Robert van Gulik’s The Red Pavilion

The Red Pavilion, published in 1961, is one of Robert van Gulik’s wonderful Judge Dee mysteries. It follows the usual pattern, with Judge Dee investigating three cases at the same time. And this novel includes a locked-room mystery!

Judge Dee had figured in a classic 18th-century Chinese detective novel, Dee Goong An, which van Gulik translated into English as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. The character of Judge Dee was based on a real 7th century magistrate of the Tang Dynasty. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee was a major success and van Gulik subsequently wrote a series of modern Judge Dee novels, written partly at least in conformity with the conventions of the 18th-century Chinese detective story.

The Red Pavilion opens with Judge Dee and his faithful reformed-criminal assistant Ma Joong passing through Paradise Island. Paradise Island is an entertainment resort. The entertainment comprises high-stakes gambling and high-class prostitutes. It’s all perfectly legal and while Judge Dee doesn’t personally approve he takes the sensible attitude that prostitution conducted in an orderly manner is overall a benefit to society.

There’s a festival going on and the only accommodation available is the Red Pavilion. It turns out to be most comfortable although the judge is puzzled by the fact that the interior doors haver locks on him. It is explained to him that those who rent the Red Pavilion value their privacy.

The judge encounters a young woman on his verandah. She’s hard to miss. She’s very beautiful and she’s wearing a robe so thin as to be almost transparent. At the moment the robe is wet so it’s entirely transparent and the judge notes that she is wearing nothing whatever underneath the robe. Dee is mildly annoyed until the young woman informs him that she is the current Queen Flower. The Queen Flower is selected from amongst the island’s most celebrated courtesans. It’s not jut an empty honour. It carries great social weight on an island devoted to pleasure. The reigning Queen Flower is not a person one should offend and Dee has great respect for the social conventions. After making sure that Dee has had a really good look at her near-naked body she departs but the judge notices that she seems nervous.

Dee intended to stay just one night on Paradise Island but his old friend Lo, the local magistrate, asks him to take over the investigation of a case of suicide. A young man named Lee, a newly appointed Academician, cut his throat over love for the courtesan Autumn Flower. Autumn Flower turns out to be none other than the Queen Flower Dee has already met. It’s a straightforward case. Young men kill themselves over women all the time. And Autumn Flower is an exceptionally beautiful woman well versed in the art of love so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that she could drive a man to madness and suicide. It all seems very straightforward until Dee makes a horrible discovery in the Red Pavilion. The discovery of this corpse raises serious doubts in Dee’s mind about the supposed suicide of Academician Lee.

Dee is even more concerned to learn that there have in fact been three mysterious deaths in the Red Pavilion. All appeared to be suicides, but Dee now suspects that all three were cases of murder. Dee starts to wonder about a few other things as well, such as the rapid departure of an important local official.

Dee painstakingly constructs fairy satisfactory theories to account for all three deaths, but there’s always at least one clue for which the theories do not account. Those clues simply cannot be accounted for at all. That means that Dee’s theories must be partially, or even completely, wrong.

The three murders are all related in some way but are they directly related? Is there one killer or several? Dee is not sure. And this is a Robert van Gulik Judge Dee mystery, which means it is an attempt to conform party to the conventions of the classic western puzzle-plot mystery and partly to the conventions of Chinese detective stories. The reader cannot be entirely certain that assumptions about the solution based on the conventions of western mysteries will prove to be correct.

There are both physical clues and psychological clues in abundance. Autopsies conducted on two of the victims provide Dee with headaches because they reveal things he expected and things he didn’t expect. The Red Pavilion itself provides some important but deceptive clues.

With van Gulik you also get more than just a mystery. You get some fascinating glimpses into Chinese history, culture and jurisprudence (subjects on which van Gulik was extremely knowledgeable), an occasional aside on the subject of Chinese art (on which van Gulik was an acknowledged authority) and some reflections on love, sex and marriage (and van Gulik wrote an important scholarly work on that subject as well).

In this case you certainly get an intricate plot. There are three locked-room puzzles. Two are childishly simple. The third is much trickier. This book is not really a locked-room mystery in the sense of having a locked-room puzzle as the central element. It does however serve a vital plot purpose. The plotting is quite effective with an ending that probably won’t be at all the sort of ending you’re expecting.

As always Ma Joong provides some entertainment. He falls in love with a courtesan named Silver Fairy but that gets complicated as well. In this novel love and sex make life very complicated. More fun is provided by Crab and Shrimp, two oddly likeable strong-arm men employed by the island’s warden.

This is van Gulik at the top of his game - a good mystery but a novel that offers a bit more than a straightforward mystery. Very highly recommended.

You might also want to check out TomCat’s glowing review at Beneath the Stains of Time.

Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Nail Murders

Robert van Gulik (1910-1967) was a Dutch diplomat, orientalist scholar and writer whose first literary endeavour was his translation into English of the 18th century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An. Published as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee in 1949 it was a major success. The Chinese novel had been based on the career of the famous real life magistrate and statesman of the Tang Dynasty Dee Jen-djieh (630-700). The success of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee inspired van Gulik to try his hand at a series of detective novels featuring Judge Dee. His idea was to keep as much of the flavour of traditional Chinese detective fiction as possible (such as the device of having Judge Dee working on three more or less unrelated cases simultaneously) while making his books more palatable for modern readers by largely dropping the supernatural elements.

The fifth of van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels was The Chinese Nail Murders, published in 1961. Dee has just been appointed magistrate of Pei-chow in northern China. In Imperial China the magistrate acted as a combination of judge, jury, district attorney and police detective. As usual Dee is assisted by the faithful Sergeant Hoong and his three underlings Ma Joong, Chiao Tai and Tao Gan (all reformed criminals).

And as usual Judge Dee has three cases to deal with, the most troubling being the discovery of the headless body of a woman. The woman’s husband has been accused of her murder. Judge Dee always pays close attention to the scene of a crime and he finds a number of puzzling items.

There is also the disappearance of a young woman in broad daylight. While his investigations into the first two cases are still proceeding the third case comes along, the poisoning murder of a very respected citizen. He may have left a very cryptic (and clever) dying clue.

There are some tenuous links between at least two of the cases. There’s also a minor case involving blackmail and two girls sold into prostitution which sheds unexpected light on one of the main cases. Of course it’s possible that other links between the three cases may come to light.

Judge Dee and his assistants undertake their investigations in a rigorous and logical manner. Autopsies are performed. Care is taken that crime scenes are not prematurely disturbed and the crime scenes are thoroughly searched for clues. Witnesses are interviewed. All possible leads, no matter how irrelevant they might seem, are followed up. Most importantly Judge Dee does not jump to conclusions. He is very much aware that things are not always exactly how they seem to be. In other words the novel can be seen as a kind of police procedural.

While the Dee Goong An was set in the days of the Tang Dynasty, in the seventh century, it was written a thousand years later and the historical background was a mixture of various time periods. In his Judge Dee novels van Gulik was also not overly concerned to get the historical details of the Tang period absolutely correct although he was certainly knowledgeable enough about Chinese history to have done so. He wanted to preserve the same mixture of elements of different historical eras that he had found in the Dee Goong An.

Chinese detective tales often had very strong supernatural elements, with vital evidence being provided by the testimony of ghosts. Van Gulik realised that modern readers of detective stories would be alienated by such devices but at the same time he was writing about historical periods in which the supernatural was taken for granted. In The Chinese Nail Murders Judge Dee discovers that sorcery is still practised in Pei-chow. This plays no actual rôle in the story but does add a hint of an exotic flavour. There is a kind of prologue however which contains much stronger hints of the supernatural.

Van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels were detective fiction but they were also historical fiction. There is absolutely no point in an author’s writing historical fiction unless he makes a genuine attempt to convey the differentness of the historical period he has chosen. If the characters are just 21st century characters wearing historical costumes the whole thing is a waste of time. Which is why it is no longer possible to write historical fiction. Today publishers insist that the characters must be 21st century characters with 21st century attitudes, values and social and sexual mores. In the 1950s and 1960s it was however still possible to attempt actual historical fiction and van Gulik does make a genuine attempt to convince us that we are reading about a different culture in which people really do have beliefs, values and social and sexual mores that are sharply differentiated from ours.

In The Chinese Nail Murders we encounter a system of criminal justice that is in its own way efficient and just but there are certain things that Judge Dee takes for granted that would hardly be accepted today - such as flogging uncooperative witnesses. And a key point in the novel hinges on a very dramatic difference between the Imperial Chinese legal system and modern systems (although I can’t offer you any hint as to what that difference is without revealing a vital spoiler). Judge Dee can be merciful but he can also be (to modern ways of thinking) extraordinarily severe. And even his ideas on being merciful will seem alien in many ways.

Judge Dee is a devoted family man and loves all three of his wives. He loves them in his own peculiar unsentimental way. For Dee everything comes down to duty - duty to family, to one’s ancestors and to the Imperial Government. Personal happiness is of little importance. Dee is not bothered by prostitution but he is shocked and enraged by the thought of a man having sex with his fiancée before the wedding.

Van Gulik took many of his plot elements from ancient case-books or from traditional Chinese detective stories and he very deliberately tried to emulate the style and structure of those stories although adapted to modern tastes (Chinese detective stories were usually inverted mysteries but van Gulik preferred the more conventional western method of concealing the murderer’s identity until the end and he tried to make his novels as fair-play as he could). The somewhat sparse and formal style of his novels is a conscious choice.

The Chinese Nail Murders offers much to enjoy - three clever murder plots, an exotic setting, a unique detective hero and a glimpse into a very different culture. Highly recommended.

Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Gold Murders

Robert van Gulik (1910-1967) was a Dutch diplomat who had a very successful parallel career as a writer of the Judge Dee mystery novels. His career as a mystery writer began in the late 1940s with his translation into English (under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee) of the 18th century Chinese detective novel Dee Goong An. Van Gulik felt that Judge Dee was a character with great potential and he tried his hand at writing an original Judge Dee detective novel, The Chinese Maze Murders. Many more were to follow. The third of his original Judge Dee mysteries was The Chinese Gold Murders, published in 1959.

Van Gulik wrote his novels in English. The early Judge Dee novels appeared first in Chinese and Japanese translations but it soon became apparent that the more sensible approach was to publish the English language versions first.

Van Gulik’s idea was to retain as many of the features of the traditional Chinese detective novels (or gong'an) as possible, but presented in a way that would make them more accessible to modern readers. Judge Dee always has three cases that he must solve simultaneously. There are hints of the supernatural but these are toned down considerably. (although not eliminated altogether).

The Judge Dee stories are set in the seventh century AD during the Tang dynasty but as in  the Dee Goong An much of the detail is representative of later eras.

Judge Dee is a magistrate but his duties go beyond judging cases. He is also in charge of the investigation of crimes. He’s like a judge, a District Attorney and a police officer all at once.

The Chinese Gold Murders deals with three early cases that Judge Dee deals with after his appointment as magistrate of the town of Peng-lai. The first and most urgent case is to solve the murder of his predecessor in the magistrate’s post, who was poisoned although there seems to be have been no possible way that the poisoning could have taken place. This certainly qualifies as an impossible crime story.

He also must discover the whereabouts of a missing bride, and the whereabouts of his own chief clerk, as well as solving the puzzle of the body of a dead Buddhist monk. There’s another murder as well plus there’s a man-eating tiger to worry about. Not to mention the possibility of a major smuggling ring. And what is a Korean prostitute doing in possession of official court papers?

As always Dee can rely on the services of the indefatigable Sergeant Hoong and in this novel he acquires two very useful assistants, both former highwaymen.

The idea of three mysteries running in parallel works quite well and adds a touch of realism. Unlike 20th century amateur detectives a district magistrate like Judge Dee would not have the luxury of being able to concentrate all of his attentions on a single case. There are also possible links between the three main cases.

The solutions to some of the puzzles were apparently drawn from the extensive Chinese detective literature so if the explanation for the impossible murder might seem a little far-fetched that’s not Van Gulik’s fault. And the murder method is just about plausible, and it’s certainly ingenious.

The Chinese setting is fascinating and while the details are not always authentically of the Tang Dynasty Van Gulik did have an extensive knowledge of Chinese jurisprudence so those details can be assumed to be basically correct. 

Dee’s techniques are those you expect from a western detective - common sense, observation, interviews with suspects, examinations of the scenes of the crimes, considerations of motives and logical reasoning but they’re combined with a couple of novel methods. Judge Dee is prepared to accept hints with a supernatural (or possibly supernatural) source and he’s also willing to employ torture, torture being regarded during the Imperial period in China as a perfectly legitimate means of obtaining information. Torture was also considered to be essential for procuring a confession, it being impossible to convict someone of a crime without a confession.

The idea of a fair-play mystery was of course quite unknown in traditional Chinese detective fiction. Since that’s the feel Van Gulik is aiming for it’s hardly reasonable to complain if the story does not conform to more modern notions of fair play.

The Chinese Gold Murders is wonderfully entertaining. Highly recommended.