Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee by Dee Goong An, translated by Robert van Gulik

VAN GULIK, Robert H. (translator and editor); DEE GOONG AN. Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee. Tokyo, Privately printed for the author by Toppan Printing, 1949.

First edition, number 700 of 1200 copies, signed by the author and with his seal.

Van Gulik was a Dutch orientalist and diplomat. This book features his first stories, which he translated from an anonymous eighteenth-century Chinese account during the Second World War. Later, he used it as the basis to create his own original Judge Dee series.

‘This branch of literature [detective novels] was fully developed in China several centuries before Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were born’ (preface). Judge Dee was loosely based on a real-life Tang dynasty statesman, Di Renjie (630-700). For this first edition, Van Gulik drew six plates after ancient Chinese models.

Octavo, pp. 237; frontispiece portrait of Judge Dee, illustrated; original pictorial woodcut-decorated boards (boards slightly worn, especially at edges, spine chipped at head); book plate of Douglas B. O’Connell and inscription ‘Hong Kong August 1953’ to front flyleaf.