Robert van Gulik: The Judge Dee Mysteries, Other Works, Bibliography, and a List of Books by Author Robert van Gulik

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Robert Hans van Gulik (???) (August 9, 1910, Zutphen - September 24, 1967, The Hague) was a highly educated orientalist, diplomat, musician (of the guqin) and writer, best known for the Judge Dee mysteries, the protagonist of which he borrowed from the 18th century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An.

Van Gulik was the son of a medical officer in the Dutch army of what was then called the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). He was born in the Netherlands but from the age of three till twelve he lived in Batavia (now Jakarta) where he was tutored in Mandarin and other languages. He went to the University of Leyden in 1934 and obtained his Ph.D in 1935. His talents as a linguist suited him for a job in the Dutch Foreign Service which he joined in 1935 and he was then stationed in various countries, mostly in East Asia (Japan and China).

He was in Tokyo when Japan declared war on the Netherlands in 1941 but he, and the rest of the Allied diplomatic staff, were evacuated in 1942. 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. While in Chongqing he married a Chinese woman (Shui Shifang), the daughter of an Imperial mandarin (under the Manchu Dynasty). Together they had four children.

After the war ended, he returned to the Netherlands then went to the United States as the Councillor of the Dutch embassy in Washington D.C.. He returned to Japan in 1949 and stayed there for the next four years. While in Tokyo he published his first two books, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee and a privately published book of erotic colored prints from the Ming dynasty. Later postings took him all over the world from New Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Beirut (during the 1958 Civil War) to The Hague. From 1965 until his early death from cancer in 1967 he was the Dutch ambassador to Japan.

The Judge Dee Mysteries more less

Other Works more less

Bibliography more less

Judge Dee

The author, having finished the translation of the story Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee around 1948, included an essay on the largely forgotten genre of Chinese detective stories. He suggested in his afterword that it was easy to imagine re-writing some of the old Chinese case histories with an eye towards modern readers. Not long after he published Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, van Gulik himself tried his hand at creating a detective story based on some older Chinese case histories. This became the book The Chinese Maze Murders (completed around 1950). As van Gulik thought the story would have more interest to Japanese and Chinese readers, he had it translated into Japanese by a friend (finished in 1951) and it was sold in Japan under the title "Meiro-no-satsujin". With the success of the book, van Gulik embarked on translating the book into Chinese. The translation was published by a Singapore book publisher in 1953. The reviews were good and van Gulik wrote two more books (The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Lake Murders) over the next few years, also with an eye towards Japanese and then Chinese editions.

After all this work was done, van Gulik found a publisher for English language versions of these stories and the first English language book was published in 1957. Later books were written and published in English first, the translations came afterwards.

The Judge Dee Mysteries in the order in which they were written

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (originally Dee Goong An) (1941-1948 translated from Chinese by Van Gulik)
The Chinese Maze Murders (originally written 1950, published in Japanese in 1951, published in English in 1957)
The Chinese Bell Murders (originally written between 1953 and 1956, published in English in 1958)
The Chinese Lake Murders (originally written between 1953 and 1956, published in English in 1960)
The Chinese Gold Murders (first published in English in 1959)
The Chinese Nail Murders (1961)
The Haunted Monastery (1961)
The Emperor's Pearl (1963)
The Lacquer Screen (1964)
The Red Pavilion (1964)
The Monkey and the Tiger, short stories (1965)
The Willow Pattern (1965)
Murder in Canton (1966)
The Phantom of the Temple (1966)
Judge Dee at Work, short stories (1967)
Necklace and Calabash (1967)
Poets and Murder (1968)

The Judge Dee Stories in the order in which they were set

Judge Dee at Work contains a "Judge Dee Chronology" telling of Dee's various posts, stories...either books or short stories...set during that posting, and giving information about the stories. Based on this chronology, the works can be arranged in this order:

663 - Judge Dee is a magistrate of Peng-lai, a fictional district on the north-east coast of China.

The Chinese Gold Murders
The Lacquer Screen.
Five Auspicious Clouds, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
The Red Tape Murders, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
He came with the Rain, a short story in Judge Dee at Work

666 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Han-yuan, a fictional district on a lakeshore near the capital of Chang-An.

The Chinese Lake Murders
The Morning of the Monkey, a short story in The Monkey and the Tiger
The Murder on the Lotus Pond, a short story in Judge Dee at Work

666 - Judge Dee is traveling and forced to take shelter in a monastery.

The Haunted Monastery

668 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Poo-yang, a fictional wealthy district through which the Grand Canal of China runs (part of modern-day Jiangsu province).

The Chinese Bell Murders
The Two Beggars, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
The Wrong Sword, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
The Red Pavilion
The Emperor's Pearl
Poets and Murder
Necklace and Calabash

670 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Lan-fang, a fictional district at the western frontier of Tang China.

The Chinese Maze Murders
The Phantom of the Temple
The Coffins of the Emperor, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
Murder on New Year's Eve, a short story in Judge Dee at Work

676 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Pei-chow, a fictional district in the far north of Tang China.

The Chinese Nail Murders
The Night of the Tiger, a short story in The Monkey and the Tiger

677 - Judge Dee is the Lord Chief Justice in the Imperial capital of Chang-An.

The Willow Pattern

681 - Judge Dee is the Lord Chief Justice for all of China.

Murder in Canton

Two books, Poets and Murder and Necklace and Calabash, were not listed in the chronology (which was published before these two books were written) but they were both from the time when Judge Dee was the magistrate in Poo-yang.

Selected scholarly works

(with Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck). A Blackfoot-English vocabulary based on material from the Southern Peigans. Amsterdam, Uitgave van de N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1934. 12.
The Lore of the Chinese lute; an essay in ch'in ideology (1941)
Hsi K'ang and his Poetical Essay on the Lute (1941)
Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period Privately printed, Tokyo (1951)
Siddham; An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan (1956)
Chinese Pictorial Art, as Viewed by the Connoisseur Istituto Italiano Per Il Medio Ed Estremo Oriente, Roma (1958) (Limited edition in 950 copies)
Sexual Life in Ancient China. A preliminary survey of Chinese sex and society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D. (1961). (In spite of its titillating title, this book deals with the social role of sex, such as the institutions of concubinage and prostitution.)
The gibbon in China. An essay in Chinese animal lore. E.J.Brill, Leiden, Holland. (1967)

Total Books: 128

1990 - The Chinese Nail Murders (Paperback) → Paperback, Hardcover
ISBN-13: 9780747401766
ISBN-10: 0747401764
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Currently 4.7/5 Stars.

1976 - Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee [aka Dee Goong An - Judge Dee, Bk 1] (Paperback)
ISBN-13: 9780486233376
ISBN-10: 0486233375
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.

The Red Pavilion (Audio Cassette) → Paperback, Hardcover
ISBN-13: 9781556904387
ISBN-10: 155690438X