Robert van Gulik with wife Shui Shih-fang 1946
Sample of authors
Gulik, Robert van
Robert Hans van Gulik was born in Zutphen, the Netherlands, and grew up in Batavia (now Jakarta) in the former Dutch East Indies, where his father served as a medical officer in the Dutch Army. Van Gulik’s father collected Chinese porcelain and passed his interest on to his son who taught himself Mandarin. Robert van Gulik was fascinated by Chinese history and culture, and he became an authority o...
Literary figures
Violet Strange
Gender: Female
Miss Strange is a beautiful, lively, young American woman with a rich father, and who is interested in literature. She has an active social life, but on the quiet is an amateur detective who solves criminal cases she has heard about. The short stories about her by A.K. Green are rather puerile, and Strange behaves like a teenager, but she has been acknowledged as one of the first girl detectives...