The+Celebrated+Cases+of+Judge+Dee

Rating: 4 stars

Summary: The novel follows the three mysteries that are presented to the esteemed Judge Dee. He investigates and sends out his faithful lieutenants to sneak around and find out the truth, traveling all over Han China to solve his cases, the Double Murder at Dawn, the Strange Corpse, and the Poisoned Bride. Along the way he verbally abuses most to the people he interviews, orders the extreme torture of multiple people, sends a recommendation to his superiors that he himself be tortured, and exhumes a grave at the behest of its ghost, among other activities.

Review: The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee is an eighteenth century detective novel written by an anonymous Chinese author and translated by Robert van Gulik, who, when he saw on the original's success wrote an spinoff series of his own. He writes in a foreword about why Chinese mystery novels are hardly successful in an American environment, though Judge Dee isn't a good example of a typical mystery story, which is why it was chosen to be translated. There is a good deal of torture, if that puts you off, and the Judge is quite opinionated, far from the judges of today as supposed to be. The translator puts in a lot of explanations of Chinese culture that is helpful if you want to learn about the eighteenth century Chinese juridical system, but I skipped most of the introduced. To me, the novel dragged on at some points, but it was very entertaining all the same, and an interesting look into the past from an unusual perspective.