Judge Dee
The author, having finished the translation of the story
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee around 1948, included an essay on the largely forgotten
genre of Chinese detective stories. He suggested in his afterword that it was easy to imagine re-writing some of the old Chinese case histories with an eye towards
modern readers. Not long after he published
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, van Gulik himself tried his hand at creating a detective story based on some older Chinese case histories. This became the book The Chinese Maze Murders (completed around 1950). As van Gulik thought the story would have more interest to Japanese and Chinese readers, he had it translated into Japanese by a friend (finished in 1951) and it was sold in Japan under the title "Meiro-no-satsujin". With the success of the book, van Gulik embarked on translating the book into Chinese. The translation was published by a Singapore book publisher in 1953. The reviews were good and van Gulik wrote two more books (
The Chinese Bell Murders and
The Chinese Lake Murders) over the next few years, also with an eye towards Japanese and then Chinese editions.
After all this work was done, van Gulik found a publisher for English language versions of these stories and the first English language book was published in 1957. Later books were written and published in English first, the translations came afterwards.
The Judge Dee Mysteries in the order in which they were written
- Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (originally Dee Goong An) (1941-1948 translated from Chinese by Van Gulik)
- The Chinese Maze Murders (originally written 1950, published in Japanese in 1951, published in English in 1957)
- The Chinese Bell Murders (originally written between 1953 and 1956, published in English in 1958)
- The Chinese Lake Murders (originally written between 1953 and 1956, published in English in 1960)
- The Chinese Gold Murders (first published in English in 1959)
- The Chinese Nail Murders (1961)
- The Haunted Monastery (1961)
- The Emperor's Pearl (1963)
- The Lacquer Screen (1964)
- The Red Pavilion (1964)
- The Monkey and the Tiger, short stories (1965)
- The Willow Pattern (1965)
- Murder in Canton (1966)
- The Phantom of the Temple (1966)
- Judge Dee at Work, short stories (1967)
- Necklace and Calabash (1967)
- Poets and Murder (1968)
The Judge Dee Stories in the order in which they were set
Judge Dee at Work contains a "Judge Dee Chronology" telling of Dee's various posts, stories...either books or short stories...set during that posting, and giving information about the stories. Based on this chronology, the works can be arranged in this order:
- 663 - Judge Dee is a magistrate of Peng-lai, a fictional district on the north-east coast of China.
- The Chinese Gold Murders
- The Lacquer Screen.
- Five Auspicious Clouds, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- The Red Tape Murders, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- He came with the Rain, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- 666 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Han-yuan, a fictional district on a lakeshore near the capital of Chang-An.
- The Chinese Lake Murders
- The Morning of the Monkey, a short story in The Monkey and the Tiger
- The Murder on the Lotus Pond, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- 666 - Judge Dee is traveling and forced to take shelter in a monastery.
- 668 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Poo-yang, a fictional wealthy district through which the Grand Canal of China runs (part of modern-day Jiangsu province).
- The Chinese Bell Murders
- The Two Beggars, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- The Wrong Sword, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- The Red Pavilion
- The Emperor's Pearl
- Poets and Murder
- Necklace and Calabash
- 670 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Lan-fang, a fictional district at the western frontier of Tang China.
- The Chinese Maze Murders
- The Phantom of the Temple
- The Coffins of the Emperor, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- Murder on New Year's Eve, a short story in Judge Dee at Work
- 676 - Judge Dee is the magistrate of Pei-chow, a fictional district in the far north of Tang China.
- The Chinese Nail Murders
- The Night of the Tiger, a short story in The Monkey and the Tiger
- 677 - Judge Dee is the Lord Chief Justice in the Imperial capital of Chang-An.
- 681 - Judge Dee is the Lord Chief Justice for all of China.
Two books,
Poets and Murder and
Necklace and Calabash, were not listed in the chronology (which was published before these two books were written) but they were both from the time when Judge Dee was the magistrate in Poo-yang.
Selected scholarly works
- (with Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck). A Blackfoot-English vocabulary based on material from the Southern Peigans. Amsterdam, Uitgave van de N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1934. 12.
- The Lore of the Chinese lute; an essay in ch'in ideology (1941)
- Hsi K'ang and his Poetical Essay on the Lute (1941)
- Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period Privately printed, Tokyo (1951)
- Siddham; An Essay on the History of Sanskrit Studies in China and Japan (1956)
- Chinese Pictorial Art, as Viewed by the Connoisseur Istituto Italiano Per Il Medio Ed Estremo Oriente, Roma (1958) (Limited edition in 950 copies)
- Sexual Life in Ancient China. A preliminary survey of Chinese sex and society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D. (1961). (In spite of its titillating title, this book deals with the social role of sex, such as the institutions of concubinage and prostitution.)
- The gibbon in China. An essay in Chinese animal lore. E.J.Brill, Leiden, Holland. (1967)