The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
Page 17
And in a deliberate antithesis, Judge Dee first notices Lee’s odor immediately after his initial encounter with Autumn Moon, who, upon her departure “left behind her a waft of expensive perfume” (1.11). The next sentence brings Dee his first awareness of the beggar who will eventually be identified as former Censor, Lee: “Suddenly the scent was drowned in a nauseating odour of decay” (1.12). Autumn Moon’s sensuous smooth skin, which, Dee notices, “had been carefully depilated” (1.10) makes an obvious contrast to the “swollen face” and “deformed hands” of the leper (1.12). The groomed courtesan and diseased beggar will prove themselves to be equally arrogant, and equally doomed.
Having the action transpire entirely on an island provides another sort of unity, and this spacial unity is emphasized when, through a strained series of coincidences, three deaths occur in the same locked room—the Red Pavilion—that Judge Dee happens to occupy on his way to a courtesy call upon Judge Lo in Chin-hwa. The body of wine merchant Tao Kwang had been discovered there thirty years ago, that of the Academician Lee Lien had been discovered there a few days prior to the Judge’s arrival, and that of the Queen Flower courtesan, Autumn Moon is discovered there shortly after Dee arrives. Given the locked room, all three might have been suicides; Judge Dee suspects all three are murders; in the end, they prove to be a murder, a suicide, and a natural death.
A degree of improbability attaches to all three deaths. Tao Kwang had been competing for the love Green Jade. When he discovered Green Jade in the Red Pavilion in the embraces of Lee Wen-djing, the future Imperial Censor, Green Jade—moved apparently more by passion than by reason—implored her lover to kill the wine merchant, and Lee Wen-djing—also without apparent reason—complied. It is a senseless crime. Lee escaped, rose to eminence as a Censor, lost his fortune as well as his health, and now, thirty years later has sent his son to Paradise Island in a scheme to gain control of Paradise Island’s wealth by a complex stratagem. When his son is found dead, he returns to the island, seeking revenge on the current Queen Flower whom he suspects has murdered his son in the same room (the Red Pavilion) that he himself had committed murder in thirty years earlier.
Lee Lien, the son, comes to Paradise Island as the agent of his father’s plot, but his sexual appetites distract him, and before he can advance the plot, he discovers marks indicating he has contracted his father’s leprosy and abruptly commits suicide. After his death, Autumn Moon seizes the opportunity to enhance her status by announcing that, had he lived, Lee Lien would have married her. When the diseased father, Lee Wen-djing, appears threateningly at the window, she dies of a heart attack.
None of these deaths—the murder, the suicide, the cardiac arrest—seems very likely in itself; the sequence of three seems highly unlikely; and the location of all three in the Red Pavilion seems incredible. Only one of the deaths is the result of a punishable crime, and when the villain, with excellent timing, expires in the arms of his mistress, Judge Dee is not called upon impose any sentence. Van Gulik achieves a concentrated narrative effect in The Red Pavilion, but it is a strained detective story. There is this additional improbability: the deaths of Tao Kwang and Lee Lien are bloody affairs. Tao’s blood “spurts” over his murderer when he is stabbed to death; Lee slashes his own jugular vein. Both bodies are then moved (Tao’s body is actually moved into a different room), yet no one seems to notice what must have been very visible signs of this alteration.
The Crab and the Shrimp
One of the pleasures of the Judge Dee series is the regular appearance of eccentric subsidiary characters who are not directly connected to the mystery plots, but who provide peculiar sidelights into Chinese customs (or into human nature). Some, like Master Crane Robe in The Chinese Maze Murders, provide philosophical depth; others, like Judge Lo (in The Chinese Bell Murders and here in The Red Pavilion), or Sheng Pa (The Chinese Bell Murders and The Emperor’s Pearl, “The Two Beggars”) or the Corporal (The Lacquer Screen) provide variety and color. The Crab and the Shrimp provide color. The mismatched pair—one a burly giant and the other a diminutive hunchback—demonstrate a genuine affection for one another. And when they are set upon by thugs, it is the Shrimp who surprises Ma Joong by killing the attackers with his expertise in twirling iron balls attached to chains.
Confucius
There is a single reference to Confucius in this novel about a pleasure resort. Judge Lo, who happily indulges in those pleasures, has to flee from his entanglement with Autumn Moon. As he departs, he instructs his constable not to identify the palankeen in which he is hoping to make an undetected escape as his official vehicle. He turns to Judge Dee and says, “Don’t like to throw my weight about, you know! ‘Govern by benevolence’—as our Master Confucius says” (2.17).
Reviews
Again securing a Kuala Lumpur edition, Anthony Boucher found The Red Pavilion to be one of van Gulik’s “best, admirably puzzle-plotted” (“A Roundup of Current Criminals at Large,” New York Times 12 November 1961: BR56).
10. The Monkey and the Tiger
(2 Chapters)
Altering the form
In this his tenth Judge Dee book, van Gulik dispenses with the three “Cases of the …” form that he had preserved with growing awkwardness in the more recent novels. Some continuity is preserved. There is still an opening “Dramatis Personae,” divided now into the two completely separate cast lists. And there is still a Postscript; indeed, there is a return to the sort of informative final note that had ended the earliest novels. In The Red Pavilion the Postscript had dwindled to three perfunctory paragraphs. The Postscript to The Monkey and the Tiger provides an extended discussion of Chinese astrology (building upon a prefatory diagram and a two-paragraph commentary on the same topic that replaces the usual opening map) and a briefer discussion of the art of the Chinese lute.
Both novellas are dated not just to the sequence of the Judge’s five postings, but to specific years: AD 666 for “The Morning of the Monkey” and AD 676 for “The Night of the Tiger.” Van Gulik has evidently decided not to leave it to a cadre of Peng-lai Irregulars to work out a chronology; he will supply the precise dateline.
The astrological framework supplied by the prefatory and concluding commentaries, with its explication of the zodiac, the cycle of years, the eight trigrams, and the yin-yang diagram, is thought provoking, but its implications for the understanding of the two novellas is unclear.
Another Monkey, Another Tiger
It is doubtless a coincidence, but late in his life (and perhaps as well earlier) Mao Zedong took the Monkey and the Tiger as the two keys to his own character. “In his late years he told Edgar Snow that he had a bit of ‘huqi’ (tiger spirit) as well as a bit of ‘houqi’ (monkey spirit) in him” (Sheng 180). Michael M. Sheng explains the tiger spirit as “the will to pursue the end regardless of the condition,” and the monkey spirit as “the survival of a weaker creature which would constantly look out for opportunities and avoid danger” (180). The same terms appear in a letter to his wife, Chiang Ch’ing (Jiang Qing) that circulated in 1972: “I have … become king of the jungle, although I am just a monkey. This is not vague compromising, for in truth I have a tigerish nature as my main characteristic and a monkey nature as my subordinate characteristic” (qtd. in Pye 36). In some accounts, Mao calculated the proportions as two-thirds tiger, one-third monkey.
“The Morning of the Monkey”
Scene: Han Yuan, Judge Dee’s 2nd Posting
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: Tao Gan
The Cast:
Wang, a pharmacist
Wang’s son, “a mentally-deficient” twenty-year-old
Leng, a pawnbroker
Seng Kiu, a vagabond
Miss Seng, his sister
Chang, another vagabond
Twan Mou-tsai, a pharmacist who chooses vagabondage
Victim: Twan Mou-tsai
Villain’s motive: jealousy
When a gibbon drops a gold ring near Judge Dee’s residence, the Judge in
vestigates and discovers the mutilated body of an older man who had been an associate of a trio of vagabonds. Dee discovers why the man’s four fingers had been sliced off and identifies the killer.
Tao Gan
“The Morning of the Monkey” is precisely dated: ten months after Judge Dee’s first encounter with Tao Gan, as described in The Chinese Lake Murders. In the novella, Tao Gan is still on probation; his usefulness as an agent (he tricks three vagabonds into custody) and as a sounding board (he proposes a series of incorrect solutions) secure him a permanent position. The Judge uses Tao Gan’s precipitant conclusions as material for a lesson in wise detection.
Plot
“The Morning of the Monkey” offers a creditable mystery, with its curious clue of the four amputated fingers. There is a sentimental turn at the end when a father attempts to confess to a crime committed by his mentally incompetent son. Judge Dee repeats the panacea he had prescribed for The Corporal in The Lacquer Screen: he here enrolls Seng Kiu and Chang in “the labour corps of our Northern Army” (59) in order to reform their characters. And, as is often the case, Seng’s sister’s case is resolved by seeing her married to her old boatman boyfriend.
“The Night of the Tiger”
Scene: the Min country estate, en route between Pei-Chow, Judge Dee’s 5th posting, and the Imperial Capital
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: None
The Cast:
Min Liang, a wealthy landowner
Min Kee-yü, his daughter
Mr. Min, his younger brother, a tea merchant
Yen Yuan, bailiff of the Min country house
Liao, steward of the Min estate
Aster, a maidservant
Victim: Min Kee-yü
Villain’s motive: jealousy; self-protection
Travelling through a flooded territory on his way to assume his new position as Lord Chief Justice of the Empire and President of the Metropolitan Court, Judge Dee finds himself isolated in a fortified country estate cut off by the floods from military support and threatened by a ruffian gang of some one hundred “Flying Tigers” who propose to break into the refuge with a battering ram. The daughter of the family has died suddenly and been encoffined, and Judge Dee is assigned to her former room. After examining the corpse, Dee discovers that the victim has been misidentified and that a murder has been committed. He identifies the murderers, one of whom commits suicide. He also discovers a way to communicate across the flood to the military authorities and rescues the household.
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants
For the first time, van Gulik has Judge Dee work without the company of any of his lieutenants. There seems no obvious reason for excluding one or more of them; van Gulik is continuing to experiment with his creation.
Plot
Judge Dee is riding toward the Imperial Capital to serve as Lord Chief Justice of the Empire and President of the Metropolitan Court, having left Pei-chow, his final post as district magistrate three days earlier (at the conclusion of The Chinese Nail Murders, he had received the order to come to the capital). As he rides, he recalls the two tragedies that ended that novel: the murder of his oldest assistant, Sergeant Hoong, and the suicide of the admirable Mrs. Kuo. This is the first occasion in the series in which the emotional impact of the events of one novel resonates in a second. Conventionally, fictional detectives (prior to the 1970s at least) almost never expressed emotional responses to experiences that occurred in prior cases; indeed, they rarely even mentioned prior cases, except in occasional asides designed clearly to guide readers to other titles available for purchase. Judge Dee’s recollection of his “dear dead” (91) represents another step in van Gulik’s deepening of his detective’s character.
“The Night of the Tiger” presents an unlikely murder mystery planted in the middle of an unlikely adventure story. The adventure story, with its echoes of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin (Shui Hu Zhuan), is necessarily undeveloped in a novella, and the misidentified corpse is on several grounds improbable.
China’s Sorrow
“The Night of the Tiger” is the only Judge Dee story to make reference to the Yellow River (Huang He, Hwang Ho). The Yellow River basin is the birthplace of Chinese civilization, but it is also known as “China’s sorrow” as a result of its repeated changes of course and devastating floods. A flood in 1332–33 is reported to have killed seven million people; another flood as late as 1931 killed between one and four million. The river’s flood in “The Night of the Tiger” is a convenient one: at the precise moment when the Judge alone has crossed the only bridge, the river sends uprooted trees to separate the Judge from his armed escort, and leave him on an island occupied only by a gang of bandits and a country house that cannot long be defended from the gang’s assault.
Reviews
Sergeant Cuff in Saturday Review found that the two novellas in The Monkey and the Tiger came “nicely up to specifications” (“Criminal Record,” 25 June 1966: 31).
11. Willow Pattern
(20 Chapters)
Scene: The plague-ridden Imperial Capital, Judge Dee now functioning as Lord Chief Justice, President of the Metropolitan Court, and, with the evacuation of the Imperial Court, Emergency Governor of the Capital.
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants: Ma Joong, Chaio Tai, Tao Gan
The Cast:
Yee Kuei-ling, patriarch of an Old World family
Madame Yee, his wife
Cassia, her maid
Hoo Pen, patriarch of an Old World family
Mei Liang, patriarch of an Old World family
Madame Mei, his wife
Dr. Lew, a physician
Yuan, an itinerant puppeteer
Yuan’s wife
Bluewhite, Yuan’s assertive, athletic daughter
Coral, Bluewhite’s more demure twin
“The Case of the Willow Pattern”
Victim: Yee Kuei-ling, blow to the head
Villain’s motive: revenge, defense of a sibling
The body of Yee is discovered in a room of his mansion, with a window opening on a canal. Clues include a broken vase, a whip, an earring and a wet handkerchief. Yee’s character eventually reveals crucial links between the three “Old World” families.
“The Case of the Steep Staircase”
Victim: Mei Liang, blow to the head
Villain’s motive: anger, rejection of pity
In the framing “Case,” the benevolent aristocrat Mei Liang has apparently fallen down a marble staircase, striking his head on a newel. His widow and Dr. Lew assert it was an accident. The perfection of the evidence sparks Judge Dee’s doubts.
“The Case of the Murdered Bondmaid”
Victim: Yuan’s wife
Villain’s motive: degenerate lechery
Six years earlier, Yuan’s wife was sexually abused and then murdered by a patriarch of an Old World family. Believing it impossible to bring an indictment against a member of the old elite, Yuan nurses his grudge and plots revenge. The murderer is executed when Judge Dee convicts him of a different, more recent capital crime.
The Magistrate’s Lieutenants
Sergeant Hoong, who died at the end of Judge Dee’s 5th and final posting as a District Magistrate (The Chinese Nail Murders), is not mentioned, though his death had been remembered in the novella published just before The Willow Pattern, “The Night of the Tiger,” which described Judge Dee’s journey from Pei-chow to the imperial capital. Ma Joong and Chaio Tai have now been raised to the rank of Colonel of the Guard; Tao Gan now serves as Chief Secretary.
It is Ma Joong who receives primary attention in The Willow Pattern. When he rescues Bluewhite from nearly drowning in the weedy canal, she rewards him by surrendering her virginity to him. Though she speaks cavalierly of the gesture as being a matter of paying a debt (“You saved my life, and I paid cash,” 12.87), the transaction has significance for Ma Joong, who launches into an autobiographical excursus in order to demonstrate he is not one of those “high-ups” who
thinks all common women are fair game. And, fortuitously, it happens that Bluewhite’s mother comes from Ma Joong’s hometown, Foo-ling in Kiangsu Province, and they both can speak the local dialect. It is not, therefore, a great surprise when, at the end of the novel, Ma Joong marries Bluewhite (and, for good measure, marries her twin sister, Coral, as well).
Plot
The principals in the three cases that the Judge will investigate are members of the “Old World”: the scions of local families whose long lineages permit them to regard the Tang emperors as parvenus. The privileges claimed by these three relics of a past aristocracy helps to make for a strong plot, with interwoven threads.
In the first chapter, van Gulik describes a woman managing the arrangement of a man’s body on a stairway, creating the effect of an accidental death. Chapter 2 identifies the body as that of Mei Liang, and the woman is therefore presumably his wife. As she is associated with the disreputable Dr. Lew in Chapter 4, he is presumably her accomplice. Only one of these presumptions is correct: van Gulik thus nicely plays both to the Chinese convention of identifying the murderer at the beginning of a detective story and the Western convention of surprising the reader at the end.