0036 Detective Fiction

Detective fiction in the West celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Of course, the detective genre has been around for way longer here in China. The Casebook of Judge Dee was written about 300 years ago. Robert van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat, translated three cases into English in 1976 and then went on to create stories of his own. The real Judge Dee was a canny Confucian magistrate back in the Tang Dynasty. Dee used some techniques that are amazingly modern: forensics, stoolies, stakeouts. He also relied on some resources less acceptable to the modern sleuth: ghosts, portents and torture. Still, given his success, modern detectives could do worse than ask themselves: what would Dee do? #ceas #china #johnson #tsutsui #shrock