More years ago than I care to remember I was being whisked around Belfast, being given a quick schooling in the lie of the land. ‘Forget what you read in the papers,’ a CID officer told me. ‘Here it’s not unknown for Catholic paramilitaries to recruit a Protestant shooter to take care of a one […]

Not long ago, my mother said to me, “The problem with you is that most of your friends are dead.” Old now she might be, and away with the fairies most days, occasionally she still has the unsettling habit of putting her finger on a certain truth.   Back in 2013, just as I had […]

In my modern Chinese detective novel The Willow Woman, a real-life magistrate from the 17th Century, Huang Liu-Hong, makes an appearance, albeit fleetingly. A legal hero for my fictional public prosecutor Xu Ya, Huang is famous for writing the instructional manual for magistrates ‘A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence’, which became a standard reference […]

I have already stated that one of the inspirations for the character of Magistrate Zhu was the character of the honest judge Song Jiang from the Song Dynasty novel The Outlaws of the Marsh (The Water Margin). However, there were real-life inspirations as well, notably Judge Falcone and Magistrate Huang Liu-Hong. I will speak about […]

The spiritual fathers of modern forensic medicine are considered to be the Renaissance greats Fortunato Fedele (1550 – 1630) and Paolo Zacchia (1584 – 1659). Fedele produced his De Relationibus Medicorum in 1602, thereby developing the concept of medical legal testimony in court, and Zacchia published his masterpiece Quaestiones Medico-Legales in seven volumes from between […]

An introduction to Magistrate Zhu of The Balance of Heaven and Earth and Philip Ye of The Willow Woman.   In 1976, BBC TV showed a Japanese series dubbed into English entitled The Water Margin. The series was loosely based on one of the four great novels of Chinese literature, Outlaws of the Marsh, set […]

In April 1920, suffering from overwork, the author, playwright and former journalist Earl Derr Biggars obeyed his doctor’s orders and arrived in Waikiki, Hawaii for an extended holiday. When checking in to the beachfront cottage, he asked for the key, only to be told, “What key?” He had just discovered that in 1920s Waikiki no […]

In 1949, while Political Advisor to his country’s Military Mission in Japan, the Dutch diplomat and scholar Robert van Gulik independently published a translation of an 18th Century Chinese detective novel by an anonymous author entitled ‘Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee’ (Di Gong’an). Unable to conduct his usual scholarly researches due to the pressures of […]

In the West we consider the first true detective story to be Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which was published in 1841, and the first mystery novel to be The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins published in 1868 – though some argue for The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix […]