This month's mystery newsletter is based on the writings found in a set of anonymous writings discovered by Dutch author Robert Hans von Gulik, a Dutch orientalist, linguist, diplomat, musician (of the gupin), and, of course, writer of the Judge Dee historical mysteries, the protagonist he used from the 18th century Chinese detective novel, "Dee Goog An." This might sound confusing but I'll explain more as the newsletter moves along.
From what I have learned researching this mystery style, the ancient Chinese detective was usually the district magistrate, an official in the form of a judge, and in this position, he was the district magistrate, detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury all wrapped up into one person. This book is actually comprised of three distinct stories but there are quite long and illustrative in their writing. The three stories are different and they are as follows: "The Double Murder at Dawn", "The Strange Corpse" and "The Poisoned Bride" make up the historical renderings from this book.
The three cases offer a glimpse into the lives of different classes in traditional Chinese society: adventurous traders who travel vast distances along the trade routes up and down the land of China, and who are sometimes targeted by robbers and sometimes form dubious partnerships or turn outright robbers themselves; the small-scale shopkeepers and townspeople, who live within a narrow circumscribed life of routine which some find stifling; the gentry of literati, who by long tradition were considered as the land's rulers and this was how the people viewed them as well.
So, how did Robert Hans von Gulik start writing about historical based detective stories, I mean, where did it begin for him? Robert Hans von Gulik was life began in Zutphen, a province in Gelderland, the Netherlands, in 1910, a son of a Dutch officer in the Dutch army stationed in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies. We now know it as Indonesia. He went to Leiden University in 1929 and obtained a PhD at Utrecht University by 1935. He was gifted as a linguist, and this talent obtained him work in the Dutch Foreign Service, which he joined in 1935 and worked in East Asia (mostly Japan and China). He was in Tokyo when WW2 began, and he spent most of the rest of World War II as the secretary for the Dutch mission to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government in Chongqing.
During World War II van Gulik translated the 18th-century detective novel Dee Goong An into English under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (first published in Tokyo in 1949). The main character of this book, Judge Dee, was based on the real statesman and detective Di Renjie, who lived in the 7th century, during the Tang Dynasty (AD 600–900), though in the novel itself elements of Ming Dynasty China (AD 1300–1600) were mixed in.
Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries follow in the long tradition of Chinese detective fiction, intentionally preserving a number of key elements of that writing culture. Most notably, he had Judge Dee solve three different (and sometimes unrelated) cases in each book, a traditional device in Chinese mysteries. The whodunit element is also less important in the Judge Dee stories than it is in the traditional Western detective story, though still more so than in traditional Chinese detective stories.
During his life he wrote twenty-odd essays and monographs on various subjects, mainly but not exclusively on aspects of Chinese culture. Typically, much of his scholarly work was first published outside the Netherlands. In his lifetime van Gulik was recognized as a European expert on Imperial Chinese jurisprudence. From 1965 until his death from cancer, von Gulik remained the Dutch ambassador to Japan.
I really found this line of inquiry with the Judge as detective quite fun and a different way to view the detective from this perspective. I hope this was as interesting of a journey to Asia again for you, and until next time, gentle reader...Read On! |
Mystery: August 14, 2024 Issue [#12687]
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