The Philosophical Exercises of Janwillem van de Wetering

By Henry Wessells

With A Checklist of Books by Janwillem van de Wetering

Author of a highly acclaimed series of mystery novels, world
traveller, former Zen student, and former police officer Janwillem
van de Wetering brings an unusual perspective to the detective
genre. His novels and stories feature a diverse and richly drawn
cast of characters and settings that range from the streets of
Amsterdam to the Caribbean and from rural Maine to Japan, South
America, and New Guinea. A careful eye for the details of police
investigations is joined with a quirky sense of humor and a keen
interest in philosophical and spiritual matters.
    With publication of Outsider in Amsterdam, van de Wetering
gained a following in both Europe and America. In this novel and
others in the series, van de Wetering created one of the more
unusual detective teams in modern crime fiction: the trio of
"Amsterdam Cops": Sergeant Rinus de Gier, youthful, handsome, and
highly athletic; Adjutant Henk Grijpstra, somewhat older and more
phlegmatic; and the unnamed commissaris, their senior officer and
spiritual guide. Outsider in Amsterdam, with a plot that involves
spiritual fraud and reflections on Western ideas about the exotic
East, explores in fictional form ideas that had long been a concern
of the author. Philosophical and existential questions are
intertwined in all of his subsequent novels.
    His first published book, The Empty Mirror, was a nonfiction
account of his experiences as a Zen student in Japan in the late
1950s; it appeared in Dutch in 1971, and in an English edition in
1973. A companion volume, Glimpses of Nothingness, recording
impressions during a stay in an American Zen community, appeared
in 1975. Van de Wetering published four children's books that
explore spiritual and philosophical themes. His 1987 biography of
Dutch mystery author and diplomat Robert van Gulik (reissued in
paperback by Soho Press in June 1998) is similarly concerned with
understanding spiritual matters. Most recently, a collection of
van de Wetering's essays entitled Afterzen has just been published
by St. Martin's Press.
    Before he turned his hand to writing, van de Wetering lived
on four continents and his varied experiences pop up throughout
his novels and stories. His years in Japan give a rich texture
to The Japanese Corpse and the stories that make up Inspector
Saito's Small Satori, while Mangrove Mama is a recent collection
of stories that evoke van de Wetering's memories of England,
Japan, South Africa and South America as well as more recent
travels to Key West and New Guinea.
    Janwillem Lincoln van de Wetering was born in Rotterdam, The
Netherlands, on February 12, 1931. His father was a merchant
whose American contacts prompted him to give his second son the
middle name, Lincoln. The signal event of his childhood was the
Second World War: "When the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam the
Junckers (obsolete cargo planes, bombs were thrown out by hand)
stopped two streets short of our house." One of the stories in
van de Wetering's collection The Sergeant's Cat, "Jacob Sanders,"
is the first chapter of a projected novel set during the Nazi
occupation of Rotterdam, that features "many of my own
adventures."

I was 14 when the war was over and had become difficult to
handle so my parents sent me to graduate (age 16) at a country
school and I lived in a teacher's house. After that I ran away
and worked at a farm until my father tracked me down. I then
studied at the Castle of Nijenrode College, an elite "business
management" school that has since become Nyenrode University (the
name was anglified).
Rotterdam, where I grew up, is a city of hard working folks
who save. They spend some of their savings in Amsterdam which is
a center of the arts, has a famous pleasure quarter, and collects
the odd and weird. Rotterdam people are straight, they work, then
they die. This may be a biased opinion. I never went back to
check and they now have famous film and jazz festivals. Maybe
I'll go back when I am older. Merely thinking about going there
gives me asthma.

After graduating at age 19, van de Wetering worked for a year
in Amsterdam and then set out for Cape Town, South Africa, where
a job had been arranged through a company connected with his
father's interests. Life in Cape Town proved very attractive and
he refused a transfer to Johannesburg, whereupon his father fired
him. "Working at this and that," he stayed on for six years. He
was for a time a member of a motorcycle gang inspired by
Dostoievski's "Young Devils" and the French "poètes maudits"
(Rimbaud was van de Wetering's favorite). The story "Quicksand"
in Mangrove Mama describes some of the gang's antics. He was
briefly married to a local artist who taught him "how ideas can
be realized into more substantial forms through pottery and
sculpture."
When his father died, van de Wetering returned to Europe, and
moved to London, where he followed a course of philosophy
lectures at University College in London, "as a `reader', I had
no interest in a degree." He rode an ex-Army Norton motorcycle
and spent a year in coffe-shops working his way through a list of
philosophical works recommended by professor (later Sir Alfred)
A.J. Ayer. He became infatuated with existentialism, but "the
resulting dogma that `we are condemned to liberty' seemed too
dour." Ayer suggested that van de Wetering consider Zen
Buddhism.

Sojourn in Japan

For two years (1958-1959), van de Wetering studied at the Zen
monastery Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, Japan.

Here, for the first time, a glimpse of a possible answer
occurred. The Buddhist idea of emptiness, concentrated in the Zen
"mu" (nothingness) koan, a meditation subject his teacher made
him concentrate on for endless painful hours in a dark hall where
police monks beat the unwary, proved to be quite cheerful.
No-purpose, happenstance, breaking down of illusionary ego walls,
giving in to the only useful desire (the desire to break desire),
sublime indifference, moral detachment, non-judgment, and still
performing optimally for no reason whatsoever definitely for no
reason, were ideas that radiated gloriously from the old abbot's
subtle but forceful being.

Van de Wetering remarks: "Japanese, as I found out, is not
easy to get into. It is ranked with Finnish and Hungarian as the
world's most impossible languages. Japanese is liked a cloud, you
can't get hold of it. After a year there I could ask all sorts of
questions but the answers eluded me. I mastered the phonetic
script, 104 scribbles, in little time, but it took almost two
years to learn 300 characters and one needs 1850 to read a
newspaper. Now I have forgotten it all, but I often gaze at
Japanese books (I have read many of the great Japanese novels in
translation) and dream about the beautiful script and the
wonderful associations."
Eventually, van de Wetering's stay in Japan ended -- he ran
out of money. He found work with a Dutch trading company in
South America and the Dutch Caribbean islands. He married again,
and in 1963 moved to Australia, where he sold real estate.

Amsterdam Cop

    Two years later his wife's uncle died in Amsterdam, leaving a
textile business in disarray. "I went over to get it going again
and spent 10 years in the Inner City of Amsterdam. The Dutch Army
accused me of violating the conditions of a leave of absence,
granted when I left the country at age 19. In order to appease
the authorities I volunteered for the Amsterdam Reserve Police,
doing uniform duty as a constable, later constable-first-class,
and passing sergeant and inspector exams." Van de Wetering also
had the means to indulge his love of motorcycles: "In Holland,
when I ran the textile business, I bought a 1943 `Liberator' from
U.S. Army stocks, in parts, and had it assembled." A
Harley-Davidson of this vintage -- familiar to the Dutch who
witnessed the arrival of Allied troops at the end of the Second
World War -- figures significantly in his first novel.
    During this same period, his philosophical curiosity had been
aroused again when he met Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche at a Tibetan
Buddhist retreat in Scotland. Studies at "The Tail of the Tiger"
led in due course to visits to another Buddhist center, "Moon
Spring Hermitage," on the Maine coast. This center was run by a
senior American disciple of the (now deceased) Japanese abbot of
Daitoku-ji.
    Van de Wetering describes the origins of his Amsterdam Cops
series:

By that time I was bored with my job and reading the novels
of George Simenon, a Belgian/French mystery writer, a
multi-millionaire author with some 300 titles to his name. I read
both his excellent prose, and that of Sartre, to improve my
French to better my company's export business. It then dawned on
me that here was my chance. I could write a series of police
novels set in Amsterdam with connections to the foreign places I
knew, both in English and Dutch. In America I had been
successful with my "Zen" books The Empty Mirror and A Glimpse of
Nothingness, the first describing my Japanese stay, the second
reporting on a number of visits to an American Zen community. I
knew Maine well by then and had bought land there. In 1975 I
left Amsterdam, settling in Surry, Maine. The Zen community I
intended to join collapsed after a short while but I liked the
setting and stayed, boating in summer, writing in winter.

    His decision to move to America came at a time when his Amsterdam
Cops novels had "taken off internationally." In the first novels in the
series, Lijk in de Haarlemmer Houttuinen (Outsider in Amsterdam),
Buitelkruid ( Tumbleweed ), De Gelaarsde Kater (Corpse on the
Dike), and Dood van een Marktkoopman ( Death of a Hawker ),
van de Wetering constructed plots that enabled him to reflect upon
a wide range of cultural and social issues affecting Dutch life -- from
the sexual revolution to attitudes toward Jews and immigrants in late 20th
century Dutch society -- while taking readers on a tour of the
neigborhoods of the city of Amsterdam. Later novels explored other
parts of the Netherlands: De Ratelrat ( The Rattle-Rat ) is largely
set in the rich agricultural province of Friesland, where the stereotypical
image of piety and conformity is revealed to be sharply at odds with
the reality of corruption, hypocrisy, and deceit.
    Insofar as these novels present seemingly accurate details
of the progress of a police investigation, van de Wetering
respects the conventions of the detective genre, but the novels
incorporate jazz improvisation, shamanistic ritual, dreams, and
other crime-solving approaches not seen in ordinary police
precincts. The interplay between de Gier, Grijpstra, and the
commissaris is not the fixed routine of formulaic writing, but an
evolving process that reveals van de Wetering's increasing
ability to get beyond the limits of the detective genre.
    There are hints of this in Een Dode uit het Oosten ( The
Japanese Corpse ), which takes de Gier and the commissaris to
Japan to looking into the organized crime roots of a murder in
the Netherlands that Grijpstra is investigating. The sections
set in Japan are part travelogue and part reflection upon the
differences and resemblences between East and West, part thriller
and part philosophical digression. Except that the digressions
are not digressions but are woven into the fabric of the novel.
    Similarly, Het Werkbezoek ("The Working Visit," published as
The Maine Massacre), which in its French translation won the
Grand Prix Policier, brings the commissaris and de Gier to the
Maine woods in winter, where they solve a series of murders and
along the way encounter a very intellectual gang of young
nihilists and a rich hermit.
    In De Zaak IJsbreker ( Hard Rain ) van de Wetering pushed even
harder at the limits of the genre, for in this novel the three
cops act outside the law to solve murders linking a prominent
banker to prositution and the drug trade. Suspended from active
duty because of baseless charges fabricated by a corrupt
bureaucracy, the elderly commissaris encounters an adversary who
is in a sense his mirror-image, a man of his age and social class
who has chosen to follow the path of crime.
    After Hard Rain (1987), van de Wetering published no new
novels in the Amsterdam Cops series for more than six years. Van
de Wetering notes candidly,

Everything went well but my wife complained about my
drinking, mostly in Amsterdam, where I had become a celebrity,
and was spending a fair amount of my time. I quit (13 years ago
now) but my personality fell apart, I needed to build a new mask,
set up new habits. That process took eight years. Instead of
writing I was mostly puttering about in an old lobster yacht and
doing junk sculpture on my acres of coastal land. Gradually we
began to travel. Juanita and I visited Papua New Guinea and
Mexico. We discovered Key West and Arizona. By 1993 I began
writing again, using a new formula for my Amsterdam Cops. As
private detectives, financed by found drug millions, they can
finally be amoral.

Van de Wetering clarifies the focus of the new novels and his
use of the word amoral by citing a passage from Robert Powell's
epilogue to The Wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (Globe
Press/Blue Dove Press, 1992):

The point is that man freed from his fetters is morality
personified. Such a man therefore does not need any moralistic
injunctions in order to live righteously. Free a man from his
bondage and thereafter everything else will take care of itself.
On the other hand, man in his unredeemed state cannot possibly
live morally, no matter what moral teaching he is given. It is
an intrinsic impossibility, for his very foundation is
immorality. That is, he lives a lie, a basic contradiction:
functioning in all his relationships as the separate entity he
believes himself to be, whereas in reality no such separation
exists. His every action therefore does violence to other
`selves' and other `creatures,' which are only manifestations of
the unitary consciousness. So Society had to invent some
restraints in order to protect itself from its own worst excesses
and thereby maintain some kind of status quo. The resulting
arbitrary rules, which vary with place and time and therefore are
purely relative, it calls `morality,' and by upholding this
man-invented `idea' as the highest good -- oftentimes sanctioned
by religious `revelation' and scriptures -- society has provided
man with one more excuse to disregard the quest for liberation or
relegate it to a fairly low priority in his scheme of things.

    Van de Wetering observes, "Not so the commissaris, he is out
there, since his retirement quite free of current morality and
dragging his disciples along on weird and wonderful paths. Of
course they like being dragged, and will have some escapades of
their own, while being guided."
    Just a Corpse at Twilight (1994) was the first of these new
novels in the series to be published by Soho Press in New York
(also publishers of a uniform edition of the earlier novels in
the series). Much of the novel is set along the Maine coast (in
the same locale as The Maine Massacre), and it offers a glimpse
of the fundamental Dutchness of de Gier and Grijpstra as they
trace a murder back to its perpetrator against an American
backdrop. Spiritual questions are very much at the forefront.
    The most recent books in the series, The Hollow-Eyed
Angel (1996) and The Perfidious Parrot (1997), explore misdeeds
in New York City and the Caribbean, respectively, that prove to
have their roots in the Netherlands. (These books were reviewed
in the April 27, 1998, issue of AB together with Judge Dee Plays
His Lute, a new story collection.) In the autumn of 1999, Soho
Press issued a collection of short stories, The Amsterdam Cops.

Robert van Gulik

    Van de Wetering has published a wide variety of books outside
the Amsterdam Cops series for which he is best known. Perhaps
the most significant of these is Robert van Gulik: His Life, His
Work (1987), a profile of his compatriot and fellow mystery
author who created the Judge Dee series of novels set in ancient
China. "Writers tend to bare some of their usually hidden
thoughtlife while the typewriter hums and clacks, so even the
respected scholar/diplomat van Gulik may perhaps reveal himself
somewhat in his work. ... Van Gulik thoroughly enjoyed decribing
his lieutenants' adventures. Fantasy is connected to our
conscious and subconscious desires. The lieutenants were the
more material parts of his favorite hero." What van de Wetering
writes about van Gulik and his connections to Judge Dee, jovial
Ma Joong, and introverted Chiao Tai, applies equally well to his
own work: the commissaris, de Gier, and Grijpstra.
    This brief and complex biography was originally issued by
mystery specialist publisher Dennis McMillan in a signed edition
limited to 350 copies. The first edition of Robert van Gulik:
His Life, His Work is a small, carefully produced hardcover
volume with decorated red and gold endpapers and an illustrated
dustjacket. The 1998 Soho Press reprint in paperback adds a new
introduction by Arthur P. Yin; a hardcover reprint was initially
announced but was not produced.
    Van de Wetering had earlier been connected with a Dutch
reissue of van Gulik's novels, and in the biography he discussed
the reception of the Judge Dee books in the Netherlands, as well
as van Gulik's scholarship and translation of Chinese poetry. He
also treats one of van Gulik's less well-known works, The Given
Day, which describes events in the life of Mr. Hendricks, a
former colonial official from the Dutch East Indies.   In bleak
post-war Amsterdam, Hendricks finds himself caught up by accident
in the activities of an international drug gang. He also
confronts elements from his own past in the course of novel and
years after his experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese,
Hendricks puzzles out the Zen koan taught to him by his
interrogator, and finds a more meaningful understanding of his
own existence.
    Written in English and first published in an edition
privately printed in Malaysia in 1964, van Gulik's mystery novel
was first published in the United States as The Given Day: An
Amsterdam Mystery (San Antonio, Texas: Dennis McMillan
Publications, 1984), in an edition of 300 copies with an
afterword by van de Wetering. (This volume dropped one page of
the afterword although the pagination is not interrupted. The
1986 paperback reprint from the same publisher, with a Miami
Beach imprint, does not use the subtitle but contains the
complete text of the afterword.)
    Van de Wetering notes in his afterword, "The Given Day took
the Dutch critics by surprise, and most judged harshly. They
couldn't understand what the author had been up to and
vindictively banished the book to the trash heap. ... I handed
out copies of the manuscript to American friends who were mostly
disappointed. They wanted another Chinese thrilling tale ... The
force of habit. More of the same. Once we see something we can
appreciate we ask for endless repeats. Artistic development,
however, is subject to change. Picasso painted for years, then
tried to bake pots. Gillespie dropped traditional jazz patterns
and switched to bop. We do it ourselves; we may continue in a
given and successful direction for years on end until a crisis
makes us veer off. What we do afterward may not be as easily
understandable, or appreciated by others."
    Children's books by van de Wetering include Little Owl, a
discussion of the Buddhist Eightfold Path with black and white
illustrations by Marc Brown, and three books featuring the
adventures of Hugh Pine, a porcupine, and his friends. He has
also translated Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows into
Dutch.

Alexandra David-Neel

In the early 1980s, van de Wetering convinced his U.S. publisher,
Houghton Mifflin, to issue The Power of Nothingness, his
translation of La puissance du néant, one of three novels by
Alexandra David-Neel and her adopted son, Lama Albert Arthur
Yongden. The novel charts the adventures and frequent distractions
of Munpa, loyal servant of a hermit who appears to have been
murdered for a jewel he possessed. Van de Wetering remarked in
conversation that he had to rewrite certain passages, for David-Neel
was curiously prudish and repeatedly turned away from writing
about sex. The Power of Nothingness is, in a sense, a Tibetan murder
mystery novel, although questions of who was murdered, and by whom,
reveal themselves to be inextricably and comically linked with
questions of ultimate identity and egolessness. It is without doubt
the least well known and appreciated of van de Wetering's books.
    An illustrated mystery novel, Murder by Remote Control, was
written as a script outlining the panels of the "comic" strip and
"drawn conscientiously by Paul Kirchner, a most talented artist,
brother of a Zen monk I got to know in Japan." It was issued as
a lavish volume in the Netherlands in 1984 and as a paperback
original in the United States in 1986.
    Two other recent story collections of note have been issued
by specialty publishers. Mangrove Mama, a volume gathering
material from a variety of magazines as well as original stories,
was published in 1995 by Dennis McMillan, now located in Tucson,
Arizona. McMillan published both a trade edition and a signed
edition of 100 copies issued jointly with Wonderly Press of Bar
Harbor, Maine. In 1997, Wonderly Press published Judge Dee Plays
His Lute in a signed edition (150 copies) as well as in hardcover
and trade paperback. Stories in both of these collections
feature the Amsterdam Cops.
    Van de Wetering is at work upon further adventures of de
Gier, Grijpstra, and the commissaris, featuring settings as
varied as New Guinea and Arizona. He is also writing a variety
of shorter pieces, such as "Ganesh," a story exploring the
consequences of greed for a series on the seven sins planned by
his German publishers. Another fine novella, "A Walk in the Park,"
recounts an adventure of the commissaris on his own in Maine.
    About his reading of other writers, he notes, "In Australia I
read the collected works of Arthur Upfield, in America the
collected works of Charles Willeford. I also like Jim Thompson
and Frederic Exley (not quite birds of the same feather). Lately
I have been reading South American literature, I learned Spanish
when I worked in Colombia and Peru. I spent years reading
Chinese and Japanese literature, always in translation,
unfortunately."
    In warm weather, however, van de Wetering spends lots of time
boating.

Acknowledgements

This article draws upon an interview with Janwillem van de
Wetering conducted over the past several months. I would like to
acknowledge his generosity in responding to my questions about
his books and his life. Our correspondence has ranged far and
wide since I initially wrote to inquire about a mutual interest
in Robert van Gulik, about whom he recently noted, "My favorite
author is probably Robert van Gulik. I often think I am done with
him but then something comes up." I would also like to
acknowledge permission granted by Blue Dove Press of San Diego,
California, to reproduce the passage by Robert Powell from The
Wisdom of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

A van de Wetering Checklist

     The full history of van de Wetering's publishing career is
extremely complex: "I usually write in Dutch, then rewrite in
English. The English versions are shorter and I don't get too
exuberant with word play. Sometimes the plot lines differ, in
some books even the characters differ. I never aim to translate.
Many short stories were never written in Dutch. The other way
round too." In matters of pacing and structure, the Dutch text
of Het Werkbezoek, for example, differs noticeably from the novel
that English-language readers know as The Maine Masacre.
    Van de Wetering's novels have been translated into more than
a dozen languages; he is particularly popular in Germany, where a
new television series based upon his novels is in the works.
Outsider in Amsterdam and The Rattle-Rat were earlier filmed with
Rutger Hauer in a starring role.
    In the following checklist of books (in English) by Janwillem
van de Wetering, novels in the Amsterdam Cops series are marked
with an asterisk (*):

The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery.
    London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1973; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community.
    London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1975; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
Outsider in Amsterdam.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975; London: Heinemann, 1976.*
Tumbleweed.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; London: Heinemann, 1976.*
The Corpse on the Dike.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; London: Heinemann, 1977.*
Death of a Hawker.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977; London: Heinemann, 1977.*
The Japanese Corpse.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977; London: Heinemann, 1977.*
The Blond Baboon.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978; London: Heinemann, 1978.*
The Maine Massacre.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979; London: Heinemann, 1979.*
Little Owl: An Eighfold Buddhist Admonition.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
Hugh Pine.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.
Hugh Pine and The Good Place.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
The Mind-Murders.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981; London: Heinemann, 1981.*
The Power of Nothingness. Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden.
    Translated by Janwillem van de Wetering. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.
The Butterfly Hunter.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982; London: Severn House, 1983.
Bliss and Bluster; or, How to Crack a Nut.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Illustrated by Joe Servello.
Hugh Pine and Something Else.
    Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
The Streetbird.
    New York: Putnam, 1983; London: Gollancz, 1984.*
The Rattle-Rat.
    New York: Pantheon, 1985; London: Gollancz, 1986.*
Inspector Saito's Small Satori.
    New York: Putnam, 1985; London: Gollancz, 1985.
Murder by Remote Control.
    New York: Ballantine Books/Available Press, 1986. Designed and illustrated by Paul Kirchner.
Robert Van Gulik: His Life, His Work.
    Miami Beach, Florida: Dennis McMillan Publications, 1987; New York: Soho, 1998.
Hard Rain.
    New York: Pantheon, 1986; London: Gollancz, 1987.*
The Sergeant's Cat and Other Stories.
    New York: Pantheon, 1987; London: Gollancz, 1988.*
Distant Danger.
    New York: Wynwood Press, 1988. Mystery Writers of America Anthology, edited by van de Wetering.
Seesaw Millions.
    New York: Ballantine, 1988; London: Gollancz, 1988.
Just Another Corpse at Twilight.
    New York: Soho, 1994.*
Mangrove Mama & Other Tropical Tales of Terror.
    Tucson, Arizona: Dennis McMillan Publications, 1995.
The Hollow-Eyed Angel.
    New York: Soho, 1996.*
The Perfidious Parrot.
    New York: Soho, 1997.*
Judge Dee Plays His Lute: A Play and Selected Mystery Stories.
    Bar Harbor, Maine: Wonderly Press, 1997.*
Afterzen.
    New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Amsterdam Cops.
    New York: Soho, 1999.*

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