Robert van Gulik

Robert van Gulik (1910 to 1967) was a Dutch orientalist, diplomat, guqin musician and writer, remembered in literature above all for the Judge Dee historical mysteries. Born in Zutphen and raised partly in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, he studied Chinese and Japanese and took a doctorate in sinology before a career in the Dutch Foreign Service that took him through East Asia. His interest in Chinese detective fiction began when he translated the eighteenth century novel Dee Goong An as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee in 1949. He then wrote his own Judge Dee novels, borrowing the protagonist from that book and many plots from older Chinese casebooks, and first issued some of them in Japanese and Chinese editions before English ones.