Curiously, one of the few bastions of the black gender In Switzerland, when the police began to spill over into other types of plots with a darker component back in the middle of the XNUMXth century, it ended up being a Durrenmatt that he sometimes painted and wrote scripts for theater or radio. Even so, she gave him time to focus her novelistic side on those types of stories that had nothing to do with his other creative performances.
This man orchestra left a vanguard residue in narrating the disturbing adventures and misadventures of police officers or investigators in charge of unraveling crimes everywhere. And in his quest to surprise in the plot, Dürrenmatt found a curious symbiosis between classic detective and suspense.
Because in his plots he addressed the usual deductive approach with an introduction into the psyche of the criminal. Stories that suggested but also took us into the motives for killing, the coldness of the murderer on duty or the strength of the passions capable of everything ...
With special prominence for its curator Bärlach, everything that happens in the novels of this genius happens between the improvisation of evil or the most perverse treachery ...
Top 3 recommended novels of Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The suspicion
In a certain way, Dürrenmatt's dramaturgical side also unfolds in novels like this one. Coincidences, chance, destiny. Life as a script where the scenes come upon us with a brilliant stagehand effect, until the curtain ends up falling, whether or not there is applause in that passage through the scene from every inhabitant of this world...
After a delicate surgical operation, which may extend his life a little longer, Commissioner Bärlach, in his hospital bed, reads, curiously and symbolically, a copy of Life magazine. A photograph published there awakens in the doctor who has just operated on him the suspicion that the infamous Dr. Nehle, who performed operations without anesthesia in the Stutthof concentration camp, could be the current director of a private Swiss clinic.
From that moment on, Bärlach undertakes a risky investigation that will lead him, through an amazing trajectory full of monsters, to a denouement that he could never imagine.
Justice
Nothing more disconcerting than a makeshift killer. Because deep down, it is not. Animosity is ruminated as a bitter consequence of something. In this novel, the modus operandi is as relevant as the ultimate motive that can lead to murder as a response to a fear or hatred stagnant in the soul like a tumor.
While accompanying an English minister to the airport, the cantonal councilor Isaak Kohler stops the official car in front of a restaurant, gets out, crosses the crowded room and, with one shot, kills Professor Winter, a bored humanist. Later, Kohler not only does not flee, but that night he goes to a concert where he is finally arrested. Despite being sentenced to twenty years in prison, the Machiavellian Kohler tries to prove that he is not guilty.
The judge and his executioner
The role of the judge as the ultimate defense of justice. The possibility that the conscience could end up being a prey to temptations. Nobody watches the guards in the same way that the judges can believe that nobody judges them ...
When Police Lieutenant Schmied is found dead in his car, on a small mountain road very close to Bern, the investigation falls to Commissioner Hans Bärlach, who is about to retire and is not exactly in his prime. With apathy (or is it perhaps serenity?) And bad temper (perhaps due to severe stomach pains that do not bode well), but with determination, Bärlach begins to unravel the case with the help of another agent. The truth is that they have very few clues. Soon the examining magistrate, Lucius Lutz, an old acquaintance of the commissioner, urges him to capture the murderer.
