History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10 · Translated from German

• Plot: A Bern police lieutenant is found shot in his car, and his dying superior takes the case, which turns out to be the last move in a forty-year wager.
• Clues: Few in the usual sense. The book shows how evidence can be arranged to convict the right man of the wrong crime.
• Reveal: A double turn that recasts the detective rather than the killer.

Dürrenmatt was a playwright, and this short novel, first serialised in a Swiss magazine, has a dramatist’s economy. Lieutenant Schmied is found dead in his car on a road above Lake Biel. His chief, Commissioner Bärlach, is old, hiding a fatal stomach illness, and close to retirement. He hands the case to an ambitious young officer, Tschanz, and follows at a distance.

The trail leads to Gastmann, a wealthy, untouchable man whose parties draw diplomats and industrialists. Bärlach knows him of old. Decades earlier, in Turkey, the two made a bet: Gastmann claimed he could commit a crime in front of Bärlach that could never be proved. He did. Bärlach has spent his career failing to bring him down.

That wager is the book’s real subject. Dürrenmatt cares less about who shot Schmied than about whether justice is possible when evidence can be manipulated and power protects itself. His answer is disturbing. Bärlach turns out to be less a detective than a strategist, and the book leaves you uneasy about methods it has quietly endorsed.

Switzerland here is no postcard. Its politicians and officials are cautious, compromised, and more worried about a wealthy man’s foreign connections than a dead policeman. Dürrenmatt skewers this with dry humour, including a gargantuan meal that becomes a scene of confrontation.

The book is very short, and several characters are sketches. The plain prose can feel abrupt in translation. But few crime novels do so much in so few pages. The 8 is for an elegant, sardonic moral puzzle that reads in an evening and lingers far longer. It is also the natural prelude to The Pledge, where Dürrenmatt takes the detective story apart entirely.