Our book today is Poets and Murder, the last of Robert Van Gulik’s mysteries starring the redoubtable (and semi-mythical) 7^th-century Chinese magistrate Judge Dee. It’s a series famously born in a bookstore – a used bookshop in Tokyo where Van Gulik found an old Chinese manuscript containing some adventures of the Dee character. Van Gulik’s touching-up and translation of the old book came out in 1949 under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, and it immediately attracted the interest of a small but very discriminating coterie of readers who clamored for more. Van Gulik, who in addition to all his far more esoteric accomplishments was also a thousand-word-a-day hack of the first water, was only too happy to oblige: over the next twenty years, he produced (and charmingly illustrated) a dozen Judge Dee novels and another dozen short stories, all set in the world he’d found in the Celebrated Cases.

These novels were already extremely popular among the aforementioned discriminating coterie long before I first encountered them in the mid-1990s in the beautiful uniform blockish white paperbacks put out by the University of Chicago Press (originally individually shrink-wrapped in plastic) and couldn’t read through them all fast enough.

This is one of the things I’ve always loved most about murder mysteries: they’re just as concerned as mainstream literary fiction to transport the reader to a strange and often exotic setting, but they’re not precious or high-handed about it: we’re transported to Paris, yes, but right to the stews and precinct houses, not exclusively to the Senate House of ancient Rome but also to the back alleys of the Subura. Murder is the staple of the murder mystery, after all, and murder brings people – victims, suspects, investigators, readers – right down to the ground of first causes. It’s true that the China of the original Judge Dee manuscript was a kind of fantasy-amalgam of ‘olden days,’ and it’s true that Van Gulik whimsically kept that tone for most of his own Judge Dee mysteries, but he couldn’t help himself: he also worked in lots of accurate details about Dee’s world.

The world of Poets and Murder (published, if I recall correctly, after its author’s death) is doubly rarefied: not only is Judge Dee not in his own home district of Poo-yang but rather in the neighboring district of Chin-hwa (bailiwick of his friend and colleague Magistrate Lo), but he’s there to attend the Mid-Autumn Festival along with a distinguished group of poets and composers – a mighty esoteric company for the shrewd but down-to-earth Judge Dee.

Once installed in Lo’s residence, Dee is free to enjoy the festivities – for the approximately three seconds before murder and mayhem come looking for him, as they always do. It’s long enough for him to walk around Lo’s compound and give Van Gulik some opportunities for the exposition he adds so smoothly:

Walking along the broad corridor of the chancery facing Lo’s residence, Judge Dee bestowed a casual look upon the dozen or so clerks who were busily wielding their writing-brushes at high desks, piled with dossiers and papers. Since the tribunal is the administrative centre of the entire district, it is not only the seat of criminal jurisdiction but also the registration office of births, marriages and deaths, and of sales and purchases of landed property; moreover, the tribunal is responsible for the collection of taxes, including land tax.

But such peaceful observations don’t last long – soon a student at the festival is murdered, and shortly after that Judge Dee is consoling his friend Lo in wonderfully typical stoic fashion:

“It can hardly be as bad as all that,” he said soothingly. “It’s never pleasant to have a murder in your own residence, of course, but such things happen.”

The festival provides a ready-made assortment of eccentric suspects, from a sultry poet with secrets of her own to the book’s most arresting character, Sexton Loo, an outspoken Zen monk who irately defends the region’s idiosyncratic ancient shrine to Dee:

“Why shouldn’t Magistrate Lo maintain a fox shrine, pray?” the sexton asked belligerently. “Foxes are an integral part of universal life, Dee. Their world is as important or unimportant as ours. And just as there exist special affinities between two human beings, so some human beings are linked to a special animal. Don’t forget that the signs of the zodiac that influence our destinies consist of animals, Judge!”

“I consider human justice a paltry makeshift, and I shan’t lift a finger to catch a murderer!” Sexton Loo tells our hero at one point. “Murderers catch themselves. Run around in circles even narrower than those of others. Never escape.”

But where would mystery novels be if murderers really did catch themselves? The prospect is, as our hero would say, too dismaying to contemplate! Instead, for the genre’s sake – and for the happiness of that discriminating coterie (which I urge you to join) – it’s a good thing that Judge Dee is on the case.