Judge Dee, or Judge Di, is a semi-fictional character based on the historical figure Di Renjie, county magistrate and statesman of the Tang court. The character appeared in the 18th-century Chinese detective and gong'an crime novel Di Gong An. After Robert van Gulik came across it in an antiquarian book store in Tokyo, he translated the novel into English and then used the style and characters to write his own original Judge Dee historical mystery stories.
The series is set in Tang dynasty China and deals with criminal cases solved by the upright and shrewd Judge Dee, who as county magistrate in the Chinese imperial legal system was both the investigating magistrate and judge.
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Di Gong An
The Judge Dee character is based on the historical figure Di Renjie (c. 630 – c. 700), magistrate and statesman of the Tang court. During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) in China, a "folk novel" was written set in former times, but filled with anachronisms.
Van Gulik found a copy of the 18th-century Di Gong An novel (Chinese: 狄公案; pinyin: Dí Gōng Àn; lit. "Cases of Judge Dee") in a Tokyo book store. It's an original tale dealing with three cases simultaneously. For the most part the overbearing supernatural plot elements, common among Chinese mystery tales of that period, were lacking in this case, making the story more accessible to Western readers. He translated it into English and had it published in 1949 under the title Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee.
Van Gulik's stories
Van Gulik began writing his own novels with the character, eventually authoring sixteen books. Van Gulik was careful in writing the main novels to deal with cases wherein Dee was newly appointed to a city, thereby isolating him from the existing lifestyle and enabling him to maintain an objective role in the books. Van Gulik's novels and stories are often referred to as the Shih Ti.
Dee is initially assisted only by his faithful clerk, Sergeant Hoong Liang, an old family retainer. In The Chinese Gold Murders, which describes Dee's initial appointment and first criminal cases, the judge encounters two highwaymen, euphemistically called "men of the green woods", Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, who attempt to rob him but are so impressed with his character that they give up their criminal careers and join his retinue on the spot. This encounter is recounted in a short flashback passage in the original Di Gong An, taking place when the two are already long-serving loyal members of his retinue. A little later, in The Chinese Lake Murders, an itinerant confidence trickster and swindler, Tao Gan, similarly joins. Judge Dee ends his career in Murder in Canton being promoted to the position of senior Metropolitan Judge in the capital, and his assistants obtain official ranks in the Army and civil service.
Van Gulik also wrote a series of newspaper comics about Judge Dee in 1964–1967, which totalled 19 adventures. The first four were regular balloon strips, but the later 15 had the more typically Dutch textblock under the pictures.
Judge Dee is responsible for deciding sentences as well as assessing guilt or innocence, although van Gulik notes in the stories that all capital punishments must be referred to and confirmed by officials in the capital. One of the sentences he frequently has to deal with is slow slicing; if he is inclined to mercy, he orders the final, fatal, cut to be made first, thus rendering the ceremony anticlimactic.
Van Gulik's Judge Dee novels have been translated into Chinese.
Other authors
Several other authors have created stories based on Van Gulik's Judge Dee character:
French author Frédéric Lenormand wrote 19 new Judge Dee mysteries from year 2004 at Editions Fayard, Paris (not yet translated into English). Some of them have been translated into Spanish (Ediciones Paidos Iberica), Portuguese (Europress), Bulgarian (Paradox), Czech (Garamond) and Polish.
Sven Roussel, another French author, has written La dernière enquête du Juge Ti.
The Chinese-American author Zhu Xiao Di wrote ten original short stories about Judge Dee collected in Tales of Judge Dee (2006), set when the Judge was the magistrate of Poo-yang (the same time period as The Chinese Bell Murders and several other novels). Zhu Xiao Di has no relation to Robert van Gulik but tried to stay faithful to the fictionalized history of van Gulik's Judge Dee.
Judge Dee appears, along with a fictionalized Wu Zetian, in books one (Iron Empress: A Novel of Mystery and Madness in Ancient China) and two (Shore of Pearls: A Novel of Murder, Plague, and the Prison Island of Hainan) of Eleanor Cooney & Daniel Alteri's historical T'ang Trilogy.
Qiu Xiaolong, best known for his Inspector Chen series, released a new Judge Dee novel The Shadow of the Empire in 2021.