If the hybrid East-West form of detective fiction that van Gulik hoped to inaugurate did not prosper in either the East or the West, the figure of Judge Dee himself continued to enjoy an afterlife in both regions and in several media. Television and cinema first took him up. In 1969, Granada Television (UK) produced six hour-long television dramas under the series title, Judge Dee, with Michael Goodliffe playing van Gulik’s hero. In 1974, the American production company, ABC Circle Films broadcast a made-for-television film, Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders, based on van Gulik’s novel, The Haunted Monastery and featuring Khigh Dhiegh as the Judge (with Keye Luke as the villainous Lord Sun Ming). Finally, in 2010 a Chinese Judge Dee film was released: Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Di Renjie: Tong tian di guo). Detective Dee is played by Andy Lau, and the script, based on a story by Lin Qianyu, is not linked to van Gulik’s novels; indeed, the cinematic Dee is more a vigorous kung fu master than an analytic detective, more Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon than Dee Goong An. A prequel, Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Dragon (Shen du long wang), also featuring Mark Chao, was released in 2013. And 21st-century China has also embraced a CCTV television series. Thirty episodes of Amazing Detective Di Renjie (Shen Tan Di Renjie), with Liang Guanhua as the hero, were broadcast over four seasons (2004–2010). Again the storylines were independent of van Gulik’s series.
Judge Dee has also caught the imagination of later writers. In 1993, Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri published Deception: A Novel of Mystery and Madness in Ancient China (later retitled Iron Empress: A Novel of Murder and Madness in T’ang China). The long novel opens with Dee Jenchieh serving as an assistant magistrate in Yangchou in 653, with the rise of Lady Wu an important part of the story. A sequel, Shore of Pearls: A Tale of Seventh-Century China, was published in 1999. In France, Sven Roussel wrote a novel, La Dernière Enquête Du Juge Ti (2008), that he set in Lan-gang, thus situating it clearly in van Gulik’s imagined Dee chronology. But the chief re-creator of Judge Dee has been Frédéric Lenormand, a prolific writer of popular novels. Lenormand began his series of Dee novels, Les Nouvelle Enquêtes du Juge Ti, with Le Château du lac Tchou-an in 2004; the eighteenth volume, La longue marche du juge Ti, appeared in 2012. Lenormand explicitly grounds his detective’s adventures in van Gulik’s version of Dee and his lieutenants.
The most interesting resurrection of van Gulik’s Judge Dee in English appeared in 2006. Zhu Xiao Di is a native of Nanjing who came to the U.S. to earn his graduate degrees. His Tales of Judge Dee is, he declares in his Acknowledgement, intended to accomplish “what van Gulik was unable to do.” It is, he argues, “appropriate and authentic that an ethnic Chinese rather than a Dutchman write Judge Dee’s stories.” And as evidence of his more authentic approach, he cites his first story, “The Old Man’s Will,” which retells “The Case of the Hidden Testament,” the second of the three cases that van Gulik had Judge Dee solve in The Chinese Maze Murders. Where van Gulik substituted a visual clue for a verbal one, Zhu attempts to restore the clue to its original form in an enigmatic direction left behind by a father who wanted to protect his second son’s inheritance. Zhu’s ten stories of Judge Dee’s additional adventures in Poo-yang present the Magistrate and his lieutenants much as they were imagined by van Gulik, though it is somewhat disconcerting to find Judge Dee “giggling” in “A Slip of the Tongue” and Ma Joong “sticking out his tongue and making a face” in “Magistrate Pan’s Predicament.” Zhu’s bibliography indicates a solid grasp of van Gulik’s creations and, as well, of the Chinese “ancient cases” that he uses as the basis of his stories. But they also remind us of the unique genius behind the blend of authenticity and imagination that van Gulik brought to his recreation of Judge Dee and his world.
Judge Dee and the Western Tradition
Some sense of the dimensions of detective story tradition in the West as van Gulik saw it when he began to consider his own contribution to the genre can be derived from the references he makes to other authors and their detectives as he explains his original intentions when he sat down in the mid–1940s to translate Dee Goong An. The first paragraph of his “Translator’s Preface” mentions Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu, Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan, the great Lord Lister, and “the immortal Sherlock Holmes”; he will later cite three other noteworthy models of fictional detective: S.S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, and Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason. And in his Translator’s Postscript he makes a specific reference to Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End. This constellation of popular figures in the genre that van Gulik was proposing to infiltrate may helpfully define the context from which Judge Dee evolved.
Fu Manchu & Charlie Chan
The first two figures constitute the notorious poles of image of the Chinese in popular Anglophone literature: the Chinese super-criminal and the Chinese super-detective. Fu Manchu is, as Sax Rohmer unequivocally identifies him, “the Yellow Peril incarnate,” dedicated to the destruction of the West—and of Britain and America in particular—in order to secure the hegemony of the East. (There is a detective in the Fu Manchu novels: Sir Denis Nayland Smith. And Nayland Smith is, as fictional detectives must be, always successful in penetrating Fu Manchu’s schemes and thus saving Western civilization. But no one has ever thought of the series as the Nayland Smith novels.) Charlie Chan is the genial, utterly unthreatening Chinese solver of moral puzzles that the police authorities of America (and Europe) are unable to disentangle. When van Gulik was translating Dee Goong An, enlightened readers could view the villainous Fu Manchu as an offensive stereotype and the heroic Charlie Chan as a benign, even a noble stereotype. Today the preternaturally malignant Fu Manchu and the preternaturally benevolent Charlie Chan are equally unacceptable. Ascribing a singular, extreme identity, however complimentary in intention, to the representative of any racial or ethnic group provokes a critical reaction. Charlie Chan was designed by Earl Derr Biggers to be an exemplary good Chinese as deliberately as Sax Rohmer designed Fu Manchu to be an exemplary bad Chinese, and so, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s exemplary good African American, Uncle Tom, he too must be relegated to the dustbin of demeaning stereotypes.
The Judge Dee novels have, thus far at least, escaped the opprobrium into which the Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan novels have fallen, but van Gulik did adopt some of the elements that Judge Dee’s Chinese predecessors exhibited. Judge Dee does not share Fu Manchu’s desire to subjugate the entire world to China, but then, in Judge Dee’s Tang era, the entire world is China. Judge Dee assumes civilization can be equated with China. Beyond its distant borders lie an assortment of “barbarian” tribes—Uyghers, Taters, Arabs, even improbable rumors of “white-skinned, with blue eyes and yellow hair” (Murder in Canton 6.49). But whereas in pulp fiction, those barbarians are possessed of a science and a technology that has enabled them to invade and humiliate China, in Judge Dee’s world these disagreeably uncivilized tribes are of little consequence, and pose a threat only when an aberrant Chinese mind chooses to employ their rude warriors as tools. Judge Dee does encounter a Chinese traitor of this sort in The Chinese Maze Murders. But Yoo Kee, who schemes to use a local Chinese strongman and a Uygher Prince from across the border as pawns in his plot to seize a border district of China as his own fief, is no Fu Manchu. Somewhat more threatening is Liu Fei-po, the mastermind of the White Lotus conspiracy in The Chinese Lake Murders. Liu’s ambition is as titanic as that of Fu Manchu; from his central location in Han-yuan, near the imperial capital, he finances a secret society that, had its plans not been frustrated by Judge Dee, would have attempted a usurpation of the throne. Liu would have seized dominion of the entire world as he knew it.
In the later novels, van Gulik largely abandons the theme of empire-threatening conspiracies. Murder in Canton raises the spectre of the rising power of the Arab Caliphate in the distant west, but it evenhandedly notes China’s own expansionist impulse in the direction of Annam (Vietnam). The ambitions of each civilization are noted,
but, within the novel, neither constitutes a Brown or Yellow Peril. Neither the Caliph nor the Emperor appears to embrace an world historical ambition comparable to Fu Manchu’s. Villainy in Judge Dee’s world tends to originate in individual depravity, with sex and greed being the primary motivations. Married couples and families tend to provide the context for homicidal action. World domination is not a plausible motive in a China governed by a wise emperor who acts under a Mandate of Heaven and who delegates authority to wise magistrates like Judge Dee.
From Charlie Chan, van Gulik may well have taken a cue regarding the detective as family man.7 Earl Derr Biggers was quite innovative in this regard. Before Charlie Chan, there were few married detectives. M. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Grice, Dr. John Thorndyke, Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Sir Peter Wimsey (until meeting Harriet Vane in 1930 and marrying her in 1937), Philo Vance: the list of bachelor detectives—emphatically bachelor detectives— prior to Chan’s debut in 1925 is long and honorable. Biggers chose to give Charlie Chan a home on Punchbowl Hill, a wife (who, unlike Charlie Chan, speaks pidgin English), and, by the end of the series, eleven children (who eagerly assimilate to contemporary American lifestyles). Charlie Chan’s family life was not very visible—exchanges with his wife and children occupy only a few pages in the six-novel series. But Chan’s family life was very important. Charlie Chan spends most of the second and third novels in California, an ocean away from home, but he constantly thinks of Punchbowl Hill. Biggers may have been using what he took to be a quintessentially Chinese family-centeredness to make his hero distinctly Chinese in a way that a non–Chinese American audience could easily embrace. Charlie Chan’s deep love of his nuclear family, and even his sentimental attachment to his ancestral homeland could resonate in a nation of immigrants.
In Dee Gong An—as in all the Gong An stories featuring Judges Bao, Shi, or Peng—there is no mention of Judge Dee’s wives or children. Van Gulik seized the opportunity to present readers with a picture of the way that the Chinese tradition of multiple wives might happily work. Judge Dee has his First Lady and a second wife; in The Chinese Gold Murders he meets the girl who will (in the short story “He Came with the Rain”) become his third wife. In the course of the series, there are several scenes depicting the domestic arrangements of the household, with the three wives working harmoniously together. But as in the Charlie Chan novels, the detective’s family life remains in the background. The only developed reference to his children (three sons and a daughter) comes in a short story, “Two Beggars.” His reverence for his father, the Councilor Dee Cheng-yuan, and for the ancestors who preceded him, is also developed only once, when, in The Chinese Nail Murders, he kneels before his ancestral shrine prior to tendering his resignation. He has a vision of his disapproving father (a “thin, white-bearded figure with the dear, wrinkled face”) and Grand Ancestor (who had lived “eight centuries ago, not long after the Sage Confucius” 21.157). Judge Dee’s family arrangements are very important in defining his character as a Chinese son, husband, and father, but van Gulik, like Biggers, keeps the narrative focused on the protagonist’s actions as a detective.8
Family is, of course, a crucial structure in the Confucian vision of a good life. Both Biggers and van Gulik identify their detectives as Confucian. Biggers tended to leave Charlie Chan’s allegiance to the sage implicit. The only reference to Confucius in the first Chan novel, The House Without a Key, comes from another character who, when Chan utters the not-particularly-Chinese truism, “What is to be, will be,” snaps, “I know—that’s your Confucius…. But it’s a do-nothing doctrine and I don’t approve of it” (7.65). In The Black Camel Charlie Chan himself refers to “the philosophy of the patient K’ung-fu-tze” (7.492), again seeming to associate Confucius with oriental passivism.9 Biggers was content to invoke Confucius, family, and ancestors as recognizable signs of Chinese values; he was not engaged in exploring the possibilities of an authentically Chinese detective.
Van Gulik is far more interested in authenticity than was Biggers, and throughout the Judge Dee series he presents the judge as “an orthodox Confucianist scholar-official” who “venerates the Confucianist Classics, which attach supreme importance to such accepted moral values as justice, righteousness, benevolence, duty, etc.” (The Chinese Maze Murders, “Postscript” 327–28). Dee’s Confucian orthodoxy is sometimes directly set against the more mystical Taoist and Buddhist traditions of China, as in The Chinese Maze Murders (Master Crane Robe), The Haunted Monastery (Sun Ming), and Poets and Murder (Sexton Loo). But Judge Dee’s domestic arrangements constitute a regular reminder of Confucian values. A well-ordered family, with respect for the ancestors and deference from the wives, is a microcosm of a well-ordered empire, with a just emperor and dedicated, intelligent magistrates. Dee’s wives are never in the forefront of any story, but their constant presence in the background of the Judge’s life testify to his Confucian bona fides.
Biggers’s Charlie Chan series helps to make a final point. One of the most remarkable features of van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels lies in the design of the series. Some writers of detective stories surprise themselves when they discover they have committed themselves to a formula. Earl Derr Biggers wrote The House Without a Key as another marketable mystery story of the sort he had had some success with, featuring a young American protagonist who, at the end of the novel, has solved the mystery and married a spunky American girl. Charlie Chan, who enters the action in Chapter Seven as a novelty—the Chinese assistant to Captain Hallet of the Honolulu police homicide detectives—seized Biggers’s imagination, superseded both Hallet and the young American (John Quincy Winterslip) and not only solved the murder of Daniel Winterslip, but went on to solve six more cases before Biggers’s death ended his career.
Most writers of detective stories since Conan Doyle, of course, hope that their initial effort will be succeeded annually (at least) by profitable repetitions of their spins on the formula, that A Is for Alibi will be succeeded by B Is for Burglar (and on to W Is for Wasted and…). With few exceptions, such as the Harriet Vane sequence of Peter Wimsey novels (1930–1937), for most of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, each repetition was an autonomous adventure. The detective started each novel afresh, unaffected by the experiences of his prior investigations. He (and he was usually male) aged little, and the very small repertory ensemble he worked with changed little. Holmes did add Mycroft (and Watson did add a wife—and then, with a randomness that would frustrate the chronologists among the Baker Street Irregulars, in many adventures seemed to forget her existence); Poirot did lose Hastings; Roderick Alleyn did marry Agatha Troy, but generally detective stories promised baffling new cases with familiar and unaltered regulars. Van Gulik’s decision to take the given cast of his Chinese original—the Judge and his four lieutenants who appear in Dee Goong An—and to present it as an evolving community was unprecedented. He has Dee acquire two lieutenants—Ma Joong and Chiao Tai—in one novel, a third lieutenant in another; Dee meets Miss Tsao in one novel, and takes her as his third wife in a short story; Ma Joong marries in one novel; Tao Gan marries in another. Sergeant Hoong dies in one novel; Chiao Tai in another. Judge Dee’s China may be a never never land—a fantasy Tang China, but it is not, for the detective, a timeless, changeless one. Readers soon learn they cannot expect the lives of the series characters to be comfortably constant.
Lord Lister
Of the precedents in the genre cited by van Gulik, Lord Lister will be the least familiar to an Anglophone audience. He was, initially, a German version of E.W. Hornung’s Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. Raffles himself has lost a good deal of the celebrity he once enjoyed. Hornung (1866–1921), who married Conan Doyle’s sister, presented A.J. Raffles as a sort of anti–Holmes: a debonair gentleman who plays cricket and takes rooms at the upscale Albany versus the eccentric bohemian who plays the violin and injects a seven percent solution at 221B Baker Street; a young man who uses his considerable wits to commit crimes versus the c
onsulting detective who uses his Science of Deduction to apprehend criminals. With Bunny Manders acting as his Dr. Watson, Raffles executes a sequence of ingenious burglaries to maintain his place in society. Hornung featured him in three collections of short stories—The Amateur Cracksman (1899), The Black Mask (1901), A Thief in the Night (1905), and one novel, Mr. Justice Raffles (1909). In the final story of The Black Mask, Raffles, having volunteered his service in the Boer War, dies exposing an enemy spy. When the popularity of his hero led him to revive the series, Hornung set the two later volumes before the Boer War.
Lord Lister was born as a German avatar of Hornung’s hero. He first appeared in the 24 December 1908 issue of pulp magazine entitled, Lord Lister, genannt Raffles, der Meisterdieb (Lord Lister, called Raffles, the Masterthief). By 1912, Kurt Matull and Theo Blankensee had produced 110 episodes featuring a hero who is, in reality, the Lord Lister (or Lord Aberdeen), but who, for reasons that vary as the series evolved, adopts the nom de krimi of John Raffles. In Matull’s and Blankensee’s final issue, Lister is happily married. The stories were translated into many languages (Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Polish, Swedish, Russian, Turkish, and Indonesian), often with local continuations. It was in van Gulik’s Dutch that the continuations were most extensive. After a dozen sequels or so (#111–126), Felix Hageman (1877–1966) would take over the character and publish 198 Lord Lister stories (740 issues). Lister evolved in Hageman’s hands, acquiring a medical degree from the University of Utrecht and always open to employing new technologies. The Dutch series of Lord Lister stories was the last to end, with a final issue in January1968 (five months after the death of van Gulik).
The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik Page 4
