= Extremely rare and collectable with the beautifully designed wrappers showing a nude woman. The story goes that the Japanese publisher only agreed to publish the detective story if a a naked lady would be shown on the frontwrapper to boost its sales. The Chinese Maze Murders was written by Van Gulik in English, but first published in Chinese in Van Gulik's own translation in 1950, then in this Japanese translation in 1951 - both editions extremely hard to obtain - not before 1956 a first Dutch translation was published alongside the first English language edition (both The Hague, 1956).