For the nation of Switzerland, I read The Inspector Barlach Mysteries, a collection of strange detective stories by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss writer mostly known for his plays. He wrote a few detective stories, and two of them are in this collection. These stories subvert the genre’s conventions and are as much about 1945 Munich as they are about 1955 Bern.
Inspector Barlach is an aging, ill police detective who has studied criminology by working at police departments around the world before returning to Bern from Frankfurt in 1935, after slapping a high-ranking member of the new German government. Over time, this incident went from being seen as an outrage to downright acceptable. His international experiences not only gave Barlach a deep understanding of psychology, but they also allowed him to meet a motley cast of folks who come to see him in Switzerland.
Switzerland is famed for its political neutrality, its semi-anonymous financial system and art freeports, and its chocolate. All of these make it a strange geopolitical player, punching well above its 9 million in population.
This particular collection has two novellas, The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion. The first shows an astute understanding of criminal psychology and highlights how Switzerland’s unique position in Europe brings together unusual people. The second is specifically about people who lived through Germany’s Nazi era, and it asks about to what extent Hitler’s reign damaged people or was a haven for people who were already damaged. Dürrenmatt’s stories don’t follow a traditional setup, exposition, plot twist format. Instead, they focus on why people do what they do.
Some of Dürrenmatt’s characterizations are badly dated, but overally, I thought this was an interesting book. I love detective stories, so I really appreciated the way that these deviated from formula.
