The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik

by J. K. Van Dover

  The episodes of The Yellow Danger lead (admittedly with a measure of improvisation) to an Armageddon; the episodes of The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (and of the succeeding twelve novels) lead to an endless iteration of Threat-and-Thwart. Just as Holmes, in adventure after adventure, encounters a fresh puzzle and supplies a fresh solution, so the Fu-Manchu novels consist of repeated attempts by the Evil Doctor to eliminate some person who might obstruct his designs to advance “the triumph of his cause—the triumph of the yellow races” and the just-in-time interventions of Nayland Smith that frustrate the attempts. The effect achieved is one of being caught in a Groundhog Day Syndrome. In The Insidious Fu-Manchu, Fu-Manchu’s slave-girl Kâramanèh falls in love with Dr. Petrie and saves his life, and then saves his life again, and then saves his (and Nayland Smith’s) life again. When Petrie encounters her again in The Return of Fu-Manchu, she is once again the slave-girl of Fu-Manchu (the Doctor has purged her memory), and so she can once again fall in love with Petrie and can again repeatedly save his life.

  As a result, where the Holmes stories use repetition to enforce a fable of the infallible power of “the Science of Deduction” to expose the identity of even the most inventive of villains, the Fu-Manchu novels constitute a fable of the irrepressible threat posed by the cruel and cunning villain motivated by inextinguishable “Oriental” malice. Holmes is always briefly baffled; Fu-Manchu is always briefly successful, but the status quo is restored at the end of every Holmes story and the end of every Fu-Manchu episode (or, equally, at the end of every Fu-Manchu novel). The difference lies in the status quo: the Holmes saga argues that normalcy means a safe and sane Great Good Place; the Fu-Manchu saga argues that normalcy means the permanent danger of subversion from Asian outsiders.

  ARTHUR B. REEVE

  The Fu-Manchu novels redefined the threat of the Yellow Peril as subversion rather than inundation. The danger lay not in the hundreds of millions of hard-working Chinese peasants, but in the singular genius of a cunning and cruel Chinese mastermind that could infiltrate a complacent and unsuspecting Western society and undermine it from within. Having averted inundation through a series of “Chinese Exclusion Acts” (1882, 1892, 1902), the United States too was receptive to this shift.45 It embraced Fu-Manchu as an iconic villain, but it did not require megalomaniac ambition as a qualification for great villainy. It was satisfied to assume that Chinese identity was sufficient to dark and cunning behaviors. The Chinese villains of American lowbrow literature might be associated with some Tong, but world dominance was not the object; they were most often villainous in service to their personal greed and lust. Typical of these popular sinister Orientals were Long Sin and Wu Fang, villains in the popular silent film serials, The Exploits of Elaine (1914), The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), and The Romance of Elaine (1915).46 Pearl White was establishing herself as the “Queen of the Serials” by following up her role in the classic cliffhanger, The Perils of Pauline (1914), with what is generally regarded as a superior performance as Elaine Dodge in the three Elaine films. Plucky Elaine is paired with Craig Kennedy, the Scientific Detective, in a series of encounters with dastardly villains. The screenplays were based on characters and scenarios by Arthur B. Reeve, who in 1910 had introduced Craig Kennedy in a series of detective stories that made him, for a moment, the “American Sherlock Holmes.” With the journalist, Walter Jameson acting as his Dr. Watson, Kennedy applied the latest technologies—dynameters, plethysmographs, stereopticons, seismographs, ondometers, dictographs, acetylene torches—to the solution of crimes. The success of the three serials led Reeve to “novelize” the screenplays, resulting in two volumes of Craig Kennedy stories, The Exploits of Elaine (1915) and The Romance of Elaine (1916).47 When Harper & Brothers published a twelve-volume standard set, the Craig Kennedy Stories, in 1918, these became Volumes 9 and 10.

  The principal villain in The Exploits of Elaine is “the Clutching Hand,” a masked master criminal who terrorizes Elaine and attempts to assassinate Kennedy. He is, in the final chapter, revealed to be Perry Bennett, Elaine’s lawyer and would-be fiancée. Midway through the novel (Chapter 12), a second villain takes an interest in the wealthy heiress. Long Sin is “of the mandarin type, with drooping mustache, well dressed in American clothes, and conforming to the new customs of an occidentalized” (235). He has an “impassive Oriental countenance” and enjoys playing with his two pet white rats. He fabricates an elaborate plot to persuade Elaine that she has murdered him with a trick knife. When the Clutching Hand confronts him, Long Sin submits himself to the greater villain. At the end of The Exploits, a trapped Perry Bennett offers Long Sin a seventh of the seven million dollars that Bennett has stashed away. In exchange for a map showing the location of the money, Long Sin offers Bennett a potion that will simulate death. When he then refuses to supply the antidote, Bennett dies. The novel ends with Kennedy embracing Elaine.

  The Romance of Elaine opens with Long Sin as the principal villain, plotting to get access to Bennett’s seven million dollars. But almost immediately the narrative abruptly announces, “Wu Fang, the Chinese master mind, had arrived in New York” (11). And Long Sin immediately reverts to a secondary role: “Beside Wu, the inscrutable, Long Sin, astute though he was, was a mere pigmy, his slave, his advance agent, as it were” (11). Within a few pages, Reeve has Wu Fang and Long Sin find themselves in conflict with the Chang Wah Tong; soon they resume their contest with Elaine and Kennedy, seeking a mystic ring and access to Bennett’s seven million dollars. The action alters abruptly when Wu Fang is ordered “to get this American, Kennedy” (102) by a hitherto unmentioned “group of powerful foreign agents known secretly as the Intelligence Office” (101). Wu manages to gain possession of one of the two models of Kennedy’s revolutionary new “telautomatic torpedo.” Kennedy catches Wu on a wharf; they struggle; Wu dies. And then a new villain, Marcius Del Mar, enters, harassing Elaine for the final two-thirds of the novel.

  Other than the “truly Oriental guile” (Romance 27), which is attributed to them but never demonstrated, Long Sin and Wu Fang are indistinguishable from the Clutching Hand who preceded them and Marcius Del Mar, who follows them. They are melodramatic villains with Chinese names (and, in the films, with Chinese costumes). The only substantial difference between the “Chinese” villains and the white villains is a negative one: the white villains—Perry Bennett and Marcius Del Mar—are permitted to express desire for Elaine’s body as well as for Elaine’s wealth. Long Sin and Wu Fang do not presume to possess her body or her affections; they pursue only her wealth. (That the Chinese villains never express sexual desire for Elaine does not, of course, mean that their covetous glances and the actions to possess her wealth are not seen as sexual threats by the audience or the reader.) But however minimal their ethnic identity may be, it is still significant that Reeve, in the hurry of composition, drew upon that identity as one that instantly evoked a definite shade of malignity—guileful, greedy, cruel.

  Among the other villains of “truly Oriental guile” who populated lowbrow genre fiction in America were Li Shoon and Mr. Chang. Li Shoon, the creation of H. Irving Hancock (1866?-1922), is the head of Ui Kwoon Ah-How, a secret society on the model of Fu Manchu’s Si-Fan, dedicated to achieving power in order to awaken China “from her centuries of sleep to take over mastery of Asia” (qtd. in Sampson 15). Three Li Shoon stories appeared in three issues of Detective Story Magazine in 1916–1917. Mr. Chang, created by A[lbert]. E. Apple, is a vicious and merely selfish criminal. He appeared in several dozen stories published in Detective Story Magazine and Best Detective Magazine between 1919 and 1936 and in two novels, Mr. Chang of Scotland Yard (1926) and Mr. Chang’s Crime Ray: A Detective Story (1928). A British-American writer (born in London; raised in Florida) who made a major contribution to the sinister Oriental vogue was the prolific author of lowbrow fiction, Roland Daniel (1880–1969). In a series of novels published between 1928 and 1935, he created the master villain Wu Fang, “well known even in China for his cunning and cruelt
y” (Daniel). Wu Fang first appeared in The Society of the Spider (1928) as the Chinese head of a branch of a secret society run by an American. His British adversary, Chief Inspector Saville, was, in later novels, joined by the American Secret Service Agent Alec Williams. A second sinister Oriental master criminal named Wu Fang was featured in seven ten-cent novels by the American pulp writer, Robert J. Hogan (1897–1963). Four appeared in 1935; three in 1936. Even more than Daniel’s Wu Fang, Hogan’s Wu Fang imitated Fu Manchu. He aims at world conquest (with special attention to the United States), he has scientific training and breeds mutants; his henchmen are of various Asian extraction. And when Wu Fang’s seven attempts to emulate Fu Manchu were done, he was immediately succeeded by three attempts by Dr. Yen Sin (May/June to September/October 1936), the “Invisible Emperor” in three novels by Donald E. Keyhoe (1897–1988) who pursues world conquest from darkest Washington, D.C. The doctor is described as “A super-scientist, an evil genius, with the ruthless will of a dictator—and an Oriental hatred of the white race that amounts to a mania” (qtd. in Cook 201). When in 1934 the creators of the Flash Gordon comic strip needed a evil emperor to dominate the distant planet of Mongo, it was an easy choice to name him Ming the Merciless and model him after Fu Manchu.

  Whether they were simply dark and cunning by virtue of their birthplace, or whether their oriental guile was in service of a larger mission to destroy the West, the supply of Chinese villains in lowbrow literature seemed inexhaustible.48 The surfeit led Father Ronald Knox to devote one of his ten commandments for detective story writers and writers to the problem: “V. No Chinaman must figure in the story.” Knox’s “A Detective Story Decalogue,” printed in his 1929 introduction to Best Detective Stories of 1928–1929, was an attempt to codify the minimum standards of a decent detective story. Himself the author of a number of respected detective novels written in the 1920s (and 1930s), Knox’s rules expressed the Golden Age presumption that the essence of a good detective story is a good puzzle, and his rules are largely concerned to establish principles of fair play. Thus:

  I. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

  II. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

  III. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

  IV. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.49

  Knox’s fifth, “No Chinaman” rule seems an outlier, with little to do with fair play plotting. But, written with a wit that for many no longer amuses, the point is less racist than an objection to using a racial stereotype as a cheap plotting device. The Rule V reads in full:

  V. No Chinaman must figure in the story. Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming that the Celestial is over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals. I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of ‘the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo,’ you had best put it down at once; it is bad. The only exception which occurs to my mind—there are probably others—is Lord Ernest Hamilton’s Four Tragedies of Memworth.

  Knox was reacting against the Long Sins, the Li Shoons, the Mr. Changs, the multiple Wu Fangs, and above all—Knox being an Englishman—Prince Wu Ling, head of the Brotherhood of the Yellow Beetle, who, beginning in 1913, served as an irrepressible Fu-Manchu-like antagonist for Sexton Blake (“the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes”) in a seemingly endless series of encounters (more than 4,000 Sexton Blake stories by some 200 authors over 85 years [1893–1978]). By the late 1920s, even the upper strata of lowbrow literature could disdain the assumption of pulp detectives like Craig Kennedy and Sexton Blake that ‘the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo’ were sufficient to explain Chin Loo’s predisposition to villainy.

  EARL DERR BIGGERS

  The reaction came in the Saturday Evening Post, that repository of the American middle-brow worldview. The Post demonstrated the American interest in China during the Ages of Benevolence and Admiration. Between 1920 and 1941, the Saturday Evening Post averaged six stories and one serialized novel a year with significant Asian settings or characters (Hawley 133). It disdained the paranoid vein of the Yellow Peril and the racist line that simplified malignancy by attributing it to Oriental genes. But in 1924 it could print a story such as Frederick F. Van De Water’s “Yellow Cargo,” in which, seeking revenge for the murder of his father, Li Chang infects the guilty crew of a ship with lice, offers them a delousing solution of gasoline, and then ignites the ship, incinerating them all (26 April 1924, pp. 18ff). The dark and cunning heathen Chinee was still a marketable character. But the following year the Post published a turning point in the image of China and the Chinese in American popular literature.

  The Post’s sense of the American middle was broad enough to include the upper-lower-brow: it accepted formula fiction of a certain quality. On 24 January 1925, the Post began serial publication of a detective story that would introduce Americans to the first heroic Chinese figure, the Honolulu detective, Charlie Chan. Earl Derr Biggers did not, as he began to write The House Without a Key, intend a revolution. The novel began with its protagonist, a somewhat priggish scion of a Back Bay Boston family travelling to Honolulu to recall a wayward aunt to her proper puritanical senses. The murder of his quite improper uncle led to the intervention of the Honolulu police department in the person of Detective-Sergeant Charlie Chan. Chan was intended as a curiosity in a supporting role, but, as Biggers told the New York Times in 1931, “Charlie appeared in the Honolulu mystery, starting as a minor and unimportant character. As the story progressed, however, he modestly pushed his way forward, and toward the end, he had the lion’s share of the spot light” (“Creating Charlie Chan” VIII.6). The result was five sequels, now clearly featuring Charlie Chan as the central character, published between 1926 and Biggers’s death in 1933. And beginning in 1931, there would be a series of 44 Charlie Chan films featuring Warner Oland (16 films, 1931–38), Sidney Toler (22 films, 1938–47), and Roland Winters (6 films, 1947–49). There would also be a series of radio shows 1932–1948, a comic strip that ran from October 1938 to March 1940, and on television, 39 episodes of The New Adventures of Charlie Chan 1957–58 (with J. Carrol Naish as Chan). Charlie Chan would eventually the target of Chinese American writers, who saw him as the ultimate self-abasing Oriental—a plump, effeminate model of an unthreatening immigrant from China, created by a white writer and embodied by white actors. Biggers saw his creation quite differently. Charlie Chan was to be the antithesis of Knox’s slit-eyed Chin Loo. He told the New York Times that this was his conscious design: “Sinister and wicked Chinese were old stuff in mystery stories, but an amiable Chinese acting on the side of law and order had never been used up to that time” (“Creating Charlie Chan,” VIII.6).

  Earl Derr Biggers knew neither China nor Chinatown. While on vacation in Honolulu, he did learn of a pair of actual Chinese policemen: “In one of the dailies I came across a small, unimportant item to the effect that Chang Apana and Lee Fook, Chinese detectives on the Honolulu force, had arrested one of their countrymen for being too friendly with opium” (New York Times 22 March 1931: VIII.6). Apana has often been taken as the specific prototype of Charlie Chan, but Apana was thin, not plump, and employed physical intimidation (a blacksnake whip), not genteel interrogation as his primary investigative tool. As Biggers explained on several occasions, he did not meet Chang Apana until 1929, when he returned to Hawaii during the filming of the second Warner Oland film, The Black Camel: “I never met Chang until I had written three of the Chan stories, and when I did, I found none of Charlie’s characteristics noticeable. The character of Charlie Chan, for better or worse, is entirely fictitious” (New York Times 22 March 1931:VIII.6).

  Biggers did make some gestures towa
rd authenticity, but his good-willed attempts to replace negative qualities (darkness, cunning, greed, a grandiose ambition to subject the world to Yellow hegemony) with positive ones (benevolent aphorisms, psychic power, patience) opened him to charges that his detective was as offensively stereotypical as slit-eyed Chin Loo. The objections began in Biggers’s own lifetime. The Charlie Chan of the novels does, on a couple of occasions, cite Confucius, and he does occasionally utter sententious “oriental” proverbs, though in nothing close to the frequency with which Hollywood scriptwriters would assign to the cinematic Chan. On the one hand, Biggers wanted to give Charlie Chan a distinctive Chinese voice; on the other hand, he wanted to avoid a demeaning pidgin. His solution was to build Charlie Chan’s diction upon that employed in letters he received from his own Chinese cook and from letters written by Chinese boys to a friend of Biggers. These letters, Biggers observed, “are flowery, elegant, and have some amazing turns of phrase” (Biggers, ms. letter to Gessler, 17 July 1929). The result was a distinctive blend of elegance and solecism that—again, magnified by Hollywood—became a signature style that would appall politically-sensitive Asian Americans in the 1980s.

  Biggers’s attempts to attribute a Chinese style of detection suffer the same fate. They were seen as credible and quaint in the middle of the 20th century, as condescending and racist by the end of the century. Biggers ascribed two principle virtues to his detective. The first is oriental intuition. In the first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key (1925), the detective announces, “Chinese most psychic people in the world” (10.97), a claim he will repeat, often more than once, in every novel. The second methodological pronouncement, repeated almost as frequently as the “psychic” phrase, also appears in The House Without a Key. Charlie Chan declares, “Patience are a virtue” (19.194). In the second novel, The Chinese Parrot (1926), he elaborates: “Patience … are a very lovely virtue. Through long centuries Chinese cultivate patience like kind gardener tending flowers” (12.182). Later in the novel, he adds: “Chinese knows he is one minute grain of sand on seashore of eternity. With what result. He is calm and quiet and humble. No nerves, like hopping, skipping Caucasian” (16.228). In The Black Camel (1929), patience is specifically identified as a Confucian virtue (“the philosophy of the patient K’ung-fu-tsze” 7.492). Psychic insight and patience do not amount to a Chinese alternative to “ratiocination” or “The Science of Deduction” as methods for detecting crime; they are, perhaps, on a level with “little grey cells.” But they do constitute a serious effort to distinguish Charlie Chan as a non–Western detective.