From 1949 to 1968 author Robert van Gulick wrote 15 novels, two novellas and eight short stories featuring Judge Dee, a Chinese magistrate and detective from the Tang dynasty. In addition to providing the setting for riveting mysteries, Dee's world highlighted aspects of traditional Chinese culture through his personal relationships with his wives, his lieutenants and the citizens he served with dedication on the emperor's behalf. This book gives a synopsis of each Judge Dee story, along with commentary on plots, characters, themes and historical details. Exploring van Gulik's influence on Chinese and Western detective fiction and on the image of China in popular 20th century American literature, this study brings to light a significant contributor to the development of detective fiction.

This book views the Dutch sinologist, Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries as a hybrid East–West form of detective fiction and uses the concept of transculturation to discuss their hybrid nature with respect to their sources, production, and influence. The Judge Dee mysteries authored by Robert van Gulik (1910–1967) were the first detective stories to be set in ancient China. These hybrid narratives combine Chinese historical figures, traditional Chinese crime literature, and Chinese history and material culture with ratiocinative methods and psychoanalytic themes familiar from Western detective fiction. This new subject and detective image won a global readership, and the book discusses the innovations that van Gulik’s Judge Dee mysteries brought to both Chinese gong’an literature and Western detective fiction. Furthermore, it introduces contemporary writers from different countries who specialize in writing detective fiction or gong’an novels set in ancient China. The book will meet the interest of fans of Judge Dee stories throughout the world and will also appeal to both students and researchers of comparative literature, Chinese literature, and crime novels studies.

This volume contains bio-critical information on popular writers of the genre.