Eine Chance bekommt er noch... Aber ich habe das Gefühl, der Herr Dürrenmatt und ich passen einfach nicht zusammen. ( )

#427 in our old book database. Not rated.

I'm not really a fan of crime/mystery novels, but I didnt mind reading this book. It felt a bit like being dropped into the middle of a larger conflict (between Barlach and his nemesis), but it still read fine as a standalone novel. The real villain was a bit predictable though 9I figured it out when he was being overly flirtatious with the dead man's wife the day after his funeral), but he was clearly meant to be a distraction from the main conflict. ( )

Il protagonista di questo libro è il vecchio commissario Bärlach che, con il suo assistente Tschanz, è chiamato ad indagare su un caso di omicidio che ha coinvolto un tenente della polizia di Berna.
Il primo che viene accusato dell'omicidio è una vecchia conoscenza del commissario, Gastmann, un uomo con le mani in pasta negli affari politici del paese. I due si conoscono perchè molti anni prima il commissario ha visto Gastmann commettere un omicidio davanti ai suoi occhi ma non ha potuto mai dimostrarne la colpevolezza.
Adesso Bärlach si sente di dover far giustizia per il presente e il passato, ma le cose non sono sempre come sembrano.
E' il secondo romanzo di Dürrenmatt che leggo e mi piace il modo rapido e conciso con cui descrive persone e situazioni. Ho ritrovato anche la sua continua ricerca atta ad evidenziare come spesso la verità dei fatti e la verità della giustizia poliziesca non siano congruenti.
Anche se non scrive thriller mozzafiato dai ritmi serrati per me Dürrenmatt resta un ottimo giallista che riesce sempre, in poche pagine, a creare una tensione e una curiosità che ti lasciano incollato al libro fino alla verità (della vita o della giustizia che sia). ( )

"The difference between humans and wild animals is that humans pray before they commit murder."
-Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990), Swiss novelist and dramatist

In his short review of this extraordinary novel, my good friend Mark Hebwood from London wrote: "Loved it! This is a bit like taking the essence of detective novels and distilling it down to concentrate. Great plot, excellent twists, and great finale. I immediately bought all other detective novels he wrote."

Thanks, Mark! Likewise, all Friedrich Dürrenmatt detective novels are now on my to-be-read list. And I’m not usually a fan of detective mysteries, to say the least - other than a handful of those old classics like Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Hammett’s The Thin Man, no dick fiction for me, thank you. But I am a big fan of tight, penetrating existential novels such as The Stranger and Nausea, and, let me tell you, The Judge and His Hangman is every bit as tight and as penetrating and as existential as these two French classics.

To say anything about plot more than a brief sketch would be to say too much since nearly every page contains subtle turns and developments that will keep a reader mesmerized from beginning to end. And that’s not overstatement as I’m not the only one to pass such a glowing judgement - literary critic and acclaimed author, Kay Boyle, likewise wrote how this Swiss novel holds the reader mesmerized. Usually I take my time with a novel but once I read the first page of The Judge and His Hangman I was hooked – I finished its one hundred pages in one evening, in one sitting.

Anyway, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s work features old, stogy, fatally ill Commissioner Barlach working on the case of a murdered police officer. The location is in Switzerland, in and around the capital of Berne. There is an element of political intrigue; there’s tension between new school criminology and old-school, small town Barlach; there’s a string of intriguing characters, including a pompous Congressman-Colonel, a bureaucratic chief of police and, one of my personal favorites, a novelist. But, above all, there is the philosophic: the battle of good versus evil, nihilism versus any moral sense, and what it means to live an authentic human life. An absolute must read for anyone attracted to either existentialism or detective novels.


Berne, Switzerland, location of this Friedrich Dürrenmatt novel published in 1950 ( )