The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt Nine out of 10

 The Pledge by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Nine out of 10

Requiem for the Detective Novel aka Kriminalroman was the subtitle of the novel and apparently the goal of the author, who states as much inside the book, which has been included on The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction - in the Crime Department, and has been adapted for the big screen, with the legendary Jack Nicholson in the title role – the iconic artist seems to have a penchant for German stories, for the latest wonderful cinematic tale that has attracted his attention is the sublime Tony Erdmann, filmed in our lands, with a cast that includes some of our best.

The Pledge seems to be perfect, indeed I am wondering why I gave it nine and not ten points out of ten – though I know, first of all because I hesitated and that means it cannot be a perfect story for this reader, who has had the habit of giving 11, when he felt like splashing about – and that could be in part due to the sometimes academic intentions and at other times a feeling of artificiality, the sense that policemen, even in the county of Zurich, would not speak like that and some aspects do not feel credible, starting with the idea that Matthai, the would be chief investigator, refuses to travel to Jordan, where he is assigned and has signed a contract no less, obliging him to go to Amman and teach those officials there how they do things in the near perfect and admired Switzerland…

Otherwise, there is an interesting twist and start to the narrative, which has one story teller, only to switch to another, for the first narrator mentions a lecture, then a meeting with Dr. H, retired police chief for the Zurich county, during which the interlocutors ingurgitate five whiskeys and then decide to drive in the Opel Komandant of Dr. H., a journey through some ‘mountains without majesty, which look like piles of earth from a huge grave’- they should tell that to the late Thomas Mann, who wrote one of the best ever novels, The Magic Mountain, set in that glorious landscape or nearby - http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-magic-mountain-by-thomas-mann.html

Dr. H. is very critical of the manner in which the Kriminalroman is written, following Logic, whereas in real life, investigators have to rely on chance, and where things do not happen in the ordained, structured manner that we see in the common detective novel, wherein a buildup is meant to increase tension, have readers capitated to the end where we offer the motive, the rationality and finally the guilty party, who comes logically into the net of the clever officers…his experience shows it is not mathematics, it is happenstance and then he refers to the wreck they have just encounters at a rather dilapidated gas station, where there was a bar, a young woman who looked very old was serving in a glum atmosphere, but the attendant used to be the right hand of Dr. H., when they both worked at the Zurich county police…

A call comes through, on one of the last days on the job for Matthai – the one that Dr. H. calls a genius of police work – for he is about to depart, in a couple of days, for Jordan, to start training the police force there, but he travels to the small town of Magendorf, near Zurich, where he meets with a peddler, von Guten, in  a bar, and then he is taken to the nearby woods, where the body of a girl is found, bloody…she was killed with a razor, such as the peddler has for sale in his basket, together with brushes, soap and other items, but it is the fact that he has razors that would be an element used against him.

Indeed, the forty eight  years old man becomes a suspect immediately, and it is not the police that wants to make him pay right away, but the villagers, who have gathered for what looks like a potential lynching of the ‘killer’, the man that they are sure is responsible, given that they know each other in such a small locality, they saw that the police came to talk to him, they have him inside the van and thus the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ has concluded – by the way, larger crowds, if not the majority of Americans, where three million more voted for the other side, have elected the Ultimate Man slaughterer (not intentionally, but through sheer incompetence and stupidity) to be their Cult leader – that the peddler is the murderer…

Matthai shows he is a peculiar, outré character – and one that contributes to the extraction of one star form the assessment of the work – when he goes to the crowd that is about to revenge the death of the child and says to them that they can have their man and do their deed – which appalls the prosecutor and feels somewhat artificious – as long as they can ensure that they have the means to do justice…for they, the officials, have a huge strength, they can appeal to international organizations, they can have immense means at their disposal to analyze the data and when he questions the witnesses, they find that one is unreliable, another fell asleep while the horses  drew the cart and thus he convinces the masses to let them have their man…

It is alas a short reprieve for von Guten, because the interrogators at the station would be convinced that he did it, since first of all he has a record and has had a sexual offence, which involved a fourteen year old - since that victim was older than the dead child, Matthai would argue later that this is not their man – then he is the one who has found the body and therefore he has been clearly near it, he has blood on his clothes, which he explains by saying he has stumbled over the corpse, he has razors in his basket and has been found to lie on some details, because he was afraid that they will believe…exactly what they all seem to be convinced of…that this is their man, the beats that has killed an innocent child…

Since they interrogate him for twenty hours or more, the accused appears to have passed the limit, he confesses to the killing, but then when he is sent to a cell, he commits suicide, making Matthai accept in the first place the widely, in fact unanimously embraced theory that the peddler has killed himself feeling guilty of the vicious murder he had committed…but when he reaches the airport to fly to Amman, the investigative genius stops before the airplane and tells the flight attendant that he is not flying and then against the wrath of the superiors, who have placed reputations on the line and international prestige, plus a contract, he withdraws from the official position, no longer working as a state employee and then continuing on his own.

People are upset to find that he drinks and furthermore, he becomes an attendant at a gas station, near Zürich, where the criminal world, once out of jail, lines up to fill the tanks, because they like the idea of using the services of this former top cop, who has nonetheless a cunning, if quite vicious plan…to use another child, similar to the one who has died, and two other previous victims – for we are to conclude that the killer of Magendorf had been responsible for the murder of two other children in the Zurich neighborhood – as bait for the monster…