The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik

by J. K. Van Dover

  Charlie Chan has at least one other distinction that can be related to his origins in Canton. Unlike any of the Great Detectives who preceded him, he is emphatically a family man. He has a wife (who does speak pidgin English) and, by the time the series ends, eleven children. The members of his household do not figure largely in the novels, but Chan’s role as husband and, especially, as the Chinese father of what are growing up to be very American children is an important anchor in the series. Charlie Chan’s house on Punchbowl Hill, with its Chinese furnishings, is the emblem of Chan’s rooted Chineseness in an Americanizing Honolulu. When Charlie Chan explains to a young woman lawyer that “we Chinese are different. Love, marriage, home, still we cling to unfashionable things like that. Home is a sanctuary into which we retire, the father is the high priest, the altar fires burn bright” (7.114), he is speaking in a very different voice than that of M. Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke, Hercule Poirot, Peter Wimsey.

  HUGH WILEY

  The extraordinary success of Charlie Chan naturally led to imitations. One of the first was Hugh Wiley’s James Lee Wong. Wiley (1884–1968) began writing for the magazines after returning from his service in France during the World War I. In 1934, he published his first Mr. Wong story in the Post’s major competitor for middle-brow readers, Collier’s. Wong is an elegant, Yale-educated agent of the U.S. Treasury who solves crimes in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Collier’s published a total of twelve Mr. Wong stories between 1934 and 1938 (they were collected in Murder by the Dozen, 1950). Six Mr. Wong films were released between 1938 and 1939, with Boris Karloff playing the detective in the first five, and Keye Luke (Number One Son in the Charlie Chan films) playing Jimmy Wong in the last.

  ERLE STANLEY GARDNER

  An interesting variation on the Chinese detective appeared in a brief experiment by the prolific Erle Stanley Gardner. In his early years as a lawyer in Oxnard, California, Gardner had made a name for himself as a defender of the Chinese residents of the town. In 1931, having already taken lessons in Chinese, Gardner and his wife made a six-month visit to China, visiting Shanghai, Peking, Canton, Macao, and Tientsin (Hughes 140–42). By 1937, having already successfully launched Perry Mason in the first nine of what would eventually be 82 novels, Gardner was looking for another series protagonist.50 He tested two detectives: a country district attorney and Chinese detective. Doug Selby would eventually feature in a total of nine novels. The Chinese detective, Terry Clane, would appear only once more, in a 1946 novel, The Case of the Backward Mule. (It would be the firm of Cool and Lam, which debuted in 1939 and ran to 29 novels, that became Gardner’s principal alternative to Perry Mason.) Terry Clane is not Chinese, but Murder Up My Sleeve opens with his return to San Francisco after spending time in a Chinese monastery. His chief accomplishment, he tells the District Attorney, is to have acquired the ability to concentrate for four and a half seconds. It is this exceptional talent, plus his deep friendship with Chu Kee, a powerful figure in San Francisco’s Chinatown, that enables him to solve murders. He lives in an apartment filled with Chinese furniture, and he is aided by his aged servant, Yat T’oy. But the most revealing detail is his relationship with Chu Kee’s daughter, the beautiful Sou Ha (Embroidered Halo). Sou Ha is clearly in love with Clane, and Clane clearly responds to her appeal. Gardner plays with the possibility of an interracial union, but in both Clane novels he pulls back, and makes Cynthia Renton, a portrait painter, Clane’s true soulmate. Clane can love China; he can be loved by the Chinese; but the Anglo Clane cannot, without reservation, love the Chinese Sou Ha.

  At the end of Murder Up My Sleeve, Gardner adds an “Acknowledgment” that functions like the Postscripts that van Gulik appended to the Dee novels, assuring readers that his representation of Chinese culture is authentic. Gardner asserts his friendship with “many” Chinese in California, and he concludes: “China is a large nation. Its people comprise many classes. Too much has been written of the more accessible lower classes; too little of the aloof Chinese aristocrat, who considers the true teacher with respect akin to reverence….But lest the reader consider the Chinese atmosphere in this book overdrawn, I assure him that I have known the exact counterpart of the characters described,” and he declares himself indebted to his Chinese friends “for a most fascinating system of mental discipline” (214). Gardner was unable to celebrate that mental discipline in more than two novels, but the gesture was evidently a sincere one. He possessed more direct knowledge of the Chinese—in China as well as in American Chinatowns—than did Earl Derr Biggers, and he admired what he knew. But he could not continue a series featuring an Anglo detective molded by and devoted to Chinese culture.

  JOHN P. MARQUAND

  It was the Saturday Evening Post desire to fill the vacuum caused by Biggers’s untimely death in 1933 that led to the most notable oriental heir of Charlie Chan. The editors approached John P. Marquand (1893–1960), who had been publishing short stories in the Post since 1921.51 Marquand wrote to a friend, “It seems they have an idea that a Chinese character is always popular. Charlie Chan was a big number with them, and John T. Foote’s ‘Number One Boy,’ and Sax Rohmer’s ‘Fu Manchu’ goes big in Collier’s. They want a new Chinese character and a Chinese background, particularly as they believe that the Orient will soon be on the front page in the news and will be for a long while” (qtd. in Bell 204). In pursuit of a more authentic Chinese background, the Post agreed to finance Marquand on a two-and-a-half month excursion to the Far East: “they believe it will make me their fiction expert on China” (qtd. in Bell 205). In the late spring of 1934, Marquand sailed to Tokyo, visited Korea, passed through the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Mudken and Hsinking) on his way to Peking, and visited Kalgan in Inner Mongolia, Taiyuan, and Shanghai before returning to the United States. He would make another visit in 1935, return again on a junket immediately after the war (1947), and make a final brief stop in Hong Kong and Macao in 1955: Marquand did attempt to know China.

  The first fruit of the Post’s investment came in December 1934, when the magazine began to serialize Marquand’s Ming Yellow, a thriller in the John Buchan vein. It features an American journalist, Rodney Jones, who has been stationed in Peking for eighteen months. Jones becomes involved in the affairs of a wealthy American collector and his attractive daughter. Edwin Newall is obsessed with acquiring ten pieces of rare Ming Yellow porcelain, and in pursuit of the acquisition, Newall ventures far into the Chinese interior, where the party is caught up in disputes between bandits and warlords. Ming Yellow bears little resemblance to anything in the Charlie Chan series, though Marquand does have Rodney Jones follow Chan in identifying patience as a Chinese virtue and impatience as a Western vice: “No one in the world has understood leisure or has been able to cultivate it like a Chinese gentleman. The trouble with us Westerners, Mr. Newall, we’re all too busy. We’re all afraid of time” (Chapter 1).

  Ming Yellow contains several of the features that would become conventions of the new series of oriental novels that Marquand began publishing in the Post, beginning with the first installment of Mr. Moto Takes a Hand on 4 May 1935. (In book form, the novel was retitled No Hero and later as Your Turn, Mr. Moto.) There would be six novels in the Mr. Moto series, five published between 1935 and 1941, with a sixth appearing in 1957. (There would also be six Mr. Moto films (1937–39), featuring Peter Lorre. In the films, Mr. Moto is no longer an agent of imperial Japan, rather he is a detective—an amateur in the first films, and working for Interpol in the later films.) Only one of the films, Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937) is set in China. Although the title character is the Japanese secret agent, I. A. Moto, the protagonist is always a young American abroad like Rodney Jones; like Jones, he usually finds himself in the unstable world of 1930s China. Only the final two novels do not have important scenes in China. The American finds himself drawn into a Buchanesque adventure, during which he meets a plucky American girl with whom, at the end of the novel, he plans to start a new married life. The China scenes al
ways aim at a degree of verisimilitude: Marquand may be as confined by his plot and character formulas as Biggers was, but he was conscientious in attempting to present a realistic China.

  The young American in the first novel, Your Turn, Mr. Moto, is Casey Lee, a World War I air ace who enjoyed some celebrity as a pilot in the post war period, but who now finds himself in Tokyo looking for work and drinking too much. He is recruited by Mr. Moto, who wants him to travel to Shanghai and to try to find out if the United States has obtained the plans of a new Japanese battleship. The espionage plot grows complicated, and comes to involve a Russian scientist’s secret formula that doubles the cruising range of battleships. Japanese, Russian, and American interests are involved. Casey Lee has adventures in the streets of Shanghai (and in the waters of the Huangpu) and in a village in the far north of Manchuria. He meets Sonya Karaloff, the daughter of the Russian scientist, and he has to deal with Wu Lai-fu, the Shanghai master criminal: “He’s in secret brotherhoods. He’s got a finger in politics. He’s mixed up in everything. I don’t believe any white man alive can make him out” (190). But Wu Lai-fu is not the Yellow Peril Incarnate; he is certainly a powerful figure with underworld connections who can credibly threaten Lee with torture and death, and he openly declares his animus against the West: “Some day I hope to see you and all of your kind driven into the sea” (148). But Marquand keeps his Chinese villain short of megalomania. Wu Lai-fu’s greed is quotidian, as is his political ambition. He wants the secret formula not because it will enable him to dominate first China and then the world, but because it is a marketable commodity.

  The novel ends with Casey Lee and Sonya flying from Shanghai to a village in Manchuria, now the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. There they recover the hidden formula and, to prevent any of the three powers gaining an advantage, they burn it. Mr. Moto arrives, and agrees that a happy resolution has been achieved. Casey Lee, now abjuring alcohol, and Sonya are left to begin a happy new life together. Every Charlie Chan novel ends with at least one young couple beginning a new life together, and Marquand, in his Mr. Moto series, adheres conscientiously to the convention. When, in the final Moto novel, Marquand chose to defy the convention and have the young girl killed, he had to overcome great resistance from the editors at the Post and Little, Brown who preferred the usual happy ending.

  Marquand’s decision to make his series character a secret agent rather than a detective lieutenant may reflect a need to distinguish the Moto stories from the Chan stories. Making his oriental hero Japanese rather than Chinese may have served a similar purpose. But both decisions served to separate the Mr. Moto novels from the “Great Good Place” in which Charlie Chan, like all of the Great Detectives of the Golden Age novels, had seemed to operate. The Great Good Place—the phrase is Auden’s—is a timeless world of manors and vicarages and lanais on Waikiki Beach, where murder is an outrageous anomaly, and the detective’s investigation works to restore the moral identity of the wrongly suspected innocent and the wrongly overlooked guilty. The China of Your Turn, Mr. Moto is very definitely a Wrong Place, with Japanese invaders, American and Russian agents, and selfish Chinese master criminals. The next Mr. Moto novel, Thank You, Mr. Moto (1936) is set entirely in China, and the dislocations caused by the unequal treaties, two decades of warlord conflicts, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria are essential elements in the story. The American is Tom Nelson, a disillusioned lawyer who has spent an aimless year and a half in Peking. He is drawn into a plot that involves art (eight painted scrolls valued at $200,000) and politics (a Chinese warlord’s scheme to seize control of Peking).52 Both aspects signify on-going the dismemberment of the cultural entity that had been the Middle Kingdom.

  As the U.S. moved from the Age of Benevolence (1905–1937) into the Age of Admiration (1937–1944), official government policy began to express the broader American sense of sympathy for China as a victim and antipathy for Japan as an aggressor. In the middle of the novel, Mr. Moto makes a reference to the “Mukden Incident” (13.105). On 18 September 1931 a small bomb destroyed a section of railway near Mukden (Shenyang) in Manchuria. The Japanese used the incident to justify their invasion of Manchuria and the establishment of Manchukuo, a nation ruled nominally by Puyi, the last Qing emperor of China, and ruled actually by Imperial Japan. Though still a matter of dispute, the general view is that the bombing was carried out by Japanese provocateurs. The American government strongly protested the Japanese actions, and on 1932 the American Secretary of State, Henry L Stimson, issued the “Stimson Doctrine,” declaring that that the U.S. would not recognize any treaty that Japan imposed upon China. Although the doctrine had little immediate effect, it began the path toward a confrontation in the Pacific between Japan and the United States. It was, therefore, a challenge for Marquand to sustain Mr. Moto, the agent of Imperial Japan, as an admirable figure who can honorably serve his Emperor and honorably abet the young Americans whom he encounters in the course of his labors. Thank You, Mr. Moto achieves this delicate balance by having two Japanese agents at work in Peking. Mr. Takahara represents what Mr. Moto calls “a disturbing, radical element in my country….It feels our nation is not moving fast enough.” This would be the same element that exploded the Mukden bomb: “There will be another incident, engineered by Japan, exactly what is undesirable” (102). Mr. Moto declares his “mission” is to “curb” these “radical, impetuous” countrymen of his. As a result, each of the two Japanese agents dedicates himself to killing the other. Mr. Takahara nearly succeeds; Mr. Moto succeeds. Marquand assumes that the victory of cautious Japanese imperialism over impetuous Japanese imperialism will satisfy an American audience.

  As, apparently, it did. The incident that Mr. Takahara is attempting to provoke involves an alliance with a local Chinese warlord, Wu Lo Feng, a thuggish military man who will supply the “several thousand followers” who will infiltrate the city in order to seize and loot Peking. Wu is distinguished by a “rosebud” mouth and an utterly amoral pursuit of power. The abstract combination of a Japanese intelligence and a mass of Chinese manpower is precisely the nightmare that M.P. Shiel and Jack London had envisioned as the Yellow Peril. But in the real world of China in the 1930s, Marquand and his readers could welcome the defeat of a local warlord and a mid-level Japanese agent by an alliance between an American ex-patriot and a different mid-level Japanese agent.

  Parallel to the two Japanese agents, there are two principal Chinese. Marquand offers the elegant Manchu survivor, Prince Tung, as a foil to the brutal Wu Lo Feng. Tung is an aesthete who lives in his ruined palace, writing poetry. He disparages the naiveté of the West with amused contempt, but he is a fatalist when captured by Wu and Takahara. It is the impulsive American girl, Eleanor Joyce, and the active American man, Tom Nelson, who turn the captors into captives, and save the day. In the end, Prince Tung happily takes the $200,000 offered for the scrolls which had been in his family for four centuries. He is no dark, cunning villain, but neither is he a dedicated preserver of the best of Chinese culture. He is just a man making pragmatic choices in an unstable modern world. (There is a third important Chinese character, Nelson’s servant Yao. Yao allows Marquand to portray the peculiar relationship between Western masters and Chinese servants. Yao offers Nelson genuine service and good advice; he also, without embarrassment, exploits his situation for his own profit.)

  The third Mr. Moto novel begins in Shanghai, but soon moves to safer territory in Hawaii.53 But the fourth novel in the series, Mr. Moto Is So Sorry (1938), involves its protagonist, Calvin Gates, on a carefully described journey from Tokyo to Korea, across the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, into Peiping (Beijing), and on to Kalgan (Zhangjiakou), near what was then the border between China and Mongolia. The final scenes take place in an independent Mongolian princedom, “Ghuru Nor,” which occupies a location of strategic importance to the two powers—the Russians and the Japanese—who have designs upon the region. Positing the Soviet Union as Mr. Moto’s adversary helps to make a Japanes
e agent sufficiently sympathetic in 1938; Mr. Moto’s success in extending Japanese influence into Inner Mongolia is presented as “economic co-operation” (160), as opposed to the Russian threat of a military invasion. And setting Moto against another, less “conservative” Japanese agent who wants precipitously to deploy three Japanese divisions in Ghuru Nor also helps make Mr. Moto seem acceptably moderate.

  The novel contains no major Chinese character. With the exception of the two young Americans and an Australian mercenary named Hamby, all of the active characters in the novel—those who kill or are killed—are Russian or Japanese. Calvin Gates and Sylvia Dillaway meet the experienced Captain Hamby as they cross from Manchukuo into China at Shan-hai-kuan. The Captain informs them that “back there in Manchukuo … everything is dead serious; but over here … everything is funny, always funny in China” (63). Later he reiterates: “over there—very grim; over here—comic opera” (63). China has become a passive prize to be apportioned. It is without dignity, without a voice in its own disposition. Lin Yutang, in A Moment in Peking (1937), was presenting upper middlebrow America with an image of China as a besieged nation, which, since the Revolution of 1911, had been divided against itself at many levels, but which is now consolidating all of its social classes in a national effort to expel the Japanese invader. John P. Marquand offers the readers of genre literature an image of China as comic opera. Japan has become the engine of history in the Far East; China is the undisciplined hodge-podge of a nation falling piecemeal to the Japanese new world order.