Robert van. Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved By Judge Dee an old Chinese detective novel translated from the original Chinese with an introduction and notes.

by GULIK

£2,500 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

GULIK, Robert van. Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved By Judge Dee an old Chinese detective novel translated from the original Chinese with an introduction and notes. Tokyo: printed for the author by Toppan Printing Company. 1949. 8vo. Original woodcut-illustrated boards showing Judge Dee, with the original blank dust-jacket (the typed title to the spine likely added by a later owner); pp. [10], xxiii, [1 (blank)], 237, [3 blanks], with woodcut frontispiece and 3 reproductions of original Chinese illustrations and 6 plates by the author; light wear to board edges and spine tips, minor rubbing to ink on upper cover, otherwise exceptionally bright and well preserved; author’s signature in black ink and red ink stamp to limitation page (see below); bookplate of Basil W. R. Jenkins to verso of front free endpaper; near fine. First edition, no. 591 of 1,200 copies signed by the author, of the first English translation of the book that inspired the Judge Dee series. Dee Goong An is an eighteenth-century Chinese crime novel, previously untranslated, which Van Gulik discovered in an antiquarian bookshop in Tokyo. The protagonist, Judge Dee, is modelled on the historical figure Di Renjie, a seventh-century Tang-dynasty magistrate. The novel, comprising three cases – “The Double Murder at Dawn”, “The Case of the Strange Corpse”, and “The Case of the Poisoned Bride” – inspired Van Gulik to develop the character of Judge Dee for his later, original, crime series. A distinguished sin

• Binding: Hardcover

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