Gulik, Robert van. — The Given Day. An Amsterdam Mystery.

Kuala Lumpur, Art Printing Works, 1964, 1st ed., (6),132 pag., 7 full-page illustrations, endpapers design and original illustrated card wrappers by Robert van Gulik. = Van Gulik's only crime novel not set in ancient China. One of four of his crime novels that were first published privately in Kuala Lumpur, where he was Ambassador Extraordinary of the Netherlands at the time. Robert Hans van Gulik was born in Holland in 1910, and died there in 1967 while on home leave from his ambassadorial duties in Tokyo. Recipient of B.A. degrees in Law and Politics and in Chinese and Japanese from the University of Leyden (in 1933) and of a Litt.D. from the University of Utrecht (1935), he had already mastered enough Chinese in his university days to be able to translate difficult Chinese texts and to write in Chinese script. He joined the Netherlands Foreign Service in 1935 and for many years represented his country in China, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Washington. He took up his last post, Ambassador of the Netherlands to Japan, in 1965. In addition to his diplomatic work, he maintained such an interest in scholarly pursuits that he acquired perhaps an even greater name for himself as an authority on East Asian literature, art, and history; as a skilled calligrapher whose script wins the admiration of even experts; and as the prolific author of several Chinese detective stories whose hero, Judge Dee, can take a place among such greats as Sherlock Holmes and Simenon.