400L

Pre K-5

3 children's mother agrees to buy them cupcakes for after dinner.  But, before dinner one of the cupcakes goes missing.  The 3 children must find the missing cupcake before anyone can eat their dessert.  I would use this book to help the children learn how to be "detectives".  The students would have to use their reasoning to figure out what they think happened to the missing cupcake.

3 Stars

This is an enjoyable book, but I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries. Van Gulik was raised in East Asia from early childhood and tutored in Mandarin from an early age. He served throughout Asia in the Dutch Diplomatic service and married a Chinese woman, so few people would be so ideally positioned to write works based on Chinese culture for Western audiences. As Van Gulik explains in his afterwards, Judge Dee is a real historical person who lived from A.D. 630 to 700 and contemporary "Chinese still consider him their master-detective, and his name is as popular with them as that of Sherlock Holmes is with us." I first read the Judge Dee mysteries when a friend loaned me her Dee novels, so the only book in the series I bought and own is this one, an anthology of short stories very much akin to Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes stories in flavor. Purely as mysteries I don't think these match the Sherlock Holmes stories such as "The Speckled Band," nor is the character of Dee quite so strong as Holmes, and Van Gulik's style is rather creaky. One reviewer called the language "stilted" and I rather agree. But the draw here is more the depiction of Chinese culture and history during the Tang Dynasty and on those terms I find the novels offer something unique and are well worth seeking out, and even though I don't think Van Gulik is strongest in this short form, these stories do display something of the appeal of those novels. The eight short stories are fine little puzzle pieces that turn on such things as an incense clock, a pawn ticket or croaking frogs in a lotus pond and takes you through all levels of Chinese society from great generals and rich merchants to prostitutes, beggars and street performers. If you're at all curious about things Chinese, you might find these just your cup of (green) tea. Although I'd start with the first book chronologically if you can find it, The Chinese Gold Murders.

I've read most of the books in the Judge Dee series, and this is the first time that I've realized that Sherlock Holmes has absolutely nothing on Judge Dee! In fact, if you were to put both of these men on a case, I'd bet on Judge Dee solving it first, less arrogantly, and more neatly than Holmes.

Truth be told, however, I'm not really a big fan of short stories, and Judge Dee at Work is a collection of short mystery stories full of very subtle clues that are collected and pieced together by our brilliant and perceptive Judge Dee. I loved some of the stories in this collection (He Came With the Rain, The Murder on the Lotus Pond, The Wrong Sword, and Murder on New Year's Eve), but in the end these are still short stories, and as such, are more likely to be forgotten by me. As it turns out, in fact, they were forgotten by me. Well into the third story I began to suspect that I'd read this book before, and by the sixth story I was sure of it. In the end I guess I'd classify Judge Dee at Work as quite good, but forgettable. I just much prefer the Judge Dee novels to these neatly done short stories.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame trailer hereAll action, storyline shy of visible.

Back in the day, before the infomercial conquered late night TV, independent stations (yes, such creatures existed before the 1996 Telecom Act) aired movies, some good, most bad, and sometimes I would stay up all night watching them. It was on one of these marathons that I first saw Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders (based on van Gulik's [book:The Haunted Monastery]) with Khigh Dhiegh (Wo Fat, the crimelord from "Hawaii 5-O", and the diabolical psychiatrist who hypnotizes Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate, among other roles) as the eponymous character. I was already something of a sinophile, and so enjoyed the story of a Tang-era judge who solved mysteries (for a made-for-TV movie, it was fairly well done).

Imagine my joy when I learned 20 years later that that sole movie was based on a series of short stories and novels by a Dutch diplomat named Robert van Gulik, who left this world the very year I entered it. I know I've read some of the stories but it's been 15+ years since and I can't remember exactly which ones and am rereading the series as opportunity permits.

Judge Dee is based on the real Tang magistrate Dee Jen-djieh, who lived from AD 630-700, and really is remembered as a model Confucian minister and paragon of justice. Though the crimes Judge Dee solves under Gulik's hand are fictional, he bases many of them on actual criminal cases from the period.

Van Gulik is not a great writer but he is good enough to write entertaining yarns with interesting characters and intriguing mysteries. (Though, frustratingly, readers must often wait till Judge Dee explains things to figure out the crime; there are not enough clues for them to more than guess at who may have transgressed the law.)

In this particular collection, the two best stories IMO are "The Wrong Sword" and "Murder on New Year's Eve." Both involve what are, on the surface, cut-and-dried cases of murder that take some devious twists before Dee manages to smoke out the real culprits.