Poets and Murder

Robert van Gulik (1910–1967), who was born in Zutphen, studied Sinology in Leiden. After obtaining his doctorate in Utrecht with a thesis about Hayagrīva — a horse-headed deity in Tantric Buddhism in China and Japan — at the age of twenty-four, he was accepted into foreign service by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. With a diplomatic career beckoning before him, he left to take up his first post in the Dutch embassy in Tokyo on 3 May 1935. He took what at that time was the shortest route: by train on the Trans-Siberian railway through the Soviet Union, Manchuria and Korea, where he took a boat to Japan.

The day before he left, he said good-bye to a good friend, the twelve-year older poet Jan Slauerhoff*. Both were fascinated by Asia and by Chinese culture. Robert van Gulik had learned to speak and write Oriental languages and gave Slauerhoff Chinese lessons in Leiden. Both published in the magazine China: Robert van Gulik wrote articles about the poems he had translated from the Chinese and about Chinese literature; Slauerhoff had placed ‘The Island of Spring’ about Amoy and a number of poems from his anthology Oost-Azië (East Asia) in it. Robert van Gulik used to dine with Slauerhoff and his wife in the restaurant Zomerzorg in Leiden. They would play chess, talk about Chinese literature and read each other’s poetry. The seven-string Chinese lute features in the works of both men: in Slauerhoff’s The Island of Spring and in Van Gulik’s article De wijze der vijf wilgen (The sage of the five willows) (China, volume 1933). Not bad, ‘Slau’ is supposed to have said when he read Van Gulik’s verse, but enough of the roses and silk and all that melodious and perfumed business. Reality, even the dream, is much harsher. Although they solemnly promised to meet each other again in China or Japan, this did not happen. A year later, in 1936, Robert van Gulik received the news in Tokyo that his friend and kindred spirit, Jan Slauerhoff, had died.

In Poets and Murder (published in the United States as The Fox-magic Murders), the master detective Judge Dee comes into contact with a number of famous poets: the court poet Chang, a highly placed official at the imperial court and the notorious courtesan Yoo-lan, famous for her explicit poems. His colleague Magistrate Lo of the district of Chin-hwa, in which Judge Dee is a guest in this story, also considers himself a talented poet. Then there is also the monk Lo, who writes down his two-line poems in beautiful calligraphy, preferably in ink on a white sheet, using a broom for his brush. While this illustrious company heap praises on each other’s poems, two brutal murders are committed in Chin-hwa. A whodunit in which power, passion and faded glory seethe between the lines of verse.

Judge Dee (Di Renjie) was a historical Chinese magistrate who lived during the Tang dynasty (618–908). Robert van Gulik, himself a great devotee of detective novels, found a small book by an eighteenth-century Chinese author about this famous judge and the murder cases he solved. 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 traditional Chinese crime novel. By publishing about the original Judge Dee, Robert van Gulik wanted to show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes, complete with his Watson. The historical Judge Dee was a magistrate of a district, the smallest unit in the ancient Chinese administrative system. Besides being judge, he was also mayor and chief of police in charge of running a criminal investigation.

Judge Dee was also Robert van Gulik’s hero because a few years later, encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions his translation received, he brought the master detective of the Tang back to life in the Judge Dee novels he wrote himself. He placed his stories in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), one of the periods of the great florescence of Chinese culture. Although the historical Judge Dee had lived almost a thousand years earlier, the Ming period allowed the writer more freedom in his choice of the settings for his stories. He also drew the illustrations in the original Chinese Ming dynasty style. In his Judge Dee mysteries, he combined his profound knowledge of ancient Chinese culture and society with an ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere.

Robert van Gulik wrote Poets and Murder in 1967 in Tokyo, where he had been appointed Dutch ambassador in 1965. This embassy in which he began his diplomatic career in 1935 was also his last post as he died in 1967 while on sick leave in The Hague. In the time in between he had worked in Africa, China, the United States, India, the Middle East, Malaysia and Korea, interspersed with periods spent in The Hague during which he fulfilled various functions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Besides his work as a diplomat, he continued his studies as a sinologist and wrote academic books on the most original subjects. In his research he came across facts and events which gave him inspiration for his Judge Dee novels or could even present him with plots he could use. In his postscript to Poets and Murder, he mentions that he had based the poetess Yoo-lan on a famous poetess and courtesan Yü Hsüan-chi who, just as Judge Dee himself, lived during the Tang dynasty. She had been condemned to death after she had beaten a maidservant to death. The whole story of this famous poetess can be found in his standard work about sexual life in old China (Sexual Life in Ancient China, Leiden, 1961); see also my introduction to The Chinese Maze Murders). Hence his work as diplomat in the Far East, his sinological research and the writing of his Judge Dee novels form a creative whole.

The writing of his Judge Dee novels was a form of recreation for my father, but he also had no trouble amusing himself at home, whether that was an ambassador’s residence in a distant country or in our house in The Hague. He paid a great deal of attention to our household pets, from hedgehogs to monkeys, among whom the gibbon occupied a special place (see my introduction to Judge Dee at Work). We always had a billiard-table at home on which he taught me the game and in his study, he played his seven-stringed Ming lute regularly. At that time we still had a Philips gramophone cabinet with valves which had to warm up after being switched on before any sound came forth. He used to play his favourite music on it: Caribbean calypso records, American numbers and French chansons. The song L’âme des poètes (The soul of poets) sung by the French singer Juliette Gréco inspired him to write the story of Poets and Murder: ‘Long after poets have disappeared, their songs murmur ever on in the streets’… Perhaps he also heard the verses of his old friend Jan Slauerhoff in them.

Poets and Murder was Robert van Gulik’s last Judge Dee novel. He finished the manuscript during his sick-leave in The Hague, in his room in the Red Cross Hospital. He had been given a two-bed room, which he arranged as a study. As his own death approached, in the story he has the Buddhist monk Loo write a two-verse poem in his magnificent calligraphy in the company of the other illustrious poets:

We shall return where we came from:
Where the flame went of the doused candle.