A review by paul_cornelius
The Chinese Bell Murders by Robert van Gulik

5.0

The Chinese Bell Murders became the second of the Judge Dee series of novels that Van Gulik published, although in terms of the chronology of the series, it stands in eighth place. And it shows, for Bell Murders is quite different from the later Judge Dee books. It most resembles the original work, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, which Van Gulik translated from the Chinese original. Like that novel, Bell Murders is a longer, more complex work. So too is its syntax, word usage, and level of overall language. To create a sense of historical distance, for example, Van Gulik eschews contractions for the most part. He also forgoes modern and contemporary idioms. The later Judge Dee books went away from this writing strategy. They were much shorter novels, with an almost hard-boiled air about them, with the language often lapsing into slang. To be frank, I enjoyed this older format more than the later ones. It created a better sense of time and place.

The story itself contains both enough mischief in it to surprise as well as shock when it leads into more gruesome aspects of criminality. Again, the pleasure in the novel is watching Dee operate and see the story, much of which the reader will anticipate before Dee does, play out so that it surprises him--even to the point of only having Dee put all the pieces together after he has executed the criminals. As such, there is always tension between the law and justice in Dee's world, which his emperor will even commend him for, because Dee figures out a way to come to terms with that tension.