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Robert van Gulik Judge Dee First Edition Rare Books. |
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Robert Van Gulik. Chinese Maze Murders, Chinese Bell Murders First Editions. |
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| Bibliography for the Jude Dee Mystery | van Gulik Biography |
Janwillem van de Wetering: Robert van Gulik His Life His Work
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Gulik, Robert Van. The Chinese Maze Murders. A Chinese detective story suggested by three original ancient Chinese plots.
Published: W Van Hoeve Ltd The Hague and Bandung 1956
Edition: First Edition.
Binding: Hardback with Dust jacket.
Price: U.S.$375 Sold
 This price includes shipping by Registered Airmail Post.
8vo., First Edition, original red lettered black cloth in its pictorial orange dust jacket, small chips to corers & edges & half inch tear to front cover top edge of dust wrapper, pp. xiii + 322, pictorial endpapers, illustrate with nineteen plates drawn by the author in Chinese style, a very good copy.
The Chinese Maze Murders is a detective novel written by Robert van Gulik and set in Imperial China (roughly speaking the Tang Dynasty). It is a fiction based on the real character of Judge Dee (Ti Jen-chieh or Di Renjie), a magistrate and statesman of the Tang court, who lived roughly 630–700.
This was the first of the fictional mystery stories written by Robert van Gulik. It was based on three actual cases from Chinese criminal investigations. The author, having written the story in English, had it translated by a Japanese friend (Professor Ogaeri Yukio) into Japanese and it was sold in Japan under the title "Meiro-no-satsujin" in 1951. Then the author translated the book into Chinese himself and it was published by the Nanyang Press in Singapore in 1953. Finally Van Gulik published the English language version in 1957. (See Forward to Chinese Maze Murders pgs. V-VI).
The three mysteries: "The Case of the Sealed Room", "The Case of the Hidden Testament", and "The Case of the Girl with the Severed Head" are all based on actual Chinese murder casebooks. The book contains a postscript by the author on the Chinese Imperial Justice system (something that Van Gulik was an expert on).
Plot introduction
Judge Dee is the magistrate in the fictional border town of Lan-fang. He confronts three mysteries involving poisoned plums, a mysterious scroll picture, passionate love letters, a hidden murder, and a ruthless robber. These are all somehow linked to the Governor's garden maze.
Lan-fang was the setting for another Judge Dee novel, The Phantom of the Temple and two short stories from Judge Dee at Work.
Agatha Christie wrote of Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders ' I enjoyed the book immensely. The whole thing has great charm and freshness and I hope it will have great success'
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Gulik, Robert Van. The Chinese Bell Murders. Three Cases Solved by Judge Dee. A Chinese detective story suggested by three original ancient Chinese plots.
Published: London: Michael Joseph 1958
Edition: First Edition.
Binding: Hardback with Dust jacket.
Price: U.S.$320
This price includes shipping by Registered Airmail Post.
8vo., First Edition, original maroon cloth, gilt spine, pictorial dust jacket with a few small chips, pp. 288, illustrated with 15 plates drawn by the author in Chinese style, pictorial endpapers, offsetting to endpapers from d/w, a very good copy.
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Gulik, Robert Van. The Chinese Lake Murders. Three Cases Solved by Judge Dee. A Chinese detective story suggested by three original ancient Chinese plots.
Published: London Michael Joseph 1960
Edition: First Edition.
Binding: Hardback with Dust jacket.
Price: U.S.$300
This price includes shipping by Registered Airmail Post.
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8vo., First Edition, original dark blue cloth, gilt lettered spine, in its green pictorial dust wrapper, pp. 270, illustrated with twelve plates drawn by the author in Chinese style, pictorial endpapers, offsetting to endpapers & a few spots to prelims, small booksellers label on front free endpaper, a very good copy.
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Gulik, Robert Van. The Chinese Nail Murders. Three Cases Solved by Judge Dee. A Chinese detective story suggested by three original ancient Chinese plots.
Published: London: Michael Joseph 1961
Edition: First Edition.
Binding: Hardback with Dust jacket.
Price: U.S.$295
This price includes shipping by Registered Airmail Post.
8vo., First Edition, original orange cloth, gilt spine, pictorial dust jacket with few very small chips, pp. 216, illustrated with eight illustrations drawn by the author in Chinese style, a very good copy.
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Gulik, Robert Van. The Monkey and the Tiger. Two Chinese Detective Stories.
Published: Heinemann: London 1965
Edition: First Edition.
Binding: Hardback with Dust jacket.
Price: U.S.$250
This price includes shipping by Registered Airmail Post.
8vo., First Edition, original black/grey cloth, Boots booklovers library stamp on upper cover, spine gilt lettered, in its mulberry pictorial dust wrapper, pp. 144, small chips to corners & edges, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with eight plates drawn by the author in Chinese style, a very good copy.
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Gulik, Robert Van. Judge Dee at Work.
Published: Heinemann: London 1967
Edition: First Edition.
Binding: Hardback with Dust jacket.
Price: U.S.$175
This price includes shipping by Registered Airmail Post.
    
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8vo, First Edition, original black cloth, gilt lettered spine in its price-clipped pictorial dust wrapper, pp. vi + 178, illustrated by the author with 8 full page drawings, small closed tear to lower edge of upper cover, plus a few small marks, neat previous owner's bookplate on front free endpaper, a clean and very good copy.
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Wetering, Janwillem Van de. Robert Van Gulik His Life His Work.
Published: Dennis McMillan Publications, Miami Beach, Florida. January 1987
Edition: First Edition, Limited Edition of 350 copies and signed by author.
Binding: Original red cloth in dust wrapper.
Price: U.S.$475 Sold
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8vo., First Edition & Limited Edition (No. 287) of 350 copies signed by the author, original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, in its pictorial dust wrapper, decorated endpapers, pp. 147, illustrated with 12 plates including a frontispiece plate of Van Gulik plus charts and diagrams, a fine copy.
 
Robert van Gulik (1910-1967) was born in Holland in 1910 but grew up in Java. Van Gulik was a highly educated authority on Chinese history and culture, diplomat, musician and writer who is best known for his Judge Dee mystery series. As a researcher van Gulik studied esoteric Buddhism and translated ancient texts, including a Chinese 18th century detective novel. This Chinese mystery novel was based in turn on the well known historically real Chinese magistrate Judge Dee who lived in the 7th century CE. Using the three stories from this original source as a stepping stone, van Gulik developed his own series of historical mysteries set in 7th century China featuring additional adventures of Judge Dee.
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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 after word 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 Complete The Judge Dee Mysteries
1. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (originally Dee Goong An) (1941-1948 translated from Chinese by Van Gulik)
2. The Chinese Maze Murders (originally written 1950, published in Japanese in 1951, published in English in 1957)
3. The Chinese Bell Murders (originally written between 1953 and 1956, published in English in 1958)
4. The Chinese Lake Murders (originally written between 1953 and 1956, published in English in 1960)
5. The Chinese Gold Murders (first published in English in 1959)
6. The Chinese Nail Murders (1961)
7. The Haunted Monastery (1961)
8. The Emperor's Pearl (1963)
9. The Lacquer Screen (1964)
10. The Red Pavilion (1964)
11. The Monkey and the Tiger, short stories (1965)
12. The Willow Pattern (book) (1965)
13. Murder in Canton (1966)
14. The Phantom of the Temple (1966)
15. Judge Dee at Work, short stories (1967)
16. Necklace and Calabash (1967)
17. Poets and Murder (1968)
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Here is a complete bibliography for the Judge Dee Mysteries novels written by Van Gulik.
Biography
Robert Hans van Gulik (髙羅佩) (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
During World War II Robert 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 seventh century during the Tang Dynasty (A. D. 600-900), though in the novel itself elements of Ming Dynasty China (A. D. 1300-1600) were mixed in.
Thanks to his translation of this largely forgotten work, van Gulik became interested in Chinese detective fiction and he decided to attempt one himself. His first attempt, The Chinese Bell Murders, was written from 1948-1950 and "borrowed" Judge Dee and his assistants from Dee Goong An.
His intent in writing this first Judge Dee novel was, as he wrote in remarks on The Chinese Bell Murders, "to show modern Chinese and Japanese writers that their own ancient crime-literature has plenty of source material for detective and mystery-stories"
Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries follow 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, 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.
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