Tricycle | Awake in the World

WHILE LIVING in Nationalist China during World War II, the Dutch diplomat and scholar Robert van Gulik made a fascinating discovery: an 18th-century Chinese mystery novel centered on the historical figure Di Renjie, a district magistrate from the 7th century, early in the Tang dynasty. Van Gulik set out to translate this novel into English, so Di Renjie became Judge Dee, and Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee was eventually published privately in Tokyo in 1949. Van Gulik became so enamored of the Chinese style of detection fiction—“fully developed in China,” he argued, “centuries before Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were born”— that he decided to continue the reallife crime-solving magistrate’s story on his own.