The Chinese Nail Murders

At the end of July 2011, it was announced that the 2022 Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing. Part of the games, the mountain sports, will take place in the provinces of Yangqing and Zhangiakou, 75 to 150 kilometres northwest of the city of Beijing. The 6,000 kilometre long Chinese Wall, built in the time of the imperial dynasties to protect the country from the nomadic people north of the Chinese border, snakes its way through this area. During the Tang dynasty, the time in which the historical Judge Dee (630–700) lived, a section of the wall already ran through this part of the world. Pei-chow was an imaginary city not far from the area over which the Tartars ruled, posing a persistent threat to the northern border of China. The Chinese Nail Murders is the only novel which is set in the snowy landscape of north-western China.

The Chinese Nail Murders is the fifth Judge Dee detective novel Robert van Gulik wrote. After Judge Dee’s term of office as magistrate in Lan-fang was completed, he was transferred to Pei-chow. As magistrate he was in charge of a district, the smallest administrative unit in the ancient Chinese administrative system. Besides carrying out his duties as judge, he was also the mayor and the chief of police who was responsible for investigating crimes. It was crucial that the position of district magistrate should not become entangled with local political or commercial interests. Therefore, in the immense bureaucratic system of the Chinese empire the district magistrate was replaced every three years. During his term of office, the district magistrate was checked on by agents of the Metropolitan Court in the capital Peking (Beijing) who mingled incognito with the people. They reported on how the magistrate carried out his duties and could advise him to improve his administration or even dismiss him. This is what happens in The Chinese Nail Murders when Judge Dee does not seem to have got a grip on the local disturbances in Pei-chow and it was announced that troops would be dispatched to garrison his district. The reason for this move was to ensure the barbarian hordes in the north would not get the chance to exploit a weak point on the border of the empire.

As a Dutch diplomat in the foreign service, Robert van Gulik served the same cycles of official employment as the judge. He was posted for three-year terms to Japan, Africa, China, the United States, India, the Middle East, Malaysia and Korea. As was and is the custom, these foreign postings were interspersed with periods spent at the home-office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (this diverged from Judge Dee’s pattern. It is meant for staff to remain in tune with The Hague). After his study of Sinology in Leiden and obtaining his doctorate in Utrecht on Hayagrīva, a horse-headed deity in Tantric Buddhism in China and Japan, at the age of twenty-four he was accepted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As an expert on the Far East, he left to take up his first post in the Dutch embassy in Tokyo in May 1935. This was where he stumbled across Judge Dee.

Judge Dee was a legendary Chinese judge who lived in the Tang dynasty (618–908). Robert van Gulik, who was himself a great lover of detective novels, found a small book about this famous judge and the cases he had solved written by an eighteenth-century author. He translated the book into English and wrote an introduction in which he explains the centuries-old Chinese legal system and gives a description of the Chinese crime novel. Robert van Gulik’s purpose in publishing this book about the original Judge Dee was to show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret and Sherlock Holmes.

Encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions which greeted his translation, Robert van Gulik came up with the idea of continuing the adventures of the astute Judge Dee. In the Judge Dee crime novels he wrote himself, he breathed new life into the master detective of the Tang dynasty. In these books he allows the reader to share his profound knowledge of Chinese culture and his experiences in the Far East. An ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere, written according to the rules of the Western detective novel, ensured the success of the Judge Dee series. The books have now been translated into twenty-nine languages throughout the world, including Chinese.

I spent part of my youth with Judge Dee. My father wrote The Chinese Nail Murders in the summer of 1958 when he was Dutch ambassador to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and was en poste in Beirut. He was married to my mother Shih-fang Shui, the daughter of a Chinese diplomat who had served at the Chinese embassies in Paris, Berlin and Leningrad under the last imperial dynasty (see the introduction to The Phantom of the Temple). It is said that my grandfather was the last Chinese mandarin. In Beirut we lived in the former palace of the Turkish governor of Lebanon, surrounded by a luxuriant garden in which I and the son of our Lebanese neighbour built huts.

Lebanon is a beautiful country. On one side is Beirut on the Mediterranean and on the other the snow-clad peaks of the high mountains. In the winter we often went up into the mountains: I remember beautiful forests of cedars, their branches bowed down under the weight of the snow. An inspiring snowy landscape which formed the background for The Chinese Nail Murders with Judge Dee and his faithful assistants Ma Joong, Chiao Tai and Tao Gan in padded jackets, on horses whose breath came out in clouds.

As did Judge Dee, in his professional life my father set great store by protocol and its observance. For official visits, he would be driven to his destination in his black Ford, which as protocol dictated flew the Dutch flag on the left front side of the bonnet. At that time Beirut was torn apart by a civil war between Christians and Muslims. The red-white- and blue flag was mistaken for the French tricolour and because of the anti-French sentiments after the Suez Crisis in 1956 the car was held up at roadblocks. Stones were often thrown at it. My father solved the problem by designing an orange flag on which the famous Dutch lion was embroidered in silver thread.

The situation in Beirut grew steadily grimmer and after one of its employes of the embassy was shot in his leg, the embassy was moved temporarily to the well-protected Hotel St. George in Beirut. This hotel was situated on the beach and we knew it from lunches there and swimming in the sea in happier times. I have a photo of my father with a pistol stuck into his belt posing with his staff in the improvised office space in the hotel. We were sent with our mother to a house in the mountains and my father remained in Beirut. In his study at home he had hung up wires to indicate in which corner of the room you would be safe from any bullets which might happen to stray in through the window. During these tense time he wrote The Chinese Nail murders and something of this menacing atmosphere penetrates the court room in which Judge Dee has his suspects harshly dealt with.

Robert van Gulik planned to end his Judge Dee detective series with this the fifth book, The Chinese Nail Murders. In this story one of Judge Dee’s faithful servants loses his life and by imperial decree Judge Dee himself is promoted to President of the Metropolitan Court in the capital, a highly esteemed position. This would indeed have been a good finale to the series were it not that his publishers in London and The Hague wanted a continuation of the successful books. So he did continue writing Judge Dee novels but changed the formula by reducing the number of characters and setting the story within a shorter time frame. After a number of books, however, he decided that Murder in Canton would be his last novel, but once again kept on writing because his readers asked him to. In the end, sixteen titles appeared in the Judge Dee detective series.

Because of his telling descriptions of the characters and their motives, I think that The Chinese Nail Murders is the most poignant Judge Dee novel by Robert van Gulik. He poured his soul into the story because he thought it would be his last Judge Dee mystery. Female readers had asked him why Judge Dee never showed a warmer side to his character. In The Chinese Nail Murders Van Gulik acquiesces in their request, by allowing Judge Dee, who had three wives, to nurture deeper feelings for a woman whom he happens to meet. In The Chinese Nail Murders, set against the background of a gruesome murder, you discover the significance of the red blossoms of the winter plum tree, which flutter slowly down and come to rest as red spots on the white snow.