The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) by Robert van Gulik

Robert van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat, sinologist and writer who penned fourteen novels, two novellas and eight short stories about the 7th century Chinese court magistrate, Judge Dee – a fictionalized rendering of the historical magistrate and statesman, Di Renjie. Van Gulik was not the first writer to place the modern detective story among the vestiges of the distant past, but the Judge Dee series was pivotal in popularizing the historical mystery novel. And helped it evolve into a genre of its own.

The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) was originally published in Dutch as Fantoom in Foe-lai (Phantom in Foe-lai, 1958) and have always considered it to be the best of the Judge Dee novels. But this judgment dates back to the mid-2000s. So it was time to put my long-held conviction to the test and reread the book to see whether or not the story would hold up. Let's find out!

Set in 663, The Chinese Gold Murders is, chronologically, the first, auspicious steps Judge Dee took in a long, distinguished legal career that began with a humble magistrature and ended in the highest office of the country, Lord Chief Justice of China – recorded in Murder in Canton (1966). Only title in the series I've yet to read. Anyway, The Chinese Gold Murders begins with an vigorous, 34-year-old Judge Dee, who has grown "sick and tired" with "dry-as-dust theorizing and paper work" at the Metropolitan Court. So he requested to be assigned to the vacant post of magistrate of the district of Peng-lai.

Peng-lai is a port city on the northeast coast of Shantung Province. A dismal place of "mist and rain" where, according to the stories, "the dead rise there from their graves" on stormy nights and "strange shapes flit about in the mist." Some even say that "weretigers are still slinking about in the woods." What attracted Judge Dee to this dreary, demon-haunted district is the strange, unsolved murder of his predecessor, Magistrate Wang. An apparently impossible to solve case to the test the mettle of legal mind!

Two weeks before, a house steward reported to the senior scribe, Tang, that the bed of the magistrate had not been slept in and the door to his private library was locked on the inside, but there was no response to the insistent knocking. So the headsman was summoned to break down the door.

What they found inside was the body of the Magistrate Wang, lying on the floor in front of a tea stove, with an empty tea cup near his outstretched right hand that had traces of "the powdered root of the snake tree," but the method of administrating this poison is somewhat of a mystery – because the magistrate had been tea enthusiast with a very particular routine. Magistrate Wang fetched his own water from the well in the garden and boiled it on the stove in the library. The teapot, cups and caddy "valuable antiques" that were locked away in a cupboard under the stove. And the tea leaves in the caddy were not poisoned. So how was the tea in the cup poisoned?

Dutch edition

When I read The Chinese Gold Murders in Dutch, I was honestly impressed with both the presentation and explanation of the inexplicable slaying of Magistrate Wang.

At the time, I believed poisonings in locked, or guarded, rooms were very tricky to stage as crimes that appear to be genuinely impossible and difficult to provide such a premise with a satisfying solution, but my locked room reading lacked depth in those days – since then I've come across many innovative takes on the impossible poisoning. One of Van Gulik's literary descendants, Paul Doherty, made the poisoning-in-a-locked-room kind of his specialty, but two excellent examples can be found in the Case Closed/Detective Conan series, "The Loan Shark Murder Case" and "The Poisonous Coffee Case."

So, admittedly, the locked room-trick here is not as impressive the second time around, but still stands as a good, elegant and original solution to genuine locked room mystery. A rarity in Dutch detective fiction! Only problem is the sporadic clueing. There are clues, or hints, an imaginative reader can use to put together a general idea of how the locked room-trick was worked, but don't expect anything along the lines of Christianna Brand or John Dickson Carr. However, the murder in the locked library is merely one of the many major and minor plot-strands that make up the story of The Chinese Gold Murders.

Van Gulik honored the age-old traditions of the Chinese detective story in which the magistrate is at "the same time engaged in the solving of three or more totally different cases." The Chinese Gold Murders is crammed with crimes, danger and intrigue.

A wealthy shipowner, Koo Meng-pin, appears in court during the morning session to report "the prolonged absence" of his wife, Mrs. Koo, who never returned from visiting her father, Tsao Ho-hsien – an eccentric doctor of philosophy. A third case concerns the gruesome discovery of two buried bodies on the property of a farmhouse and a potentially missing third body. There's even a small, quasi-impossible element to this case with three people apparently vanishing into thin air from a stretch of road, but this is still only a fraction of the plot. Judge Dee has an unnerving encounter with the ghost of Magistrate Wang in the courthouse and stories are told of "a headless monk slinking about" an old, abandoned temple. A weretiger is terrorizing the district, smugglers active, shady businesses are being conducted aboard floating brothels, an ever-present Korean element, murderous attempts on officials and a bit of sword play!

I believe the sword play here deserves a special mention. The story begins with Judge Dee traveling, on horseback, to Peng-lai with his right-hand man, Sergeant Hoong, but they're waylaid by two "brothers of the green wood," Hoong Liang and Chiao Tai. A group of outlaws whose code is to only rob officials and wealthy people. They known to help people in distress and have a reputation for courage and chivalry. Judge Dee engages them with his legendary family heirloom, Rain Dragon, the Excalibur of the Orient, which was a nicely done nod at the Robin Hood lore. There's even a touch of the Arthurian legends in the back-story of the sword!

So, while The Chinese Gold Murders didn't quite shine with the same radiant brilliance on my second read, but regardless, I tremendously enjoyed revisiting the story. 

Van Gulik never allowed his readers to be bored for even a single page by packing the plot, cover to cover, but held a firm grip on the various plot-threads throughout the story and tied them all together in orderly fashion by the end – of which the locked room murder is the best realized strand of the plot. There are, however, two elements of the large, overarching solution breaking two cardinal rules of the Golden Age detective story, but they were very well done. And even Carr broke one of those two rules. But, perhaps the best thing about this series, is Van Gulik's world-building skillfully merging history and fiction. I can see how the Judge Dee series helped to legitimize the historical mystery as a (sub) genre.

Long story short, The Chinese Gold Murders is not exactly the masterpiece I remembered from my first reading, but it's still an excellent and recommendable historical detective novel.

Murder on Paradise Island

"Whenever bizarre phenomena occur that seem to defy human understanding, there are very few who can actually fish out the evil plots lurking behind them. And the longer one waits, the truth grows exponentially distant." 

- Lai Shang-rong (Ashibe Taku's Murder in the Red Chamber, 2004)

Recently, two of my fellow bloggers, Kate and "JJ," wrote tepid reviews of Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders (1956) and The Willow Pattern (1965), which tempted me back to my beloved Judge Dee series to provide a counterweight to their blog-posts, but the last remaining title on my TBR-pile is Murder in Canton (1966) – generally considered to be one of the poorer entries in the series. So I decided to backtrack over previously traversed ground and return to one of my favorite titles from the series.

The Red Pavilion (1961) begins with Judge Dee, accompanied by Ma Joong, breaking their homeward journey from the capital at the Sin City of 7th century China, Paradise Island. A town with gambling halls, wine shops and brothels on every street corner.

Personally, Judge Dee does not approve of what goes on Paradise Island, but realizes such resorts are "a necessary evil" and a good warden, like Feng Dai, ensures that it is "a controlled evil." So, much to Ma Joong's delight, they decide to overnight at the pleasure resort. There are, however, a rapidly mounting pile of problems and unforeseen circumstances forcing them to extend their stay at Paradise Island – which begins with the difficulty of finding a place to spend the night.

Upon their arrival, Paradise Island is in the middle of celebrating the Festival of the Dead, when the souls of the departed mingle with the living, but the consequence of these festivities is that lodgings are scarce. The Hostel of Eternal Bliss does have one unoccupied room, called the Red Pavilion, which has been the scene for a string of violent and inexplicable deaths. Someone took his own life in there only a couple of days ago!

Nevertheless, Judge Dee waves away the objections uttered by the inn keeper and takes possession of the accursed room. A decision that would come back to haunt the magistrate, but he would make another one before the end of the day.

The second lapse of judgment came during a brief encounter with a colleague, Magistrate Lo, whose presence on the island pertained to the tragic suicide of a promising Academician, Lee Lien – recently appointed a member of the Imperial Academy. On his way home, Lee tarried at the island and became infatuated with a woman, but when she turned him down he "cut his jugular vein with his own dagger" behind the locked door of the Red Pavilion. An elaborate key of "intricate pattern" was on the inside of the door and the only window barred with iron bars no more than a span apart. So it had to be suicide, assured Lo, as he asked Dee to stay a day, or two, in order to wind up the affair for him. And then hightails it out of there.

Magistrate Lo had a good reason to leave the pleasure resort in a hurry: a famous courtesan and Queen of Flower of Paradise Island, named Autumn Moon, tried to sink her claws into the magistrate. Judge Dee had already met her, before taking over the investigation, but had given her the cold shoulder and angrily she mentioned that, only three days ago, a scholar killed himself because of her – which is the death Lo had been investigating. But the room would soon claim another victim.

When he returns from dinner, Judge Dee finds that the bedroom door of the Red Pavilion is locked on the inside and a glance through the barred window reveals the form of a naked woman on the floor. The door is battered down and the body is shown that to be of Autumn Moon. She appears to have suffered a heart attack, but the doctor also discovers bruises around her throat. This suggests someone had been throttling her, however, there were "no marks of fingernails." So how was she attacked and how did the murderer entered, and left, the room when the key was on the inside of the door?

Meanwhile, Ma Joong strikes up an acquaintance with a pair of delightful characters, Crab and Shrimp, who work for the warden of Paradise Island and they refuse to believe the Academician was the type of commit suicide, but, more importantly, they tell about another fishy suicide that took place in the same room over thirty years ago – when the father of the local wine merchant reputedly took his own life in the locked and barred bedroom of the Red Pavilion.

So that's three inexplicable deaths, separated by three decades and three days each, which all had the same locked room as the scene of the tragedies, but Van Gulik provided the story with a different explanation for each case. A very ambitious attempt that has to be appreciated, but two of three impossibilities were a trifle weaker than I remembered.

The past murder is only nominally a locked room and the then magistrate of the district only passed it off as a suicide because a deadly smallpox epidemic was ravaging the region at the time, which will come to play an important part in the two deaths several decades later. So the lack of a proper locked room trick can be forgiven as this supposed suicide and epidemic has far-reaching consequences. On the other hand, the locked room problem surrounding the Academician turned out to be a routine affair (Lo was sort of right there) with one of the oldest and unimaginative tricks in the book.

However, the explanation for the death of Autumn Moon is one of those one-of-a-kind locked room trick tailored to the specific events and setting of the story (e.g. Alan Green's What a Body, 1949).

A trick splendidly using such clues as the victim's poor health, the strange bruises, past epidemics, the supposed suicide from three days previously and the room itself to create an impossible crime that, in itself, function as a clue to the overall solution. But where that overall solution really excels is when all of the plot-strands, including the three locked rooms, are twisted together with the theme of the book showing the consequences when the evil of past events are left unresolved – which revealed the excellent mystery I remembered reading all those years ago.

A second consequence, story-wise, is that the nature of the case does not allow Judge Dee to act as an examining magistrate or detective, but as a correcting factor who lays the restless spirits of the sin-filled pleasure island to rest by covering everything up. Nobody is arrested, sentenced and escorted to the execution grounds. And he has a good reason to sweep everything under the carpet. So the past and its ghosts are finally laid to rest at the end of the Festival of the Dead, which was a nice, stylistic touch to the story.

Overall, The Red Pavilion definitely stood up to re-reading with a solid, well-crafted plot that, when everything came together, strengthened the individual parts that looked a trifle weak on their own – which is the hallmark of a good plotter. 

I previously rambled about The Chinese Maze Murders (1956) and Judge Dee at Work (1967).

All in a Maze

"Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly and to decide impartially."

- Socrates 

Late last month, I posted a review of Judge Dee at Work (1967), a collection of eight, historical detective stories situated in Imperial China of the 7th century, which were penned by the late Robert H. van Gulik – a Dutch diplomat and fervent sinologist.

I had read the stories from that volume before, but they reminded me there were a few novels from the series I had yet to read. So I elevated one of them to the top of my to-be-read pile and the only surprising part about picking this particular title is why I hadn't read it before.

The Dutch and English-language editions of The Chinese Maze Murders (1956) were preceded by publications in Chinese and Japanese, which were released in 1951 and 1953. 

Needless to say, the chronology of when and where the Judge Dee novels were written/published can be Confucius confusing, but The Chinese Maze Murders is one of the earlier novels – which did its part in establishing the series and helped popularizing historical mysteries in the process.

The Chinese Maze Murders has Judge Dee arriving in Lan-fang, "a far-away district on the Northwestern border," and, as "a border town," had "to reckon with sudden attacks from the barbarian hordes of the western plains." However, the less than heartwarming and disrespectful reception the new magistrate and his entourage receive proved that the town had already fallen from within.

Lan-fang is under the thumb of a self-styled tyrant, named Chien Mow, who usurped power in the district a decade ago and the only magistrate who dared to go up against him ended up on the riverbank – "his throat cut from ear to ear." As a consequence, the court is in abeyance. So the first course of action for the new magistrate is disposing of "this miserable local tyrant" and reestablish a rule of law, which occupies a large swath of the first half of the story, but it's fun to read how a small, outnumbered group of people outsmarted a small-time despot.

It's not entirely comparable to the scheme Nero Wolfe hatched in Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang (1965), in order to outwit a corrupt FBI, but the comparison suggested itself to me when reading it.

There are, however, other matters that Judge Dee finds of "absorbing interest" and prefers to concentrate on "two most interesting problems," which are "the ambiguous last will of old Governor Yoo" and the "murder of General Ding that is announced in advanced" – who holed himself up in his hermitically sealed library in his well protected, barricaded home. Hey, I told you it was kind of weird that I hadn't read this one before!

Well, the governor's last will is drawn up in a painting depicting a fantasy landscape and it's included among Van Gulik's illustrations. However, this plot-thread is thin, but dyed scarlet red and run through practically all of the other cases – which makes it difficult to comment upon without giving away too much. Luckily, there's also a murder in a locked room.

The Queen's Blessing

General Ding had "fought a victorious battle against barbarians across the northern border," but felt "unexpectedly compelled to resign" after returning to the capital and retired to Lan-fang. A month before Judge Dee arrivals he began "to notice that suspicious looking men" loitering in the neighborhood and began to wall himself up in his home. You have to take that last part somewhat literally. The gates of the general's mansion are "locked and barred day and night" and "walled up all doors and windows of his library save one." The one remaining door "has only one key," which the general always kept with him.

All of these safety measures proved insufficient in keeping an assassin from entering the sealed library and jab a small, peculiar looking dagger with a poison-daubed blade in the general’s throat.

Van Gulik noted in his postscript that The Case of the Sealed Room "was suggested by an anecdote concerning Yen Shih-fan," who was "a notoriously wicked statesman of the Ming period who died in 1565 AD," which gives some historical credence to a type of locked room-method that's always difficult to pull off without leaving the reader disappointed – especially the spoiled ones such as yours truly.

I mention this here not because I was disappointed about the method, but it felt terribly out-of-place in 7th century China. But, hey, who am I to argue with Van Gulik? He was the expert. The only problem I had, plot-wise, was that's next to impossible to deduce or even guess how it was done and the murderer was better hidden than you'd expect. I figured the murderer had left poison in the room, before the general locked himself in, and the small, poisonous blade was stuck in him after the door was broken down as a red herring that was to draw attention away from the actual poisoning-method. Well, I was wrong.

Anyhow, I think Paul Doherty would nod approvingly at the murderer's motive and army background of the killing, which are plot-elements that regularly turn up in his work.

These are just a handful of the problems thrown in Judge Dee's face upon his arrival in Lan-fang, which also involve a missing girl, barbarians and high treason. Most of these problems seem to eventually lead to an overgrown "country estate at the foot of a mountain" with "an old, dark house surrounded by a dense forrest" and has the titular maze – which is "bordered by thick undergrowth and large boulders" that "form an impenetrable wall."

As I said at the beginning of this post, The Chinese Maze Murders packs a lot of plot and storylines in this single, novel-length story, which is both a strength and a weakness. You're unlikely to get bored with this book, because there's always something happening or turning up – right up to the end when some of the culprits find themselves on the execution grounds about to pay for their crimes. On the other hand, there's so much happening that, plot-wise, the book misses the finesse and grace of some the later, tighter plotted-and written novels – such as The Chinese Gold Murders (1959) and Necklace and Calabash (1967).

Either way, fans of the Judge Dee series and historical fiction won't be disappointed by this entry in the series.

On final, semi-related note: I have tagged nearly 200 blog-posts as a locked room mystery. I see a commemorative filler-post in the not so distant future about this two-hundredth locked room post!

Sitting in Judgment

"Guide the people by law, subdue them by punishment; they may shun crime, but will be void of shame. Guide them by example, subdue them by courtesy; they will learn shame and come to be good."

- Confucius 

Robert H. van Gulik was a diplomat, sinologist and a writer whose career highlights included being the Dutch ambassador to Japan and authoring a series of novels, short stories and a couple of novellas about Judge Dee – which popularized historical mysteries and established them as a proper sub-genre in the 1950-and 60s. 

The series is set in 7th century China, during the Tang dynasty (AD 600-700), when a lauded magistrate and statesman, by the name of Di Renjie, presided over the courts of the Imperial Governments of the time.

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (c. 1949) is a translation of an 18th century novel, Dee Goong An, which was loosely based on some of the cases handled by Di Renjie and formed an unofficial starting point of the series. And Di Renjie was, of course, the model for Judge Dee.

The plots were constructed along the lines of the classical, Chinese detective stories, in which several, seemingly unrelated, cases are braided together, but Van Gulik threw out the supernatural agencies and replaced them with 20th century plot devices – such as a stronger emphasis on whodunit and the occasional locked room mystery.

Judge Dee at Work: Eight Chinese Detective Stories (1967) is a collection of short stories and I have read them before, but they were spread out over two different volumes. The title of the Dutch edition of Judge Dee at Work is Zes zaken voor Rechter Tie (Six Cases for Judge Dee, 1961), which didn't include "Five Auspicious Clouds" and "He Came With the Rain." They were published separately as Vijf gelukbrengende wolken (Five Auspicious Clouds, 1969) and included the novella Vier vingers (Four Fingers, 1964), which was published in The Monkey and the Tiger (1965) as The Morning of the Monkey.

This was also the first time I read a Rechter Tie book in English. So it was somewhat like rediscovering this wonderful series.

"Five Auspicious Clouds" is the first story from this collection and occurred when Judge Dee served for only a week as magistrate of Peng-lai, which is where my favorite entry in this series took place – namely the fabulous Fantoom in Foe-lai (The Chinese Gold Murders, c. 1959). Judge Dee is confronted with the apparent suicide of the wife of a notable legal-mind, but there are enough signs pointing towards murder and the extinguished, pentagon-shaped incense-clock seemed to have fixed the time of death. A good, somewhat clever story of domestic murder and notable for having found a way to use the smashed-watch-trick... in the year 633!

"The Red Tape Murder" takes place in the same coastal district as the previous story, Peng-lai, in which Van Gulik allowed Judge Dee to be drawn into a military affair and exonerate Colonel Meng of a murder-charge and solve a pesky, bureaucratic problem of a missing document – a document interestingly titled P-404. They were unable to find that page! Anyhow, the murder of Colonel Soo turns out to be an impossible crime, because the innocent Meng appears to have been the only one who could've loosened the deadly arrow, but Judge Dee finds an alternative explanation and one that's reasonable clued. I've grown quite fond of this story, but not everyone is going to like it.

Six Cases for Judge Dee

Judge Dee still presided over Peng-lai as magistrate in "He Came With the Rain" and takes place on one of the hottest, wettest days of the dog-days. A pawn-broker is found stabbed and hacked to pieces at an old, abandoned watchtower in the marches and the only witness is a deaf-mute girl – who lived in the crumbling tower. A couple of soldiers apprehended a blood-covered suspect, but, of course, Judge Dee comes to a different conclusion. This is one of those stories that should be read as a historical story and it’s character development instead of as a detective story.

"The Murder on the Lotus Pond" has a change of scenery, the district of Han-yuan, which was the backdrop for The Chinese Lake Murders (1960) and The Haunted Monastery (1961), but in this minor case an elderly poet is killed in his garden pavilion. The setting and characters are very well drawn, but it's a minor, rather forgettable case and the murderer only got caught because he/she jabbered too much.

"The Two Beggars" takes the reader to yet another district, Poo-yang, where The Chinese Bell Murders (1958) and The Emperor's Pearl (1963) took place, but Judge Dee's time as magistrate of this district also coincided with his visit to Paradise Island – recorded in The Red Pavilion (1964) and features several impossible murders. However, this short story seems to have been missed by everyone as just such a story, which begins when Judge Dee witnesses a ghostly apparition during the Feast of Lanterns. The escape of the apparition from a watched, moonlit garden, in which the "garden gate to the park outside was securely locked and barred," coincides with the discovery of a dead beggar at the bottom of a drain. The encounter in the garden is explained by itself towards the end of the story, but initial sighting gives Judge Dee a good reason to take a closer look as the supposed accidental death of the beggar and eventually discovers a murderer. A well-told and constructed story.

The following story, "The Wrong Sword," remains in the district of Poo-Yang, but Judge Dee is absent for a large portion of the investigation and leaves two of his lieutenants, Ma Joong and Chiao Tai, in charge of tribunal. A case and an opportunity to prove themselves presents itself during a street performance: someone swapped a "trick sword" for a real one and that came at the expensive of a young boy's life. It’s an interesting approach to allow a troupe of Watson's investigate a flurry of potential murderers, before Judge Dee correctly arranges the gather information and evidence upon his return.

"The Coffins of the Emperor" takes place in the isolated district of Lan-fang, the location of The Chinese Maze Murders (1952) and The Phantom of the Temple (1966), which is situated on the Western border of the empire – which has become a dark and desolate place during a warring conflict with the Tartar's. Judge Dee offers his assistance to the local military leader in solving a potential case of treason and clearing yet another military officer from a murder charge, before his head rolls off his shoulder the next morning, but the main attraction of this story is dark, sickly mood of impending doom permeating the plot.

The final story of the lot, "Murder on New Year's Eve," takes place in that same desolate place, but the explanation ends both this collection and Judge Dee's run as magistrate of Fan-lang on a positive note. It's a short, touchy story and that's all that can be said about it without giving anything away.

So, all in all, Judge Dee at Work is an excellent and well-balanced collection of stories, which can be read as both detective stories or historical fiction. And that makes it hard to be disappointed if you're a fan of one or both genres, but that goes for the entire series. Recommended!

Finally, if this review appears clunky or overwritten without the usual amount of detail... well... I finished this collection nearly two weeks ago and was in the hospital at the time. So not every detail was as clear as it should be when I finally began cranking out this review, but I'm getting back on track.

A Night at the Monastery

When this blog embarked on its journey through the brittle pages of venerable paperback editions and pass hefty hardcover volumes with crackled spines, I did not anticipate that less than ten posts later I would be critiquing my first detective movie – and a pretty obscure one at that. It's not that I didn't want to do the same hack job at reviewing movies as I do with books, it's just that I'm already familiar with the well-covered, critically acclaimed magna opera of cinematic mysteries, such as Green for Danger, The Murder on the Orient-Express and The Maltese Falcon, that doing movies simply wasn't in the short term plans for this place.

I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised and greatly impressed by Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders (1974), an adaptation of Robert van Gulik's 1961 novel The Haunted Monastery with screenplay by Nicholas Meyer (of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution fame), which starred an almost all-Asian cast – only the character of Judge Dee was played by Khigh Dhiegh, who was of mixed North African ancestry. This was quite a different approach from an earlier attempt to adapt the Judge Dee stories to the small screen, an ephemeral series made for British television in the late 1960s, which had a cast without a single Asian actor among them.

But the pleasure of watching this fine movie isn't just derived from its ethnic authenticity; it also treats its source material with the respect it deserves, even reusing many of the books dialogue, and did a splendid job at recreating the locale of the book: an old and musty monastery, plagued by ghostly apparitions and infested with death, during a heavy thunderstorm.

That's not to say that there aren't some minor changes, here and there, but for the most part the plot follows the book like a shadow – and both start off with a somewhat familiar trope of the detective being overcome by a sudden storm, which forces him to seek shelter in a dark and a dreary monastery on the night of its anniversary. But the festivities can't muffle the whispers of murder echoing through its darkened hallways and endless staircases. 

And although it's more a story of suspense than one of ratiocination, Dee still does an excellent job at uncovering the truth behind the former abbots death, deducing the truth from the man's final drawing of a cat, and the way in which he disposes an unsavory character, who murdered several innocent women, would've received the nodding approval of both Reggie Fortune and Mrs. Bradley. The story also contains a subplot involving a ghost window, appearing and disappearing in front of the Judge's eyes, however, the solution is very crude and antiquated – so don't expect too much from it.

On the whole, there's not much that can be said against this film, except that they pulled a Peter Ustinov by casting an actor who does not at all resemble the Judge Dee from Van Gulik's illustrations, and that one would wish they had either picked a better, more detection orientated, book (e.g. The Chinese Gold Murders) or simply had made more than one episode. But these are minor quibbles, really, that pale measured against the overall quality and enjoyability of the movie.

The one thing I don't understand, though, is why it's relatively a little-known film, even though it's one of the most faithful adaptations I have ever seen and was even nominated for an Edgar! 

In closing, I can only say that I hope that Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders will become available on DVD at some point in the future. It's too good to languish in obscurity!