The Chinese Maze Murders.Written in Tokyo,in 1950,and trans-
lated at once into Japanese by my friend,the late Professor
Ogaeri Yukio,a well-known Japanese Sinologue,and accepted
for publication by Mr. Noma's Kodan-sha,under the title
Meiro no satsujin. Since in post-war Japan there had arisen
a "cult of the nude",the publisher insisted on my including
a female nude in the cover design;I informedhim that I could
not do that,because I wanted to keep my illustrations in
genuine old Chinese style,and that in China,owing to the
prudish Confucianist tradition,there never developed an ar-
tistic school of drawing nude human bodies.The publisher,
however,wanted me to make sure of this anyway,so I wrote
identical letters to a few dozen antiquarian booksellers in
China and Japan of my acquaintance,asking whether they had
Ming prints of nudes.As a matter of course I did not in-
clude in my research the coarse,pornographical pictures
peddled in the 19th and 20th centuries in China's port
cities. All answers were negative,except for two : a book-
seller in Shanghai wrote me that one of their customers
possessed a few erotic albums of the end of the Ming period
and was willing to let me have tracings of these pictures;and a
curio-dealer in Kyoto informed me he had a set of actual Ming
printing-blocks of an erotic album,containing large-size male
and female nudes.I purchased these blocks,and had tracings made
of the albums of the Shanghai collector.Thus I discovered that
there had indeea existed in China a cult of the nude,and this
discovery led me to further research which resulted in the pu-
blication of my two books "Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming
Period" (privately published in 50 copies,Tokyo 1951),and
"Sexual Life in Ancient China" (Leyden 1961).This is one of the
many cases where the writing of my detective novels had a direct
bearing on my orientalistic research-work. The female nude that
ultimately appeared on the cover of the Japanese edition of The
Chinese Maze Murders",and all other nudes in the plates I added
to my novels,are based on these Ming albums. 
In New Delhi (1952) I translated the Maze Murders into Chinese,
and when I was back in Holland the following year,my Dutch publi-
sher W.van Hoeve published the English original. This book at-
tracted the attention of the London publisher Michael Joseph Ltd.
and he brought out The Chinese Bell Murders,and thereafter the
other three volumes of the First Judge Dee series.