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iammmartina_'s review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Murder, Violence, Adult/minor relationship, Pedophilia, Death, and Suicide
Moderate: Blood and Mental illness
Minor: Alcohol, Car accident, and Alcoholism
graciado's review
4.0
How could any lover of detective fiction not read something with this subtitle? Dürrenmatt was a critic of detective fiction and its usual tropes, and this novel plays with several of them in a way that tries to show them as moribund. (Of course, readers of detective fiction often read the genre for precisely this quality of "the same happening to the same".) The novella conjures up a feeling of despair in the search for the truth, not unfamiliar to us now in many detective stories, where answers are often not forthcoming, and justice is even further away.
The novel takes a meta approach to framing its central story about the pledge—a promise made by Detective Matthäi to a dead girl's mother to find her killer, no matter what. The story is related by Dr H, now retired, but formerly Matthäi's boss, to a first-person narrator standing in for Dürrenmatt, a fiction writer specialising in the detective genre, who is in town lecturing on the subject. It details in sparse prose the story of an obsessive search for a killer that ends only in futility, and Dr H criticises how detective fiction endings usually require success, while his 'real-life' story does not.
Matthäi disbelieves the confession of the police's initial suspect in the killing of the young girl and suspects a serial killer targeting children, but the force's consensus is that the killer has been caught and the case should be closed. Finding the true killer becomes an obsession, and Matthäi is warned by everyone, including a psychiatrist, that he may be chasing a phantom, which will drive him crazy, but to no avail.
Matthäi pursues the case into his retirement, and he builds what he believes is a detailed picture of the way that the killer chose his victims. He takes up running a petrol station on the road he believes the killer drives through the area, and he employs a housekeeper with a young daughter (Annemarie) who resembles other murdered girls. Annemarie becomes Matthäi's bait, and he apparently succeeds, with her entering into secretive exchanges with an unknown man. Believing this to be the killer, Matthäi successfully convinces the police to lie in wait, but the man never arrives, and Matthäi's final shreds of credibility are entirely gone. Insanity and alcoholism await, and Matthäi dies never knowing that in fact he was entirely correct, but the killer had died on his way to the meeting with Annemarie (and the hidden police).
This idea of justice evaded, and a police force willing to settle for a closed case rather than a true answer, are not new, and in a way are themselves a form of detective fiction's "the same happening to the same". However, Dürrenmatt's rendition of those tropes is an enjoyable one to read, and the impossibility of escaping fully the genre's repetitions is its own sort of futile struggle! I particularly like how Dürrenmatt's fiction is propelled along by his characters' dialogue, which has a great ring to it, such as the great line, "in the police force, after all, we cannot observe regulations to the letter".
More importantly for Dürrenmatt's thinking about the genre, Dr H also directly criticises the (pseudo)scientific method of detecting that is often posited in detective fiction, from Holmes onwards. The precision with which a detective can trace and trap a criminal is constantly overstated in the genre, he argues; real policework involves too many random occurrences to ever work that way. This novella is therefore an interesting precursor to the thinking in my book chapter on the extraordinary sidekick figure in modern TV detective stories; real policework must be supplemented by an extraordinary figure who can bridge that gap. Dürrenmatt's frustration with the 'puzzle box' or 'chess game' approach to detective fiction is in part a reaction to the Golden Age structure and Knox's 10 rules, but the roots of that approach go much further back into the start of the genre itself.
The novel takes a meta approach to framing its central story about the pledge—a promise made by Detective Matthäi to a dead girl's mother to find her killer, no matter what. The story is related by Dr H, now retired, but formerly Matthäi's boss, to a first-person narrator standing in for Dürrenmatt, a fiction writer specialising in the detective genre, who is in town lecturing on the subject. It details in sparse prose the story of an obsessive search for a killer that ends only in futility, and Dr H criticises how detective fiction endings usually require success, while his 'real-life' story does not.
Matthäi disbelieves the confession of the police's initial suspect in the killing of the young girl and suspects a serial killer targeting children, but the force's consensus is that the killer has been caught and the case should be closed. Finding the true killer becomes an obsession, and Matthäi is warned by everyone, including a psychiatrist, that he may be chasing a phantom, which will drive him crazy, but to no avail.
Matthäi pursues the case into his retirement, and he builds what he believes is a detailed picture of the way that the killer chose his victims. He takes up running a petrol station on the road he believes the killer drives through the area, and he employs a housekeeper with a young daughter (Annemarie) who resembles other murdered girls. Annemarie becomes Matthäi's bait, and he apparently succeeds, with her entering into secretive exchanges with an unknown man. Believing this to be the killer, Matthäi successfully convinces the police to lie in wait, but the man never arrives, and Matthäi's final shreds of credibility are entirely gone. Insanity and alcoholism await, and Matthäi dies never knowing that in fact he was entirely correct, but the killer had died on his way to the meeting with Annemarie (and the hidden police).
This idea of justice evaded, and a police force willing to settle for a closed case rather than a true answer, are not new, and in a way are themselves a form of detective fiction's "the same happening to the same". However, Dürrenmatt's rendition of those tropes is an enjoyable one to read, and the impossibility of escaping fully the genre's repetitions is its own sort of futile struggle! I particularly like how Dürrenmatt's fiction is propelled along by his characters' dialogue, which has a great ring to it, such as the great line, "in the police force, after all, we cannot observe regulations to the letter".
More importantly for Dürrenmatt's thinking about the genre, Dr H also directly criticises the (pseudo)scientific method of detecting that is often posited in detective fiction, from Holmes onwards. The precision with which a detective can trace and trap a criminal is constantly overstated in the genre, he argues; real policework involves too many random occurrences to ever work that way. This novella is therefore an interesting precursor to the thinking in my book chapter on the extraordinary sidekick figure in modern TV detective stories; real policework must be supplemented by an extraordinary figure who can bridge that gap. Dürrenmatt's frustration with the 'puzzle box' or 'chess game' approach to detective fiction is in part a reaction to the Golden Age structure and Knox's 10 rules, but the roots of that approach go much further back into the start of the genre itself.
esperias's review against another edition
2.0
Non mi è per niente piaciuto, l’ho trovato scontato, ripetitivo ricco di pagine inutili. Un libro corto ma che mi è sembrato infinitamente lungo.
La trama è semplice, un classico giallo, ma poco sviluppato
La trama è semplice, un classico giallo, ma poco sviluppato
rotten_flesh's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
aradhyatrivedi's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
lazylys's review against another edition
5.0
L'antigiallo per eccellenza, un libro breve ed intenso, e assolutamente imperdibile.
All'uscita di una conferenza in una piccola cittadina Svizzera, uno scrittore di gialli accetta il passaggio in macchina di un ex comandante della polizia di Zurigo che, durante il viaggio, gli racconta un vecchio caso di omicidio, volendo mostrare come la finzione narrativa non abbia logica quando applicata alla realtà.
La promessa è un autentico gioiellino.
All'uscita di una conferenza in una piccola cittadina Svizzera, uno scrittore di gialli accetta il passaggio in macchina di un ex comandante della polizia di Zurigo che, durante il viaggio, gli racconta un vecchio caso di omicidio, volendo mostrare come la finzione narrativa non abbia logica quando applicata alla realtà.
La promessa è un autentico gioiellino.
zmorgason's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
4.0
fabio10's review
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.25