Tao Gan, the fourth lieutenant and a reformed swindler, plays only a small role in Dee Goong An. Van Gulik will first assign him a specific function—as a former confidence man, he is employed to make inquiries in disguise and to discover secret doors—and a caricatured manner: he is the parsimonious lieutenant; he thoughtfully strokes the three hairs projecting from the mole of his face. But in Murder in Canton, he too receives a special development.
Torture & Execution
The torture of Mrs. Djou is another element that van Gulik would underplay in his own series of novels. His Judge will occasionally resort to torture, but in Dee Goong An, there are rather graphic accounts of the beatings and the torture that Judge Dee has administered to all three criminals. The murderer of the silk merchants has his hands and ankles crushed by screws before he confesses; at her first arraignment, Mrs. Djou is lashed with a whip and has the screws applied gently (because the constables assigned to turn the screws are subject to the same penalties as the magistrate should the accused eventually be vindicated) and then, at the end, she suffers greatly (“skin and bone were crushed, and blood stained the floor….Her body writhed in vain in the terrible grip, and she shrieked hoarsely” 27.197–98); and her accomplice is tied to a rack. As van Gulik explains in his preface to Dee Goong An, Chinese court procedure forbade conviction without confession, and forced confession was routine (18). But in his own model of Chinese detective fiction, it is a routine more honored in the breach than in the observance.
A similar stricture applies to the vivid depiction of the execution of the villains. Again, van Gulik will occasionally give a brief account of an execution in his own novels. But in Dee Goong An several pages are given to the beheading of one villain, the strangulation of a second, and the “lingering death” of the third. The latter is the notorious “death by a thousand cuts” (lingchi). Judge Dee orders that the first cut be a fatal one to the breast; van Gulik notes that this mercy was commonly practiced. Nonetheless, the mutilation is an extreme penalty, intended to preclude the victim’s happiness in an afterlife. Given the western conventions of rarely—except, obviously, in the subgenre of legal detective fiction—showing trials and convictions and virtually never describing executions, van Gulik largely discards this Chinese tradition of making the final price of villainy so explicitly concrete in crime fiction.
The Supernatural
Dee Goong An plays to the Chinese taste for supernatural interventions in judicial inquiries. Van Gulik notes in his Preface that Dee Goong An follows the Chinese tradition of inserting a supernatural element into the narrative. But, as he observes, there are only two such elements in the novel, “and neither of them is a decisive factor in the solution of the crime, because they merely confirm the detective’s previous deductions” (vi). The first of these occurs when, unable to elicit a confession from Mrs. Djou, Judge Dee spends a troubled night meditating upon the evidence. Instead of smoking three pipes, he picks up a book on divination and reverently undertakes a ceremony in which he shakes a vase until a random slip of bamboo falls out, leading him to an enigmatic four-line verse (11.81). This is followed by a dream in which the Judge is visited with additional enigmatic verses and scenes. In the end, these verses and scenes do correlate to details in the murders of the silk merchants and the husband (cases 1 & 2); there is even a possible hint regarding the death of the young bride (case 3), though that death has not yet even occurred. Earlier, he had sought to question the ghost of husband, discovering in the cemetery “a dark shape of indistinct outline” (5.45) that leads them to a grave mound; and when the corpse is disinterred, it closes its eyes in response to Judge Dee’s instruction to indicate that it had met a violent death by doing so (9.71).
None of these interventions is decisive: they confirm conclusions that the Judge has already drawn. But that confirmation is significant. It means that not only is the authority of the imperial system behind the magistrate’s detective investigation, the larger universe of transcendental spirits is also encouraged Judge Dee in his efforts to expose crimes and bring justice to Chang-ping. (In his own Judge Dee novels, van Gulik will occasionally hint at some paranormal sign in the course of the Judge’s investigation, but he will always add an alternative, mundane explanation for the phenomenon.)
The device by which the Judge finally wrings a confession from the resistant Mrs. Djou reinforces this lesson. Her partner breaks quickly under torture, but the strong-willed woman endures interrogation, imprisonment, torture, and the betrayal of her accomplice without capitulating to the demand for confession. Having weakened her, Judge Dee appears to her in her prison cell in the costume of the Judge of the Inferno, with Ma Joong and Chiao Tai dressed as the Ox-headed and the Horse-headed demons. Sergeant Hoong is made up as the corpse of her husband petitioning for justice from the Judge of the Inferno, and the diabolic tableau suffices to draw Mrs. Djou into the confession necessary to secure her execution. A district magistrate, by impersonating an immortal judge, achieves the just result that the district and the universe both need. He satisfies the local people’s requirement that crime be discovered and criminals punished, and he restores balance to a world disturbed by an unnatural woman who aggressively takes a lover and murders a husband. As van Gulik explains in his note on the translation, he has abbreviated the scene of the Infernal Tribunal. Elaboration that to a Chinese reader would reinforce the conjunction of a human magistrate’s artifice to elicit a confession from an evil wife and a performance enacting a supernatural power’s judgment upon an evil wife would, upon Western readers, make a counter-productive, “comical” impression (229).
And, as the final chapters of the novel make clear, Judge Dee acts as the proper instrument of an Imperial system that enjoys the mandate of heaven. The Imperial Censor notices Judge Dee’s effective administration of justice (and, as well, acknowledges the services of Dee’s grandfather as a Minister and of his father as a Prefect—an upright judge has upright ancestors), and upon his recommendation, the Emperor issues an edict raising Dee to the office of President of the Imperial Court of Justice. The novel’s last pages depict Judge Dee’s ceremonial receipt of the edict making this appointment and his preparations for departure to his new post. (Van Gulik retain this conclusion in his original novel, The Chinese Nail Murders. His Judge Dee, serving as a magistrate in his fifth posting in Pei-chow, will receive his summons to the imperial court after solving his version of a nail murder in the fourth original novel.)
Illustrations
Van Gulik supplied six original line drawings to illustrate Dee Goong An, and he would follow this practice in each of the original novels that followed it. His visual creativity mattered to him as much as his literary creativity. He was disappointed that the initial American paperback reprints of four Judge Dee novels (by Dell and Avon) had excised the the illustrations, and he asked his editor at Scribner to insure they would not be omitted in the future: “I would appreciate it, therefore, if, when you are approached regarding a pocket reprint of one of your editions of my book, you would stipulate in the contract that my plates shall be included” (“Robert Hans van Gulik 1910–1967” 383; emphasis in the original).
Van Gulik’s illustrations occasionally provide clues that advance a detective plot (e.g., the wide pupils of the cat in Jade Mirror’s painting in The Haunted Monastery), and they do aid readers in imagining the costumes and furniture of the Judge’s world. But perhaps the most often noted feature of his drawings is the obligatory nude: every volume of Judge Dee stories contains an image of at least one naked (or half-naked) woman. In Dee Goong An, the nude appears in an illustration of Mrs. Djou’s judicial torture. She lies bare-breasted on the floor in front of the judge’s bench, with her wrists being pressed between wooden screws. Judge Dee and Sergeant Hoong stare at her. (For an analysis of the role of the male gaze in this image, see Jie Guo’s “Robert Hans van Gulik Reading Late Ming Erotica”; Guo’s entire article provides a very useful recent analysis of van Gulik’s relationship
with Chinese eroticism.) When Dover Books needed a cover illustration for its edition of Dee Goong An, it chose this image. Van Gulik once confessed to a Swedish professor that he was “an ardent admirer of pure eroticism” (van de Wetering 64), and the signature nude in every novel becomes one expression of that admiration.
But there was as well a scholarly dimension to van Gulik’s admiration of pure eroticism. It was, he declared, the publisher of the 1951 Japanese translation of The Chinese Maze Murders that precipitated his scholarly interest in visual eroticism. The publisher wanted a nude image for the cover, and to accommodate the request, van Gulik sent inquiries to “a few dozen antiquarian booksellers in China and Japan” (Wessells 456). Finally, a Kyoto dealer was able to provide him with a set of printing blocks. These provided the precedent for his own illustrations to his novels. They also led him into a new area of scholarship. Using his printing blocks, van Gulik produced a three-volume scholarly edition of Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (1951), fifty copies of which he had privately printed and distributed. Five years later, he was invited to expand upon that book and make a contribution to the Routledge and Kegan Paul series of books on “Sexual Life.” The result was a manuscript that a Director at Routledge and Kegan Paul felt compelled to reject as it was “so frank that it would not bear publication in this country [the U.K.] without attracting the attention of the public prosecutor” (qtd. in Rocha 336). Published in 1961 in the Netherlands by Brill (with the naughtiest bits rendered in Latin), this would become his pioneering work, Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 BC Till 1644 AD. When it was reprinted in 2003, Sexual Life in Ancient China could be critiqued from feminist (see Furth) and gay (see Hinsch) perspectives, but the critics acknowledged its status as a landmark in both sinology and sexology.
Reviews
Dee Goong An, published in a limited editions of 1200 copies, received only limited attention in specialized journals. A.F.W. in Far Eastern Quarterly observed that van Gulik had produced “interesting and vivid evocations” of 1ife in China in the 18th century, and that they possessed “some of the intricacy of plot and some of the suspense which readers of detective stories expect,” and rated the translation as “excellent,” despite “occasional infelicities of style” (“Dee Goong An,” 11.3 May 1952: 422). The Times of India reviewed it as “A Chinese Thriller,” observing that the plot was “ingenious” and the story “well-written,” “with a judicious mixture of thrilling episodes, tragedy and comedy.” Recognizing the Kai Lung stories as the standard of excellence, van Gulik’s style was praised as “so well done that one may almost suspect it to be a Chinese tale patterned after the Kai Lung stories of Ernest Bramah” (2 November 1952: 6).
Foundation: From The Chinese Bell Murders to The Chinese Gold Murders
In his Foreword to the English language edition of The Chinese Maze Murders, van Gulik recounts how, following publication of Dee Goong An, he thought “it would be an interesting experiment to write a Chinese-style detective story myself, utilizing plots found in Chinese stories of bygone times” (111). While serving as advisor to the Netherlands Military Mission in Kyoto, Japan, in 1950, he completed an English manuscript which was translated into Japanese and published Tokyo in 1951. Van Gulik then prepared his own Chinese translation, which was published in Singapore in 1953. “Encouraged by this success,” he then “wrote two more ‘Judge Dee’ novels, The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Lake Murders.” The clear implication is that the Judge Dee was first imagined as a series hero in The Chinese Maze Murders, not in The Chinese Bell Murders.
And it is certainly true that The Chinese Maze Murders was the first novel to appear in English. It was published by Van Hoeve in The Hague in 1956 (Van Hoeve simultaneously published van Gulik’s Dutch translation). The Chinese Bell Murders would not appear in any language until its publication in English in London and New York in 1958. But in his “Postscript 2” to The Chinese Nail Murders (1961), van Gulik rectifies his chronology. His first original effort in Kyoto in 1950 was The Chinese Bell Murders. “Later that year,” he composed The Chinese Maze Murders. (The priority of The Chinese Bell Murders might have been inferred from Judge Dee’s comment in Chapter 1 of The Chinese Maze Murders that his premature transfer from Poo-yang to Lan-fang was the consequence of his having offended the Buddhists and the Cantonese.) The remaining three novels were, it appears, produced in the following order: The Chinese Lake Murders was completed in New Delhi in 1952; The Chinese Nail Murders in Beirut in 1956, and The Chinese Gold Murders in Beirut in 1958.
The following chart indicates the three sequences of composition, publication, and fictional biography.
The first five novels are linked by a common formula for their titles: “The Chinese [four-letter word—Gold / Lake / Bell / Maze / Nail] Murders.” There is an echo here of S.S. Van Dine’s formula for all twelve of the novels in his celebrated series of the 1920s and 1930s: The Benson Murder Case, The “Canary” Murder Case, The Green Murder Case, etc. Each of the five novels introduces three “Cases,” and the titles of each of these cases echo the formula (“The Case of the…”) that Earl Stanley Gardner used for his 82 Perry Mason novels (1933–1973): The Case of the Velvet Claws, the Case of the Sulky Girl, The Case of the Lucky Legs, etc.
Four of the first five Dee novels open with what van Gulik, in the Postscript to The Chinese Nail Murders, called “an introductory episode covertly indicating the story’s main points” (189). These prologues provide a peculiarly Chinese atmosphere: it was the custom of Chinese storytellers to indulge in these preliminary analogues, providing a special pleasure for leisurely readers who would circle back and reread the prologue and the novel, making connections. Additionally, van Gulik used the prologues as a substitute for the Chinese custom of invoking supernatural influences in the discovery of criminal behaviors. Having largely eliminated the supernatural from the detective story as a concession to western taste, van Gulik used the Prologues, set in the Ming Dynasty some 700 years after Judge Dee, to insert an element of the uncanny. The swoon during which the merchant in the prologue to The Chinese Bell Murders receives a life-altering narrative of three of Judge Dee’s cases is such an element.
1. The Chinese Bell Murders
(25 Chapters)
Prologue: A retired Ming Dynasty tea merchant discovers a cap mirror (a silver mirror mounted on top of a box containing a judge’s cap) in a curio shop. The mirror and the cap belonged to Judge Dee. When he places the cap on his head, the merchant swoons and falls into a six-week illness. Upon recovering, he has his criminological collection packed up and sent off. He then transcribes the three cases that he experienced during his swoon.
Scene: Poo-yang, Judge Dee’s 3rd posting. A wealthy city on the Grand Canal in Kiangsu (Jiangsu) province.
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: Hoong Liang, Ma Joong, Chaio Tai, Tao Gan
The Cast:
Hsiao Foo-han, a butcher
Pure Jade, young daughter of Hsiao Foo-han
Loong, a tailor
Wang Hsien-djoong, a Candidate of Literature
Yang Poo, Wang’s friend
Hwang San, a vagabond
Spiritual Virtue, abbot of the Temple of Boundless Mercy
Complete Englightenment, former abbot
Bao, a retired general
Wan, a retired judge
Ling, master of the Guild of Goldsmiths
Wen, master of the Guild of Carpenters
Mrs. Liang, Cantonese widow seeking revenge
Liang Hoong, her son, killed by brigands (and not to be confused with Judge Dee’s Sergeant Hoong Liang)
Liang Ko-fa, grandson of Mrs. Liang
Lin Fan, wealthy Cantonese merchant
Judge Lo, magistrate of Chin-hwa
Judge Pan, magistrate of Woo-yee
Sheng Pa, counselor of the Beggar’s Guild
Apricot & Blue Jade, sisters sold into prostitution
“The Rape Murde
r in Half Moon Street”
Victim: Pure Jade, raped and strangled
Villain’s motive: rape, robbery
Pure Jade’s body is discovered in her room; she has been raped and strangled. Her father and Loong accuse Candidate Wang of having carried on an illicit affair with Pure Jade, and then, when she insisted upon marriage, of having strangled her and stolen her golden hairpins. Judge Dee’s predecessor had arrived at a preliminary finding of Wang’s guilt. Judge Dee has Wang beaten in court, but is impressed by his denials. The Judge sends Ma Joong in search of a specific sort of suspect. Using Sheng Ma as an intermediary, Ma Joong captures the villain. The villain confesses in court in Chapter Thirteen.
“The Secret of the Buddhist Temple”
(or “The Street of the Buddhist Temple,” Avon edition)
Victims: barren wives, forced to have sex; blackmailed
Villain’s motive: profit; sexual pleasure
The ostentatious wealth of abbot, Spiritual Virtue, and of his Temple of Boundless Mercy attracts the interest of Tao Gan. The Temple specializes in helping infertile women who, if they pray to Kwan Yin (= Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy) in a sealed room overnight, will bear children. Judge Dee accepts silver and gold from the abbot; he undertakes a complex scheme to verify the corruption within the temple and to secure the punishment of the offenders.
“The Mysterious Skeleton”
The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik Page 8
