Dr. R. H. van Gulik
POSTSCRIPT 2
It seemed superfluous to repeat here the description of ancient Chinese administration of justice printed in the Postscripts of the four previously published Judge Dee novels. Instead I add a few general remarks on those novels, thereby also supplying the answers to a few questions some readers addressed to me.
My interest in Chinese crime literature was aroused 'only after I had already been engaged for more than fifteen years in the study of Chinese language and history, namely when in 1940 I came upon an anonymous Chinese detective novel of the eighteenth century.* (* I am proud to share the credit for having discovered the merits of old Chinese detective novels with so eminent an expert on crime literature as Vincent Starrett. That excellent storyteller became interested in the subject during his sojourn in China, and wrote the delightful essay "Some Chinese Detective Stories," found in his Bookman's Holiday, the Private Satisfactions of an Incurable Collector, published in 1942 by Random House, New York.) Since this book seemed to me of unusual interest, I prepared an English translation, which was publishd in 1949 in Tokyo under the title Dee Goong An. In my annotations I gave a list of books on Chinese crime literature and added: "It might be an interesting experiment if one of our modern writers of detective stories would try his hand at composing an ancient Chinese detective story himself. The pattern is given in the novel translated here, while in the books listed above one will find a rich variety of peculiarly Chinese plots" (page 231). When I noticed that the book market in China and Japan was flooded with bad translations of third-rate Western thrillers, I resolved to conduct the above-mentioned experiment myself, and mainly to prove to Oriental readers how rich their own ancient crime literature is in source material for modern detective stories. I had no previous experience in writing fiction, but I thought that if I relied heavily on my Chinese reading of past years and kept closely to the Chinese traditional pattern, it was worth trying. Thus in 1950 I wrote in Tokyo The Chinese Bell Murders, and later that year The Chinese Maze Murders. Originally I had not intended to publish these two novels in English, my English manuscript was only a working draft to be used for a published version in Chinese and Japanese. Thereafter, when Western friends showed interest in this new type of detective novel, I had The Chinese Maze Murders published in English, as another experiment (first printed in 1956, in Holland; published in England). The success of that novel then led to the writing of three more, meant for both Oriental and Western readers. These were The Chinese Lake Murders, completed in 1952 in New Delhi; The Chinese Nail Murders, written in 1956 in Beirut, and The Chinese Gold Murders, written in 1958 in Beirut, in order to provide the series with a suitable opening volume. Although the five novels were written in the order mentioned, in the Judge Dee chronology—which is of course wholly fictitious—the right sequence in which they should be read is Gold-Lake-Bell-Maze-Nail Murders.
Although the actual writing of each novel was completed in six weeks or so, the preliminary work took considerably longer. Yet the laying of the groundwork afforded me as much pleasure as the writing itself, especially since this task could be performed piecemeal, as a welcome relaxation in between often exacting official duties. First I had to locate in old Chinese sources some plots suitable for being woven together into one longer novel about Judge Dee. Sometimes I found a plot complete in all details in ancient Chinese crime literature, at other times the main idea was suggested by only a few lines in a criminological or medical book, or by a brief anecdote in some other book or essay. In The Chinese Bell Murders all three plots are derived from Chinese sources, but in the four other novels I myself had to supply a considerable part of the intrigue, as will come to light if one consults the references to the sources listed in the Postscripts.
I chose Judge Dee as the central figure because we know much more about him than about other famous master detectives of China's past. The historical records are especially explicit on Judge Dee's career at the Imperial Court, and the detailed description of his achievements in that second phase of his life enables us to form a clearly delineated picture of the kind of man he was. He figures largely in Lin Yutang's recent historical novel, Lady Wu, a True Story (London 1959), where he is called "the greatest man of his generation." I here reproduce a portrait of "Judge Dee" when he was about 68 years old, wearing the full Court dress of a Minister of State; in his right hand he carries an ivory tablet, symbol of his rank. The portrait is taken from the block-print entitled Ku-chin-sheng-hsien-t'u-k'ao, a collection of pictures of famous people, published in 1830 by the scholar Ku Yuan, who utilized portraits in ancestral temples and similar ancient material.
As regards his four lieutenants, Sergeant Hoong, Ma Joong, Chiao Tai and Tao Gan, I adopted the names and main characteristics of this— entirely fictitious—quartet as I found them ready-made in the novel Dee Goong An mentioned above, but I elaborated their personalities according to my own fancy. For the other persons to be assigned a part in my stories I could pick and choose from the nearly unlimited variety of types described in Chinese historical records, and old novels and short stories.
After the plots and the persons concerned in them had been chosen, I had then to create a suitable geographical background. The place of action of each novel had to be a town-district somewhere in China and in particular the tribunal of that town, in old Chinese novels invariably the scene of all more important developments. I order to reduce the unavoidable repetition to a minimum, I purposely made each novel deal with Judge Dee's first few months on a new post. That gave me occasion to create each time an entirely different milieu as background.
Before elaborating this background, I first drew a sketch map of an imaginary town, an engaging task that often suggested new ideas for further developing the plot. Every old Chinese town had approximately the same landmarks: in the first place, of course, the tribunal, then the Temple of Confucius, the Temple of the War God, the Drum Tower, etc. The rest of the city one can design according to one's fancy, incorporating special features of towns actually visited or lived in. These maps, drawn in the traditional Chinese semipictorial manner, are found on the endpapers of each novel.
The last phase of the preliminary work was to draw up a timetable, divided in as many days as the action occupies, and each day subdivided into morning, afternoon and evening. In the novels there is little mention of dates and hours, because the ancient Chinese did not live by the clock as modern life compels us to do. But I needed a timetable for my own reference, so as to know where all my people were at a given moment, and what mischief they were up to there.
All this preliminary work having been completed, I could at last start to write. With plots, persons and places ready, the actual writing proceeded comparatively smoothly, all kinds of odds and ends coming to mind and finding their appropriate place. An apt retort quoted in an old novel, a joke exchanged between ricksha coolies, a striking pronouncement in a philosophical text, scraps of conversation overheard in a tea house—all such tidbits came as grist to my mill. The greatest difficulty was to prevent my characters from getting out of hand. I often became so engrossed in a certain character that I was tempted to let him or her engage in all kinds of activities that had no direct or indirect bearing on the plot—and such are out of place in a detective novel.