The Chinese Lake Murders

The Mugar Memorial Library in Harvard University in Boston houses the Robert van Gulik Collection. This documentation centre, whose goal is to gather bibliographical information about internationally famous authors and poets and to make this accessible for research, contains biographical records, original manuscripts and personal notes which writers themselves have presented to the library for this exact purpose. One of the archive boxes contains an account Robert van Gulik wrote about of his Judge Dee crime novels, usually known in English as the Judge Dee mysteries. He recounts how he came to write these crime novels, how the stories were constructed, the circumstances under which the various volumes were written and most interesting of all: his personal thoughts about particular titles. The collection in Boston, which is accessible to everybody, is a rich source of information about the writer, his life and his Judge Dee crime series.

Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) was born in Zutphen and studied Chinese at Leiden University. After he had obtained his doctorate in Utrecht on the horse cult in China and Japan at the age of twenty-four, he was accepted for diplomatic service with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague. With the prospect of a diplomatic career before him, on 3 May 1935 he left to take up his first posting in the Dutch embassy in Tokyo. In Tokyo, his fluency in Japanese enabled his to establish contact with prominent Japanese and he was able to obtain important information which was a closed book to most Western diplomats. He dispatched valuable reports to The Hague about the political situation in Japan and China in the tense years before the outbreak of the Second World War, and these earned him the status of Far Eastern expert.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor marked the outbreak of the Second World War in the Far East. After war was declared on Japan, the allied embassies were evacuated and the Western representatives exchanged. All diplomats had to leave and were embarked on the steamship the Tatsuta Maru which was lying ready to board in the harbour of Yokohama. They were permitted to take just one single suitcase. Robert van Gulik grabbed a few small Chinese books from his study and stuffed them into his bag. One of these small books was an eighteenth- century crime novel in which the detective, the legendary Chinese Judge Dee (Di Renjie), solves three murder cases. The intertwining stories describe how the master detective, who lived during the Tang dynasty (618–908), finds the solution to three complicated murders, assisted by his staff who help him carry out the criminal investigation. Robert van Gulik, himself a great fan of detective novels, translated this original Chinese crime novel into English (see Dee Goong An, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee). The purpose of his translation was to show the West that China had its own detective genre and its own Maigret or Sherlock Holmes, complete with his Watson.

Encouraged by the many enthusiastic reactions his translation elicited, Robert van Gulik brought the master detective of the Tang dynasty back to life in the Judge Dee crime novels he wrote himself. He set these stories in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644); a period in which the artistic and cultural life in China attained great heights. This setting gave Van Gulik more possibilities to create the background to his stories and he drew his own illustrations in the Ming style. In his Judge Dee mysteries he combined his extensive knowledge of ancient Chinese culture and society with an ingenious plot in an authentic Chinese atmosphere.

As can be read in his notes in the Mugar Memorial Library, Robert van Gulik wrote his first version of The Chinese Lake Murders in 1952, when he was attached to the Dutch embassy in New Delhi as counsellor. As he had done with nearly all his Judge Dee novels, he also wrote this one in English. The Englishman Hilary Waddington, one of Van Gulik’s good friends who worked for the Indian Archaeological Service, was also a great lover of detective novels and he read The Chinese Lake Murders as it was being written. He was the one who drew a flower boat and its layout for this book, the only drawings in all of the Judge Dee novels which are not the work of the author. When he had finished it, Van Gulik still felt rather dissatisfied with the book and put the manuscript away. It was 1957 before he looked at it again when his publisher in London was asking him for the next Judge Dee novel after the success of The Chinese Bell Murders and The Chinese Maze Murders. By that time Van Gulik had been appointed Dutch ambassador in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, stationed in Beirut. There he rewrote the manuscript completely. Although he thought this book better than either The Chinese Bell murders or The Chinese Maze Murders, he still considered it too long and the plot too complicated. He was planning to rewrite the novel again in a less complicated form but this never happened, not least because the readers thought highly of the book as it was. After The Chinese Lake Murders, Robert van Gulik wrote The Chinese Nail Murders, his fifth Judge Dee novel which was published in 1960. He also wrote this book in the style of a traditional Chinese crime novel, peopled with a large number of characters. In the novels which followed he used a new formula with fewer characters and covering a shorter period of time. The idea was to make them less complicated for the reader.

In the original Chinese crime novel, Judge Dee was assisted by a number of helpers who aided him in his investigations. Robert van Gulik created two assistants: the rough-and-ready Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, former outlaws who while still ‘brothers of the green wood’ had tried to rob Judge Dee on his way to his first post as district magistrate in Peng-lai. However, they failed to get the upper hand over Judge Dee, an accomplished swordsman, and they were so impressed by his authority and fighting skills, they offered to work for him (see The Chinese Gold Murders). Judge Dee could do with a couple of sturdy men to do the investigative work and he appointed them to serve him in the court. Ever since his youth, Sergeant Hoong, an old friend of the Dee family, had been his trusted advisor. In The Chinese Lake Murders Tao Gan joined the company. He had been a professional swindler who was well versed in all the twists and turns of the underworld and could pick any lock. After Judge Dee had rescued him from a nasty predicament, Tao Gan offered Judge Dee his services. This team of assistants remained loyal to Judge Dee for the rest of his career, accompanying him whenever he was transferred from one provincial capital to another.

In Chapter 9 of The Chinese Lake Murders, Judge Dee visits one of the prominent members of the city of Han Yuan, Han Yung-han, who is a suspect in the mystery of the drowned dancer. Han receives Judge Dee lying among silken cushions on an ebony daybed inlaid with mother of pearl. My father had an antique Chinese daybed precisely like this, inset with marble panels. The bed was so large that we could all sit on it together. It stood in his study in the ambassador’s residence in Tokyo; it was too big for his study in The Hague or Kuala Lumpur. We have a photo of my father sitting on that bed with his friend Leonard Huizinga who was a Dutch writer, talking and probably trying to find some inspiration for the next book or article.

Robert van Gulik would not have been a true sinologist if he had not given a meticulous explanation of various matters which occur in the stories in his Postscripts. He borrowed the idea of the flower boat as a crime site, even a place where a murder might be committed mentioned above, from one of the murder cases in an original source in old Chinese crime literature. I once received a letter from a reader advising that, in the next edition of The Chinese Lake Murders, the words Chinese chess should be replaced by the word ‘go’. All I had to do was to direct him to the Postscript in which there is a meticulous explanation of how the chess game played in China was imported into Japan in the eighth century and there it has continued to flourish under the name ‘go’. Be that as it may, in the chess problem shown in the illustration in chapter 5, Judge Dee finds the solution to the mystery of Han-yuan.