The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik

by J. K. Van Dover

  Incidental to the investigation of Ko Chih-yuan’s death, Judge Dee discovers that a large amount of money has been embezzled from his accounts and gold has been stolen from his safe.

  Plot

  There are specific references to the initial Peng-Lai novel, The Chinese Gold Murders. The conference on coastal defenses from which Dee is returning builds upon the arms smuggling that worried Dee in The Chinese Gold Murders. And the Judge refers to a lesson he learned “when I was investigating the gold murders in Peng-lai” (2.27). Van Gulik has begun to weave together explicitly the pieces of Judge Dee’s fictional career.

  There are two principal plots in The Lacquer Screen, the first involving the celebrated poets and admired lovers, Judge Teng and his wife (Case 1), and the second involving the marital and financial affairs of the merchant Ko (Cases 2 & 3). The two plots involve parallel infidelities. In both instances, it is the wife who betrays the husband, but Mrs. Teng and Mrs. Ko represent opposite situations. The Tengs have been married eight years, and both are admired poets. Literati in the capital have nicknamed them “the Eternal Lovers” (1.12). Teng, however, has been unable to satisfy his wife physically (Dee suspects that nature has “stunted” him) or emotionally. She has, therefore, taken the tubercular painter, Leng Te, as a lover. One of their meeting places is a high class brothel, and Teng has more than once followed them and paid the madam for the privilege of observing their actions through a peephole. Teng plots to murder her, but before he can act, Kun-shan rapes and kills her.

  Mrs. Ko is also unhappy in her marriage, but less discriminate in her infidelity. When the handsome but weak-willed and mean-spirited Student breaks into her house intending to rob it, she seduces him and arranges for him to prepare a grave and then stab her husband in the back. (When the student fails to make an assignation the night after the murder, she agrees to spend the night with Chiao Tai.) In the courtroom, neither Mrs. Ko nor the Student is willing to shoulder the blame, and both are condemned.

  None of the principals receive much sympathy. The final pages of the novel are devoted to Dee’s exposure of his colleague as a “stunted” and sick man who is, as well, inferior as a poet to his wife. The Student is a cowardly braggart who disdains the one woman (Carnation) who actually makes sacrifices on his behalf. Kun-shan is repulsive figure with a deep-rooted misogyny. Mrs. Ko is a promiscuous and greedy woman. Leng Te and Amber Lotus may be gifted artists, but they are nonetheless violators of the sanctity of the family. They are, in any event, not seen alive in the narrative.

  The model relationship in the novel, oddly enough, is that between the coarse thug, The Corporal, and the young prostitute, Carnation. He shares her as a sexual partner with his mates, but he offers her some respect and some protection, and she defends his essential good nature. In the end, Judge Dee attempts to play matchmaker. Carnation spends time with Judge Dee in a brothel, revealing her heart of gold. When the Judge redeems the Corporal by returning him to the army after confirming that he was unjustly cashiered, he advises him to keep Carnation for himself.

  “Degenerate lechery”

  Sexual maladjustment is not central in The Lacquer Screen, but neither is it absent. The two extremes are represented by the young “Student” (Hsia Liang) and the mature Judge Teng. The Student is a reprehensible egoist. He resents the protective gestures of the prostitute, Carnation, yet he accepts them. He engages in a secret sexual affair with an older woman, the wife of the wealthy silk merchant Ko (accepting money from her after their initial encounter), and he executes her plot to murder her husband. When confronted with his crime in court, he places the blame upon Mrs. Ko. His depraved nature was already on display early in the novel, when he accompanies Judge Dee on an expedition, thinking Dee is a dismissed headman. “Did you torture women when you were still a headman?” he asks. “I wager they squealed like pigs when you put the hot irons to them!” (5.52–53).

  The Student’s nasty and exploitative attitude toward women is juxtaposed to the equally nasty and exploitative relationship between Judge Teng and his wife. The “Eternal Lovers” are profoundly unhappy couple. Not only is Teng incapable of normal sexual relations; when he learns that his wife is enjoying assignations, he makes repeated visits to the place in order to observe their love-making through a peephole. Finally, Dee learns that it was Gold Lotus who was the brilliant poet; Teng has built his reputation with verses written by her.

  Kun-shan is in some respects a nastier creature than either the Student or Teng. He lives as a cunning thief, despised even by The Corporal, who runs the underground world of Wei-ping. Happening upon Golden Lotus in a drugged sleep when he enters her bedroom to steal jewelry, he is angered by her nudity, and rapes her, then murders her. But van Gulik gives Kun-shan’s unhealthy attitude toward sex an origin: as a homely boy, he had been called into a girl’s chamber; when she mocked him, he attacked her. She screamed, claiming he had tried to rape her, and he was tortured (with the hot irons that the Student imagines applied to women). Kun-shan has since avoided all relations with women, until aroused by the naked Golden Lotus.

  Poetry and Confucius

  Confucius was absent in The Emperor’s Pearl, but in The Lacquer Screen, van Gulik finds an occasion for Dee to reaffirm his Confucian orthodoxy. In a brief speech to the prostitute, Carnation, Dee reiterates the central message of his proclamation to the people of Lan-fang in The Chinese Maze Murders: “I have sworn to serve the state and the people, and that includes the Prefect’s First Lady as well as you, the prime Minister as well as your Corporal. We, the great Chinese people, all belong to each other, Carnation. That is our eternal glory, and that makes us, the cultured people of the Middle Kingdom, different from the uncouth barbarians of the rest of the world” (The Lacquer Screen 11.109).

  But once again Dee’s Confucianism is immediately qualified. Hitherto, he usually posited his Master Confucius against the mysticism of the Taoists and Buddhists, almost always expressing a degree of attraction toward the supernatural perspective before pulling back to the solidly this-worldly view of the Master. In The Lacquer Screen, before reading a volume of Mrs. Teng’s poetry, Dee asserts his conventional Confucianism: “Judge Dee took the narrow Confucianist view that the only poetry worthy of the name served either an ethical or didactic purpose” (12.119). (The phrasing echoes the Postscript to The Chinese Nail, in which van Gulik referred to “Judge Dee’s ultra–Confucianist mental attitude, including narrow-minded view of poetry and painting.”) Dee’s own youthful experiment in poetry had been “a long poem on the importance of agriculture.” This caricature of the Confucian response to poetry is, however, immediately subverted: “He had to admit that Mrs. Teng’s masterful command of the language and her original imagery lent her poetry a compelling beauty” (12.119). Dee is no philistine.

  Dee does respond to the aesthetic, not just the ethical and didactic, merits of poetry—and of painting, and of calligraphy as well. The tubercular painter, Leng Te, has died two weeks prior to Judge Dee’s appearance in Wei-ping, his art plays no role in investigation, and Judge Dee expresses no relevant judgment of it, as he had, for example of the paintings of Woo Feng in The Chinese Maze Murders or those of Jade Mirror in The Haunted Monastery. But Leng Te’s painting, along with Mrs. Teng’s fine poetry and fine calligraphy seem to partially excuse their extramarital affair; or, if adultery is by Confucian standards an inexcusable violation of family integrity, at least to diminish the intensity of the disapproval. And, on the other hand, Magistrate Teng’s derivative poetry (derived, Judge Dee realizes, from unpublished verses of his wife) adds to Dee’s disgust with his colleague. Teng’s melodramatic use of the four lacquer panels that he hopes will corroborate his insanity defense constitutes another aesthetic defect that compounds his moral degeneracy.

  Buddhism

  On a sleepless night at the end of the investigation, Judge Dee reaches for a book. He first happens upon a volume of Magistrate’s Teng’s poetry, and he angrily rejects it. He then happens upon a
Buddhist text.

      To be born means suffering and sorrow,

  To live means suffering and sorrow,

  To die, and never be reborn, is the only deliverance

  Of all suffering and sorrow [15.156].

  Although “as a follower of Confucius he [Judge Dee] was not partial to Buddhist teaching,” he finds these lines to accord well with his current mood. The source of the mood is evident: the two errant wives—one a sensitive woman seeking romantic solace from a sick, impotent, and hypocritical husband, and one a lascivious and greedy woman bound to an old, hypochondriacal husband—a deep flaw in the family, the core unit of the Confucian vision of society. The surprise is that, again, Judge Dee seems to feel the pull of the otherworldly orientation of one of China’s two spiritual alternatives to Confucius. And the greater surprise is, of course, that it is religion of “the black-robed foreigners from India” (The Chinese Bell Murders 3.34), not the native Taoist tradition, that supplies the verses.

  Reviews

  Anthony Boucher secured a copy of the Kuala Lumpur edition of The Lacquer Screen and gave it his usual endorsement: “a lusty Hogarthian gusto,… along with the usual adroit whodunit trickery” (“Criminals At Large,” New York Times 12 November 1962: BR26).

  9. The Red Pavilion

  (20 Chapters)

  Scene: Paradise Island, an amusement resort in Chin-hwa district, adjoining Poo-yang, Judge Dee’s 3rd posting. Dee is returning from the capital after reporting on the “The Secret of the Buddhist Temple” (The Chinese Bell Murders).

  The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: Ma Joong

  The Cast:

  Autumn Moon, premier courtesan on Paradise Island

  Silver Fairy, courtesan of the second rank

  Kia Yu-po, literary student, poet

  Lee Lien, young scholar, “the Academician”

  Lee Wen-djing, his father, retired Imperial Censor

  Feng Dai, warden of Paradise Island, owner of brothels and gambling halls

  Jade Ring, daughter of Feng Dai

  Tao Pan-te, owner of restaurants and wine shops

  Tao Kwang, his father, died 30 years earlier

  Wen Yuan, owner of curio shops

  Miss Ling, old, blind courtesan; music teacher

  The Crab, large muscular worker for Feng Dai

  The Shrimp, small, hunch-backed worker for Feng Dai

  Lo Kwan-choong, Magistrate of Chin-Wa (Chinese Bell Murders)

  “The Case of the Callous Courtesan”

  Victim: Autumn Moon, heart failure

  Villain’s motive: undetermined

  Autumn Moon’s naked body is discovered in Judge Dee’s locked room in the Red Pavilion of The Hostel of Eternal Bliss. There are faint marks around her neck and light scratches on her arm, but the coroner declares that she has died of heart failure. Because Tao Kwang had died in the same locked room thirty years earlier, Judge decides to investigate further.

  “The Case of the Amorous Academician”

  Victim: Lee Lien, knife wound to the jugular vein

  Villain’s motive: suicide?

  Lee Lien, on his journey home after having just been appointed a member of the Imperial Academy, has paused to refresh himself at Paradise Island. After patronizing other courtesans, he has become infatuated with Autumn Moon. When she rejects him, he apparently commits suicide in the locked Red Pavilion. It is to handle this case that Judge Lo deputizes Judge Dee to hold court on the island.

  “The Case of the Unlucky Lovers”

  Victim: Tao Kwang, knife wound

  Villain’s motive: jealousy

  Thirty years prior to Judge Dee’s arrival at Paradise Island, Tao Kwang was found stabbed to death in the locked Red Pavilion. A smallpox epidemic interfered with the investigation, and the death was ruled a suicide. His son, who discovered the body as a child, believes the crime was a murder.

  The Magistrate’s Lieutenants

  The libidinous Ma Joong is the Judge’s natural lieutenant for a stay on the island of pleasure, and he exercises his inclination by sleeping with Silver Fairy. Somewhat surprisingly, he decides he loves the courtesan, and he spends the entirety of his recently received inheritance—two gold bars—to redeem her from her brothel, with the intention of marrying her and settling down. Then, even more surprisingly, when he learns that Silver Fairy is in love with Kia Yu-po, he makes the sentimental gesture of pretending that he has redeemed her on behalf of Kia.

  Plot and Setting

  The Red Pavilion is, in some respect, the Judge Dee novel that draws most closely upon the plot conventions of the Golden Age detective story formulas. It is a locked room mystery, indeed, it is a triple locked-room mystery: three people have died in the same room, always apparently alone, with a locked door and solidly barred windows. A second familiar plot formula is sounded when one of the three deaths is a cold case, having occurred thirty years earlier.

  Paradise Island, encircled by rivers, is a pleasure retreat in the district of Chin-wa, set aside as a place for men to enjoy women, drinking, and gambling. Judge Lo, Chin-wa’s magistrate, had appeared in The Chinese Bell Murders as a plump, epicurean colleague who obtained two young courtesans for Dee to use in his inquiry into the Buddhist temple. Here he naturally enjoys the diversions of the Island. He has, in fact, entangled himself with Autumn Jade, the courtesan who has been selected this year as “Queen Flower.” It is to escape the entanglement that he happily passes responsibility for the formal judgment upon the Academician’s suicide to Judge Dee and rushes from the island. As a Confucianist, Judge Dee finds none of the resort’s offerings appealing, but accepts the usefulness of having them confined to an island: “I disapprove of Paradise Island … and of all that goes on here. But I do realize that in a way such resorts are a necessary evil” (18.159).

  The evils are not dwelt upon. Neither drunkenness nor gambling plays a significant role. Three courtesans figure prominently in the narrative, and two do appear naked, providing van Gulik the draftsman with the expected occasions for supplying illustrative nudes. And in one of those illustrations, another familiar van Gulik motif is brought in: the novice courtesan, Silver Fairy, is being whipped by a sexual deviant. When the evidently impotent Wen Yuan discovers the half-naked Silver Fairy already bound with her hands in the air, he seizes the opportunity to lash her with bamboo. (Although Wen’s degenerate lechery seems neatly to combine elements of the prior two novels—Teng’s sexual impotence [The Lacquer Screen] and Yang’s proclivity for whipping young girls [The Emperor’s Pearl]—it remains a minor note in The Red Pavilion.) After rescuing Silver Fairy, Ma Joong will first sleep with her, then purchase her from her procurer, and finally allow her to marry the unambitious poet, Kia Yu-po.

  The other two courtesans have risen to the status of Queen Flower: every year one young woman is selected as the reigning courtesan of the island. The current Queen Flower is the imperious Autumn Moon. She has already attracted the attentions of two powerful men, Judge Lo and the Academician, and when the first flees and the second dies, she turns her attentions to Judge Dee. It is in his locked bedroom that her naked corpse is discovered. The third courtesan makes perhaps the strongest impression: the old, blind, diseased “Miss Ling.” Miss Ling claims to be Gold Jasper, once a courtesan of the second rank, but finally admits to being Green Jade, who had thirty years earlier been selected as Queen Flower. Smallpox and age have reduced her to living in a hovel located in a bit of wasteland on the island.

  Green Jade completes a tableau of the three ages of woman. Silver Fairy is the plump young village girl, recently sold into prostitution but redeemed by Ma Joong’s kindness. Autumn Moon is the acknowledged mistress of the sexual arts. She exploits her appeal, but is anxious to secure a more elevated (and more permanent) attachment; she is dismissive of (and even abusive toward) the lesser courtesans. And her lifestyle kills her: the coroner attributes her death to sensuous overindulgence. Green Jade is the memento mori: thirty years earlier she too had been an
imperious Queen Flower, able on an impulse to have one lover to murder another admirer. She ends the novel as a blind, dying wreck, hugging to her bosom the leprous corpse of that lover. The moralism of the tableau is clear: “successful” prostitutes are doomed creatures. Silver Fairy escapes the fate: she is saved by the gold of Ma Joong and by the simple love of Kia Yu-po, a poet who aspires only “to live quietly somewhere up-country, read and write a little” (10.93). But those who rise to become Queen Flowers develop a sense of privilege and entitlement that deforms their characters—and their bodies. Autumn Moon had been suffering from dizziness and palpitations of the heart for months prior to her fatal heart attack, and Green Jade is reduced to blindness and penury by smallpox.

  The three courtesans constitute one device for unifying the novel; van Gulik makes other choices that suggest The Red Pavilion is a conscious experiment in concentrated effect. The action takes place during the Festival of the Dead. This celebration—Yu Lan, also known as The Ghost Festival, or the Hungry Ghost Festival (zhong yuan jie)—is celebrated on the fifteenth night of the seventh lunar month (usually mid to late August). The entire seventh month is regarded as a period when the Gates of Hell are opened, permitting the spirits of the dead to access to the world of the living, and this tradition frames the narrative. Elements of the traditional festival rituals, such as roadside altars (1.1) and burning paper models (16.141), are mentioned throughout the novel. The Festival is the reason that the Hostel of Eternal Bliss is fully booked in Chapter One, and Judge Dee must be assigned the Red Pavilion, where the Academician’s suicide recently took place, and the novel closes with Judge Dee and Ma Joong observing the fires that mark the end of the festival. At intervals throughout the narrative, Judge Dee notices “putrid odour.” It is the rotting flesh of the leper who turns out to be Lee Wen-djing, the former Imperial Censor. Lee is the key villain in the novel: thirty years ago he murdered Tao Kwang; now, disfigured and dying, he has come back to Paradise Island with a plot to recover his fortunes by gaining control of the island’s rich commerce. Lee is almost literally a Hungry Ghost, returning to the site of his original sin, and he is implicated in all of the deaths in the novels.