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A review by graciado
The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
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.