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I greatly enjoyed this. The three plots have been mentioned; not only did I like how they were interwoven, I loved how van Gulik used standard devices: the locked room mystery, the hidden will, the puzzle that needed to be resolved. There’s nothing new under the sun! You add to the mysteries the dicey political situation and the philosophical issues posed by the hermit and you’ve got a fully realized world, populated by many diverse characters.
The juxtaposition of a cultured civilization with the savagery of torture was fascinating to me. Perhaps we’re not so far beyond that as we’d like to think; we just hide it better or are in a state of denial. And yet, the notion that someone couldn’t be convicted without his admission of guilt, so why not torture it out of him? is entirely off-putting.
I’m going to pose a question about van Gulik’s attitude toward women. Was he just reflecting the reality of Chinese life at that time, or perhaps, unfortunately, mid-20th century attitudes? It was interesting to me that the only mystery that wasn’t happily resolved was that of the missing women, who was tortured, then killed, by a sadistic lesbian. Was the woman more disposable than the characters in the other mysteries?
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