The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
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But there is one important aspect of Conan Doyle’s invention that van Gulik does develop in an interesting way. Conan Doyle gave his detective a realized world, a London that readers could imagine in textural detail: 221B Baker Street and a host of sitting rooms and stables, clubs and tenements, shops and accessible country houses, hansom cabs and trains, secret societies and foreign noblemen. And, over time, he gave his detective a biography, supplying him with an ancestry in the squirearchy (with the painter Horace Vernet in the maternal line); an education at Oxford or Cambridge (a still-debated topic); early adventures that determined his pursuit of the unprecedented profession of consulting detective; a considerable number of cases that for various reasons Watson chooses not to narrate; a death, a resurrection, and a retirement; and, in 1917, an important assignment on behalf of the British war effort. Holmes’s life and world were not designed in advance of his debut in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Rather, the details emerged as Conan Doyle composed the four novels and fifty-six short stories that comprise the saga (1887–1927). And, importantly, Conan Doyle never felt obliged to provide all the details. By the end of the 20th century, it had become common for writers to imagine comprehensively the lives of their detectives: parents and childhoods, friendships and ailments, readings and spiritual lives. And they were equally thorough in endowing their detectives with attitudes: detectives became vocal in expressing their views on social and political issues. Sherlock Holmes’s accidental accumulation of a life story merely foreshadows the designed biographies that later detectives would be burdened with.
Van Gulik’s development of Judge Dee’s private life falls somewhere in the middle. The schematic plan of the first five novels, establishing the five cities to which Dee will be posted during his 14-year career as a district magistrate (663–677), suggests more design that Conan Doyle ever imposed, even though the five novels were not written or published in the order in which they occurred in Judge Dee’s fictional biography. And as the series progressed van Gulik added information about Judge Dee and the members of his household—how he acquired the third of his three wives and three (of his four) lieutenants, how two of the lieutenants married and the other two died, the importance of Dee’s relationship with his dead father, or with a woman who sacrifices herself for him. Some specific characters reappear in later novels (the Tatar Tulbee, the King of the Beggars, Sheng Pa), and some character types reappear with varying identities (the most significant being the Daoist or Buddhist mystic who challenges Judge Dee’s staunch Confucianism in an early, middle, and late novel). Van Gulik may have had some of these characters and fates in mind when he wrote The Chinese Bell Murders; others surely emerged as the series grew. When, in the year of his death, he published his collection of Judge Dee short stories, Judge Dee at Work, he appended a “Judge Dee Chronology” that placed every novel and story in a sequence of events that began with Dee’s birth in 630 and ended with his last case in 681, with a note informing the reader that the Judge died in 700. Conan Doyle left the Baker Street Irregulars a hash of chronological clues which are still being argued over; van Gulik neatly provides the precise dates.13
This incremental development of Holmes’s life story left room for inconsistencies, not just chronological, that have happily generated volumes of commentary, but the incremental development of Holmes’s world as seen by the sharp eye of Conan Doyle produced a coherent vision of late Victorian England—of London and the Home Counties—that has remained a principal attraction of the novels. The gaslit streets of Holmes’s time have retained their fascination in later ages of brighter lights and accelerated travel. As Vincent Starrett wrote in the sestet of his sonnet, “221:B,” readers never tire of that place:
A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street;
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five [58].
Conan Doyle himself realized the importance of Holmes’s immersion in his era. When writing the final series of stories, published in The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes (1927), Conan Doyle carefully set all twelve in the very first years of the 20th century, when Victoria’s influence was still strong. Holmes still springs into hansom cabs, still aerates his drinks with the gasogene. Conan Doyle had Holmes retire from active practice in 1907, and though he did have the detective solve one case after his retirement (“The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane”) and contribute his patriotic mite to the British cause in World War I (“His Last Bow”), neither the trauma of the war nor the cultural transformations that ensued in its wake were permitted in the world of Sherlock Holmes. It is always 1895.
And Judge Dee’s world is always 670. Van Gulik did, in fact, like Conan Doyle, have Judge Dee solve cases after he “retires” as an active magistrate and takes up his position as Lord Chief Justice in the court of the Empress Wu (The Night of the Tiger, The Willow Pattern, and Murder in Canton). Wu Zetian, notorious in Chinese history for her Machiavellian efforts to supplant the glorious Tang dynasty with her own ill-fated Zhou dynasty, may not have caused the quite cultural upheaval that World War I did, but van Gulik’s decision to place Dee’s detective adventures almost entirely in the reign of the Tang Emperors Gaozong (649–683), Zhongzong (684), and Ruizong (684–690) has an effect similar to that of Conan Doyle’s decision to preserve Holmes as a Victorian detective. The Tang’s seventh-century Mandate of Heaven and Victoria’s 19th-century imperial reign are incomparable in many ways, but they do enable both detectives to identify themselves with a stable and glorious era that will be followed by disaster. Though their genius lies in questioning witnesses and evidence, neither Dee nor Holmes needs to question the essential values that underlie the moral world that they inhabit.
But there is also this important parallel between Holmes’s world and Dee’s world: they both acquire a utopian quiddity. Though based on historical realities, both Holmes’s Victorian England and Dee’s Tang China become artificial refuges from history. The initial Holmes stories did not possess this character: Holmes and Watson were the exact contemporaries of their author and their readers. But as early as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), which was published nearly a decade after the report of Holmes’s death at Reichenbach Falls in 1893 and was carefully dated back to the 1880s, Conan Doyle realized that Holmes properly belonged in the past. (Dating the Baskerville legend of the hound to the 17th century emphasizes the attachment to the past.) And, as already noted, the later Holmes stories were explicitly backdated by at least two decades.
W.H. Auden has observed that the authors of the post–World War I Golden Age detective stories (1920–1950)—Christie, Allingham, Sayers, Marsh, Van Dine, Queen, et al.—tended to set their novels in what he called the Great Good Place, a scene which eliminates most of the social and economic stresses that disturbed the contemporary world. “It should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet” (Auden). The ideal setting would be a country estate such as Styles Court, near the village of Styles St. Mary, where Agatha Christie locates her first Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). The business of the modern world is not entirely absent—Poirot is in Styles St. Mary as an aged Belgian refugee from the warfare of the western front—but it is distant. Conan Doyle chose to achieve distance by removing his stories to a more innocent time, instead of a more innocent place. Whatever social or economic troubles had actually afflicted late Victorian times, by 1920 the gaslit, hansom era could be whitewashed by nostalgia, and a simple moral clarity
could be applied to judgments about the victims, the suspects, and the villains of the crime at hand.
Judge Dee’s Tang dynasty China, removed by more than a millennium from the Chinas that had been governed and misgoverned by the 20th-century regimes embodied successively in the Qing dynasty Dowager Cixi, the Nationalist Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Mao Zedong, attains a comparable innocence.14 Just as readers could escape into Holmes’s gaslit London, knowing that within a decade or so, it would be annihilated by a World War (and, of course and more importantly, be annihilated by electricity, automobiles, airplanes, radios, contraception, flappers, cinema, etc.), so readers could escape to a China governed by a wise emperor and just magistrates. England in the 1920s and China in the 1950s might both seem to have lost the confidence bred of past imperial mandates, but those mandates had been real, and could be recovered as Great Good Places in which to place detective stories.
There is this one difference: mid–20th-century Anglophone readers immersing themselves in gaslit London were engaging in a relatively innocent exercise in nostalgia. London of 1895 had different attractions from London 1955, but both were familiar and both were attractive. Van Gulik’s Chinese Great Good Place was a novelty, not a stimulus for nostalgia; the vast majority of Anglophone readers would find its happy normalcy colored by customs that were startlingly different. But the Tang China of 670 was, in van Gulik’s telling a Great Good Place, and if the Maoist China of 1970 was not, again for the vast majority of Anglophone readers, at all an attractive place, the representation in a series of detective novels of the normalcy of strange age-old Chinese customs might nudge some Anglophone readers away from an absolute antipathy toward China of the sort cultivated by some influential voices.
The Continental Op & Philip Marlowe
The conspicuous, though understandable, omission in van Gulik’s unsystematic citation of exemplars of the Western tradition of detective fiction is the hard-boiled American form that had been pioneered in the 1920s by Carol John Daly and Dashiell Hammett; that had matured in the 1930s in the fiction of writers such as Raymond Chandler, Cleve Adams, Brett Halliday, Norbert Davis, James M. Cain, David Goodis, Jim Thompson, W.R. Burnett; and, in 1949—the year van Gulik published Dee Goong An—that was undergoing an important revision with the debut of the first Lew Archer novel by Ross Macdonald (The Moving Target). It would, in fact, be the Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald model of detective fiction that would come to dominate the genre, in America and worldwide, in the second half of the 20th century, providing a vehicle for serious writers to employ a popular genre to examine issues of social justice in their local communities and, as well, to interrogate the nature of heroic action in such communities.
Auden’s preferred Golden Age form did permit a measure of social relevance; indeed, given the generic prerequisite of a crime—usually murder—being committed, it was compelled to address the conditions of and a range of possible motives for that crime. But these conditions and motives could be kept particularized; crime could be, and—as Auden said, should be—an aberration. He specifically rejected consciously the new American hard-boiled style. Auden recognized Raymond Chandler as the master of this form, and in a brief aside declared, “I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” (Auden). Chandler himself mocked the notion of “serious studies of a criminal milieu,” but it is certainly true that hard-boiled fiction offered a different sort of escape. The hard-boiled detective was usually a private eye who walks the violent streets of a corrupt modern city. Will and integrity (enforced with fists and guns) replace cerebral ratiocination and genteel amateurism.15 As Chandler wrote, the characters in hard-boiled fiction “lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night” (Introduction to “The Simple Art of Murder” 1016). By the 1970s, the detectives of the sort that van Gulik cited—Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance, Agatha Christie, Charlie Chan, and Nero Wolfe—were, after several decades of rewarding celebrity, retiring to a small corner of the mystery and detection bookcase, where they and their heirs continued to draw a small though reliable readership. But the bestselling writers in the genre, in America and Britain, but also in Sweden, Japan, Mexico, Cuba, Germany and elsewhere have preferred the realism—the local mean streets—of the hard-boiled form which enables them to explore and criticize the ways people live and die in the big cities of the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. The hard-boiled detective (with a certain softening of his hardness, not least by his becoming, as often as not, a she) has become the vehicle of choice for writers who want to portray the way their world really works in fiction that sells.
And this has tended to limit the appeal of the Judge Dee novels to 21st century readers who have been raised on the physically hard or semi-hard, intellectually unexceptional detective. When, in the 1950s, reviewers noted that the Dee novels were “caviar-to-the-general” (New York Times, 28 July 1957: 186), they meant that the common reader might be put off by the setting so distant in time and space. The assumption of many reviewers of detective fiction in the 1950s was that the genre was still a vehicle for escape to the Great Good Place, and while Judge Dee’s Tang China was great enough and good enough, it would prove too differently great, too differently good for many readers. Today, it is that difference that keeps the Dee novels in print. If there is little taste for narratives of cerebral ratiocination, there is still a substantial readership for a thoughtful series of novels set in a great era of Chinese history, written by a man who clearly knew what he was writing about and clearly enjoyed playing with his cast of puppets.
Two
The Judge Dee Novels
Robert van Gulik’s seventeen Judge Dee books fall into a sequence of four stages.
I. Prologue. First there is the translation, Dee Goong An, first published in America in a Dover edition titled Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An). This authentic Chinese detective novel establishes the five essential characters—the Judge and his four lieutenants—and the basic form—three concurrent “cases”—that will be followed (with some variation) in the original novels that follow. The novel is set in the district of “Chang-ping,” which van Gulik did not choose to include among the five districts to which his Judge Dee would be posted. (Changping is, in some accounts, the village in Shandong in which Confucius was born.) Dee Goong An is thus not an intrinsic part of the life of van Gulik’s Judge Dee.
II. Foundation. The first series of original novels consists of five lengthy narratives in which van Gulik establishes the parameters of Judge Dee’s fictional career as a district magistrate: a sequence that begins with the Judge’s first posting in Peng-lai and ends eighteen years later with his promotion to President of the Metropolitan Court at the end of his fifth posting in Pei-chow. The five novels were neither written nor published in an order from the first posting to the fifth, but they establish the framework for all of the remaining novels.
III. Elaboration. The second series consists of seven novels, two novellas, and eight short stories, in which van Gulik set about filling in the structure established in the first five novels. Judge Dee would, naturally, be central in all of them, but van Gulik shuffled the lieutenants, providing the Judge with sometimes four, sometimes three, or two, or one. Some novels took a philosophic turn, confronting the Confucian Judge with Daoist or Buddhist antagonist; others emphasized sensual pleasures (and perversities). In the end, van Gulik took the occasion of collecting his eight Judge Dee short stories to establish a detailed “Judge Dee Chronology” which placed every one of his orig
inal Judge Dee titles in a sequence dated from his birth in 630 to his final detective adventure while serving as Lord Chief Justice in 681.
IV. Judge Dee Alone. The third series of Judge Dee novels, concluded after only two novels by van Gulik’s untimely death, were intended to open a new vein: Judge Dee would now investigate without any of his lieutenants, and his investigations would take on a new degree of philosophical and aesthetic substance.
Appendix 2: Judge Dee Chronologies provides two ways of reading the sequence of the Judge Dee stories. The first chronology presents the titles in the order in which van Gulik published them between 1949 and 1968, under the headings of Prologue, Foundation, Elaboration, Judge Dee Alone. The second chronology lists the stories in the order of van Gulik’s outline of the life of his detective, from Judge Dee’s birth in 630 to 681.