BOOK: "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee"

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Robert van Gulik. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.* (First ed.: privately printed in Tokyo, 1949.) 0486233375. xxiii + 237 pp.

[*Obviously my copy is from a later printing, but it doesn't indicate the year anywhere. I bought it in 2008 and it was new then. The RRP on the back cover is $8.95; as of this writing, in 2024, the price on Dover's website is $17.95. Ouch!]

I cannot claim to be a huge reader in the genre of detective stories, but I have read, and enjoyed, Poe's stories about Dupin and Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes, several times in fact, and I also listened to a lot of audiobooks of Agatha Christie's stories about Poirot; and I was vaguely aware that Poe's Dupin stories, from the first half of the 19th century, were pretty much the beginning of the detective story as a genre. So naturally, I was greatly intrigued when, years ago on a book fair, I came across a book subtitled “An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel”. It turns out that, while Poe's stories may have been the first detective fiction in the West, something very much resembling detective stories and novels had existed in China several centuries earlier than that (p. iii). I bought the book right away, but only got around to reading it now.

As it turns out, the book has very many excellent features — and one or two horrible downsides, but we'll get to these in due course. The translator, Robert van Gulik, was evidently both an excellent Sinologist and a keen connoisseur of crime fiction, both Western and Chinese, and he provided the book with a very interesting introduction and an appendix with some notes; he introduces us to Chinese detective stories, points out a few ways in which they differ from Western ones, and explains the minor adjustments he made in the process of translating the present work to make it more accessible to Western readers. Many of these novels are very long, have a confusingly large cast of characters, reveal the criminals up front, and feature prominent supernatural elements — characteristics which the Chinese audiences expect and like, but which Western ones wouldn't; van Gulik chose to translate the present novel precisely because it is one of the few without these downsides (p. v).

The protagonist of the Chinese detective novel isn't exactly a detective as we would understand the term now, but the “district magistrate”, an imperial official in charge of an area typically consisting of “one fairly large walled city, and all the countryisde around it, say for sixty or seventy miles” (p. ix). When people reported crimes or brought lawsuits before him, it was his job to act as investigator, prosecutor and judge, all in one person; so he has a wider range of things to do than the Western detective, and we get to see him do all these things in the present novel as well. The Chinese readers expected to see the criminals not only discovered, but also tried and executed, the more gruesomely the better.

Judge Dee was a real person, a prominent official at the Imperial Court in the 8th century (p. xiii); but the present novel, written in the 18th century, shows Dee in his early days as a district magistrate. Apparently, although the author didn't go out of his way to avoid anachronisms, there were very few of them anyway since the Chinese law and administration had changed so little in the intervening thousand years (p. xx); moreover, the translator removed one or two more blatant anachronisms, such as the occasional use of firearms (p. 229).

Dee solves three cases in this novel, but they aren't presented as three separate stories; the second case opens up while he's still working on the first, and the third case intervenes later (but is solved quickly). I rather liked this idea, though it made it slightly harder to keep track of what is going on and which character belongs where. There is a pleasing variety in the cast of characters: one case involves travelling silk-merchants, one involves gentry and one mostly involves relatively poor town-dwellers. And moreover, there is also a pleasing variety in the contents of the cases. One isn't a criminal case at all, but turns out to be a combination of a unfortunate accident and of suspicions which prove to be unfounded; one is a fairly straightforward murder case, but the problem is how to find the murderer and prove his guilt; and one is a case that Dee discovers purely by coincidence, and only gradually does it turn out that a crime has been committed at all.

Dee has several assistants whom he occasionally sends out to gather information, watch suspects and so on, but they are mostly just the muscle* while he is the brains of the operation. Sometimes he travels around in the pursuit of his investigations, either in his official capacity as the magistrate or in various disguises; sometimes he conducts hearings and interrogations in his own tribunal. Supernatural elements, which are apparently common in Chinese detective stories, fortunately have a fairly minimal presence here; on one or two occasions, Dee receives hints from ghosts and dreams, but they are mostly very vague hints, some of which he only comes to understand after he has solved the case by conventional means. Apparently it is also common in this genre for the criminal's spirit to find itself in the underworld, judged by a tribunal of infernal demons, but the present novel features a nice inversion of this trope: there is a scene like that, but it turns out to be just Dee and his assistants wearing masks and costumes, trying to trick a suspect into making a confession (and it works).

[*Occasionally we even get ‘action scenes’ in which these characters practice some sort of boxing or martial art. Evidently this art had a rich vocabulary of technical terms for every possible move, and the author loves to deploy them to construct a sort of detailed step-by-step account of the fight: “a tiger clawing at a sheep”, “enticing the tiger out of his forest”, etc. (pp. 104–5). I suppose the original readership of these novels must have relished this sort of thing; I for one was simply glad that in the present novel such scenes are short and few in number.]

So, as far as detective work is concerned, this was all pretty neat and interesting and made for an enjoyable read. But now we come to the downsides. In the Western detective fiction I've read so far — which, as I have already admitted, is fairy limited — the detective isn't really a very powerful figure; he relies on his wits, not on having a position of power over other people. You don't generally see Holmes or Poirot yelling at people, and you certainly don't see them having people flogged and tortured. But for an ancient Chinese district magistrate like Dee, that is a routine part of his work. Unless some higher-ranking imperial official comes for a visit, Dee is the most important person in his district. People who appear in his court are on their knees all the time, knocking their heads against the floor and referring to themselves as ‘this insignificant person’ when talking to him. He can, and does, have them tortured to extract information or confessions from them.

Now, to be sure, you could advance many extenuating circumstances on Dee's behalf. He lived in the 8th century. If you were to set such a story at the same time anywhere west of China — say in the Frankish Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Caliphate — I daresay the tortures would have been just as bad and just as easily forthcoming, possibly more. We even see a scene where Dee is urged to torture a suspect but refuses to do so because there is no evidence against him, only mere suspicions (p. 159). Moreover, Dee is labouring under a supremely idiotic constraint which is not his fault: “it is one of the fundamental principles of the Chinese Penal Code that no one can be sentenced unless he has confesed to the crime” (p. xviii) — of course torture is rife in such a system, otherwise why would anybody ever bother confessing? How could anybody ever have thought that having such a principle in your legal system is a good idea? I suspect that people who came up with it didn't really care about justice in the sense of finding out who was actually guilty, punishing him and avoiding harming the innocent; probably to people who designed this system, it was enough if for each crime, someone — anyone — was found who could be made to confess to it, and who would then get punished for it; a surface appearance of justice was thereby maintained, so that people wouldn't complain too much about crimes not getting investigated and punished, and for this purpose it didn't matter if they got the right person or not.

The translator, in his introduction, tries to point out various factors that, at least in theory, worked to discourage magistrates like Dee from abusing their powers too much (pp. xx–xxiii); and he quotes this opinion of a British official: “As regards then the criminal law of the Chinese, although the allowance of torture in the examination of prisoners is a blot which cannot be overlooked, although the punishment for treason and parricide is monstrous, and the punishment of the wooden collar or portable pillory is not to be defended, yet the Code—when its procedure is understood—is infinitely more exact and satisfactory than our own system, and very far from being the barbarous cruel abomination it is generally supposed to be”.

Well, I don't know. To my mind all this sounds a little bit too much like ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’ Sure, if you disregard the torture and the inhumane punishments and the vast potential for abuse in the hands of corrupt officials — if you disregard all that, it was probably a fine system. But all that was actually a routine part of the system, so... it *was* a barbarous cruel abomination. The most that can be said for it is that Western systems were also barbarous cruel abominations until a comparatively recent time.

As far as I'm concerned, this aspect of the novel prevented me from enjoying it. I can be intrigued by a detective as he uses his wit and logical skill to solve a puzzling case; I might even admire him if, at the end, he gathers everyone into a room and explains how he did it. But for the judge, who acts as if he were better than other people, who demands deference from them, who presumes to pass judgment on them — for him I can have nothing but the liveliest contempt. They have a very easy job with all these powers vested in them. If they wanted me to respect them, they'd have to lay down all their powers *and then try to accomplish anything* — that would impress me, to do something when you have no power over people; but the way it is now, they should only be despised.

The fact that the criminals in this novel suffer tortures and execution also caused me to transfer all my sympathy to them and away from the victims. Sure, the fact that Shao killed one of his fellow silk-merchants and also a random passer-by who might otherwise have become a witness isn't exactly commendable; but the very essence of a merchant's work is to screw people out of their money; from that to murdering them for their bales of silk is but a small step; we allow them to do the former, so why not also the latter?

And sure, the fact that Mrs. Djou killed her husband in the hopes of subsequently marrying her lover isn't exactly commendable either — and yet I can't really find it in me to object to it all that much. He's long dead and buried, so what good can punishing her now possibly accomplish? Besides, it's not her fault that divorce isn't easily available in ancient China. The same applies a fortiori to Hsu, her lover, who doesn't seem to have been guilty of anything more than adultery.

It would be easier to sympathize with the victims if we had got to know them first; but in this novel we never get to know them as individuals, we only hear about them once they are already dead, and so it is easy to write them off without feeling sorry for them. I lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of the author; there are eight billion people in the world, and I cannot care very much if a random stranger gets murdered; Mrs. Djou is a human being whose sufferings and death I have many reasons to care about, but her late husband and victim, Bee Hsun, is just a name to us, and we have no reason to care if he lives or dies.

So to me, this novel felt like a tasty dish sprinkled with broken glass. Theoretically, there's still a tasty dish in there somewhere, but practically it's ruined beyond repair. Perhaps other readers, if they are able to ignore Dee's judicial violence better than me, will enjoy the book better than I did. In any case, this doesn't change my admiration for the translator, who did an excellent job of making the book as accessible as possible even to a reader like me, who knows next to nothing about China, its administration, its legal system and the like.

ToRead:

• Robert van Gulik, the translator of the present volume, went on to write a series of some sixteen volumes of ‘Chinese detective stories’ of his own, with Judge Dee as the protagonist. I don't know if they manage to avoid torture and execution scenes or not; but if they do, they sound like they should make for quite enjoyable reading.