In the preface, van Gulik describes some of the problems (as he saw it) with traditional Chinese murder mysteries. First, the criminal is introduced at the very start of the story and his crime and reasons are carefully explained, so removing any mystery from the story at the start. Second, the stories always have a supernatural element with ghosts telling people about their death and even accusing the criminal. Third, the stories were filled with digressions into philosophy, the complete text of official documents, and much more, making for very long books. Fourth, Chinese novels tended to have a huge cast of characters (200 or more) and these characters are all described as to their relation to the various main actors in the story. Lastly, the Chinese writers spent little time on the details of how the crime was committed and great deal of time on describing the torture of the criminals, even going on into their further torments in one of the various hells for the damned.