several of her non–China novels also qualified as bestsellers. In sum, Justice reports her books spending a total of 138 weeks on the American bestseller lists. (By comparison, Pearl Buck’s books made the lists a total of 513 weeks.) By the time of her death (in the same year as that of van Gulik), four million copies of Hobart’s books were in circulation (“Alice Tisdale Hobart” 300).

  16. Oil for the Lamps of China was remade (and replanted in Latin America!) in 1941 as Law of the Tropics. Keye Luke, who played Lee Chan (Number One Son) to Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan in seven films from 1935 to 1937, had a small role in the 1935 version of Oil for the Lamps of China. He also played the Elder Son in the 1937 film of The Good Earth. And, a final link, he played Lee Chan, Charlie’s son, in the third Mr. Moto film, Mr. Moto’s Gamble.

  17. In 1937, four years after Oil for the Lamps of China made the bestseller list for fiction, Carl Crow’s 400 Million Customers made the bestseller list for non-fiction. Crow, a one-time muck-racking journalist in America, lived in Shanghai from 1911–1937; for 19 years he ran the city’s first Western advertising agency. 400 Million Customers uses humor and anecdote, but Crow’s theme is the serious one that China represents an exploitable market for capitalist enterprise. In “Carl Crow, Edgar Snow, and Shifting American Journalist Perceptions of China,” Jerry Israel juxtaposes Crow’s vision of a China receptive to American investment to Edgar Snow’s vision of Mao Zedong as an Agrarian reformer in Red Star Over China, also published in 1937.

  18. MGM decided to make The Good Earth in California, but wanted to include some scenes filmed in China. The Guomindang government had reservations about permitting the filming of these scenes, but Chiang Kai-shek gave his approval after he attended a screening of MGM’s The Mask of Fu Manchu (Roan 128).

  19. Isaacs’s opinion makers included 41 academics, 40 members of the media, 28 government officials, 12 former government officials, 13 businessmen, 27 persons representing
“Groups concerned with Public Opinion and Education, and 20 churchmen

  20. Isaacs also reported that of the 145 opinion-makers who identified themselves as Christian, fully 123 mentioned “missionaries” as among their earliest associations with China (128). The American crusade to Christianize China during the Age of Benevolence bore lasting fruit.

  21. Movie-goers in 1937 enjoyed a similar escape when Frank Capra’s film version of Lost Horizon, starring Ronald Colman, was released. Columbia Pictures made an extensive (and expensive) effort to get the Tibetan setting right, employing the American explorer-photographer Harrison Forman (1904–1978), one of the few Americans to have penetrated Tibet, as technical director (Hammond 139). Lost Horizon was a popular film, and was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

  22. In addition to My Country and My People, The Importance of Living, and Moment in Peking, Lin Yutang placed six additional books on the American best-seller list between 1941 and 1953: With Love and Irony, A Leaf in the Storm, The Wisdom of China and India, Between Tears and Laughter, The Vigil of a Nation, and Vermilion Gate.

  23. Han Suyin reproached Lao She for his response to his treatment by the Red Guard: “When they had come for him, instead of submitting to the silliness, and trusting in the ultimate justice of the people, he had thrown himself into the pond in front of his house” (Tears and Butterflies 171). Her comment, reprinted in a 1990 collection, does not reflect well upon Han; the abuse that the young Red Guards inflicted upon the 67-year-old writer was something more than “silliness,” and “the ultimate justice of the people” is a slogan with little consolation.