Motivation and Influence

​In order to look at the influence ​of Robert van Gulik, let’s first talk about how he started writing his own stories. It was during World War II that he first got interested in Chinese detective stories from a book named Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee written by​ an anonymous author in Tang Dynasty. He was fascinated by the sheer amount of criminal psy​chology involved in the story compared to those in the western culture. At the same time, western detective story started to become more popular in China and vice versa. Van Gulik was disappointed by the quality of translations in the sense that they are not able to preserve the essence of the respective culture. He then started to translate Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, which proved to be a success in the western world later on.

In his translation, he listed five common problems of Chinese detective stories. First, the crimes and the intentions are stated at the beginning of the stories, which resulted in the lack of mysteries. Second, too many supernatural elements in the stories. Third, too many philosophical analyses and documentations. Fourth, too many characters and fifth, too many torture scenes. He stated that the translation is faithful but he claimed that Chinese detective stories could be more appealing to the western world if those problems could be solved.

In 1950, van Gulik finished his first short novel, in which Judge Dee is the protagonist, named The Chinese Maze Murder. The book was published in 1957 and from then to 1968, twenty three more Judge Dee stories were published. The stories were proven to be even bigger success. Van Gulik, while providing detail description of Chinese culture and ancient Chinese Law, utilized western writing techniques to make the stories more appealing to westerners. At that time, Judge Dee was so popular in the western world that he was sometimes referred to as the “Chinese Sherlock Holmes”.

Van Gulik is said to be one of ​the first and most important person introducing the Chinese culture to the western world. His Judge Dee novels were also said to be the most influential literature among all signologists.