Judge Dee Novels / Robert van Gulik

Don't judge a book by its cover - nor the reviews printed on the blurb. Going by those, this series of detective novels set in Tang China would be a painful read indeed:

• "Judge Dee... is one of those acquired tastes, like the ancient buried Chinese eggs...",


• "His cases are always as lusciously tangled as soft noodles...",


• "I never tire of this ingenious Chinese pastiche cookery...."

The novels themselves, though they may be chinoiserie, are at least sinologically informed chinoiserie. Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat to the Far East, and an amateur sinologist, writing on such subjects as the Chinese detective novel, erotica and sexual life, and the gibbon as a motif in art. The Judge Dee series began as a diversion and soon became very popular. They are based, however, on a historical personage - Di Renjie, who was a Tang magistrate and later high official, who also served under the Empress Wu Zetian. Stories about his ingenuity and integrity were long in circulation, and served as a basis for a 18th century Qing novel called Di Gong An (The Cases of Judge Dee), which van Gulik translated during the 1940s.

According to van Gulik, Di Gong An was more likely to appeal to modern readers of the genre because in some ways it isn't the typical Chinese detective novel. It is relatively short and doesn't name the culprit at the very beginning. He used the characters of Judge Dee and his lieutenants to write his own series of stories imitating the style of the original, including the cheerful anachronisms typical of later Chinese fiction. The stories, though set in the Tang, are really describing life a thousand years later in the Ming, in the details of the exam system and bureaucracy, in the food that people eat, their modes of transport, and their religious practices. Other favorite literary tropes that van Gulik appropriated include the evil monks who feature prominently in the Chinese Bell Murders, one of the earlier books in the series. Their quality, though, is somewhat uneven. The later ones tend to be shorter and pay less attention to the task of imitating the original style, but despite those minor shortcomings, they are still highly entertaining.

So, is this fan fiction? Does what van Gulik do with Judge Dee compare to what thousands of adolescents do with Edward Cullen and other fictional characters (and sometimes get sued for it)? The Judge Dee novels are certainly fan fiction - they fit all the technical criteria of the genre - but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are campy or somehow inauthentic. That anxiety about authenticity is a strikingly modern phenomenon. Recall that the original Di Gong An itself appropriated names and characters from history and literature. This is not just a characteristic of Chinese literature - even Shakespeare's plays were reworkings of his antecedents. The Judge Dee books show us what the potentials are for fan fiction broadly construed, and are real good reads in themselves.