The Lie

I am so full of meh about this book that I hardly know what to say. It’s a doppelgänger book, and author Petra Hammesfahr has been hailed as the German Patricia Highsmith, so what could go wrong? To be honest, I’m not sure that anything went particularly wrong, but it doesn’t go particularly right either, so I’m left feeling … meh.

In the prologue, a 14-year-old finds a body in a dumpster, a woman whose face has been disfigured and whose hands have been burned. We’re told that the police thought they had solved the crime but that they were wrong.

The first chapter begins four months earlier, when Susanne Lasko has a chance encounter with a more fashionable and elegant version of herself. This woman, Nadia Trenkler, soon enlists Susanne to help her get some time away with her lover. All Susanne will have to do is to pretend to be Nadia so that Nadia’s husband doesn’t suspect. Susanne, who’s been out of work for a while and is having no luck finding a new job, agrees. Given the prologue, you can imagine what the results might be.

I can’t quite put my finger on what about this book didn’t work for me. The plotting is competent, although it dragged at times and got more complex than it needed to be. I wouldn’t say the story was filled with surprises, but I couldn’t consistently predict precisely where it was going, so that’s okay … but only okay. Susanne herself was not an especially interesting protagonist. I sympathized with her situation, but as a person, she was bland. Some of the blandness was probably intentional, to show that this is an ordinary person getting mixed up in a big crazy mess, and she was one of the only characters I cared about at all, but I felt like I was caring for an idea of a person, the way you’d care about any theoretical person who’s down on her luck. There was nothing specific about her to interest me. I did finish the book and never gave much thought to giving up because I was curious as to where the twisty plot was headed, so it did keep me that interested.

For me, the fascination of doppelgängers is in the whole idea of identity and what makes us who we are, and I would have liked more of a focus on that than on the twists and turns of who’s betraying whom and how. Susanne spends a lot of time living another woman’s life, and the psychological implications of that are brushed over. Instead, it’s all about whether and how she’ll slip up. I was hoping for something meatier, but this was mostly a plotty thriller. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what I’d expect from an author hailed as the German Patricia Highsmith.

A Kiss Before Dying (audio)

I haven’t been including audiobooks in my international crime spree, partly because the suitable pickings at my library are slim. So Ira Levin’s 1953 debut, A Kiss Before Dying, doesn’t fit with the international theme, but it is a crime novel. In fact, it’s a few different kinds of crime novel all rolled into one surprisingly coherent package. Levin ingeniously takes a psychological crime novel that puts readers into the mind of a murderer and turns it into a whodunit of sorts, complete with an intrepid amateur detective, multiple suspects, subtle and unsubtle clues, and heaps of misdirection. Then, he caps it off with a section of full-blown suspense, in which readers know the score from the beginning but don’t know how things will turn out.

The book begins with a young couple in trouble. The young woman has just discovered she’s pregnant, ruining her and her boyfriend’s plan to wait until they finish college to get married. She’s ready to go ahead and tie the knot, but he worries that her rich father will abandon them to a life of poverty. Determined to get out of his commitment, he grows increasingly desperate and eventually turns to a truly cold-blooded murder. And this is just the first. Two other women soon fall into his orbit, and once again, he callously arranges circumstances to his own benefit.

The plot is just about perfectly constructed, filled with twists and reversals that left me breathless. The second section in particular is stunning, creating levels of just about unbearable tension. I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen because there were so many plausible possibilities. I’m not going to say much more because this is a book that I do believe can be spoiled if you know too much. In fact, I’m going to plead with you not to even go so far as to look at the Wikipedia page for the book or the movie because they both casually drop a major bombshell. This is a novel that relies on surprise—don’t deprive yourself of that pleasure if you’re thinking of reading it. Just go read it.

My only complaint about this book is that the women are all so easily duped and end up relying on men to get them out of trouble. And it’s a minor complaint, given that the book was written in 1953 and is all about a sociopath with irresistible charm. It’s just that these women seemed a little too ready to be charmed by anyone with the right line, and it got frustrating. But again, this is a minor complaint! Don’t let it put you off. Just don’t be looking for girl power here. It’s a masterpiece of plotting, not a masterpiece of girl power.

The audio production is quite good. Reader Mauro Hantman employs a slow, deliberate tone, which suits the killer’s cold-blooded calculations. Other characters are voiced well, with each one sounding different enough from the others to make the dialogues easy to follow. And he doesn’t make the error of trying to alter his voice excessively when reading women’s dialogue. I was pleased with it.

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin. Narrated by Mauro Hantman. 8 hrs., 44 minutes. Audio edition published by AudioGo, 2011. Review copy courtesy of Audiobook Jukebox’s Solid Gold Reviewer program.

The Name of the Rose

Seeking knowledge is like walking through a labyrinth. One fact leads to another and another as you wind around its path. Some facts lead you away from the ultimate answer you’re seeking. Others might be hidden behind secret walls that you can’t pass through without some additional knowledge. Sometimes you’ll find yourself doubling back, revisiting information you’ve already passed through. You may despair of ever reaching the center, or you may decide that the journey is as important as the destination.

In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the idea of knowledge as a labyrinth is given shape in the form of a library that actually is a labyrinth. This library, housed at the 14th-century Italian monastery, may contain the key to a series of murders that have taken place there. Investigating the murders is the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, who has come to the monastery with a novice Benedictine monk named Adso—the novel’s narrator—to help settle a theological conflict. When William and Adso arrive, the first death, an apparent suicide, has just occurred. Before long, there’s another death—this one an obvious murder—and the quest begins in earnest.

The murder mystery is one of several vehicles within the novel for discussing how people pursue truth. As he’s investigating, William gets into long conversations with the monks about such questions as whether laughter is sinful or whether poverty is a virtue. (The latter belief among the Franciscans is a source of significant conflict and one of the questions William has come to the monastery to address.) For many readers, these conversations are likely to seem pointless and distracting, but they’re key to the novel as they illustrate the way the characters think. In the end, we see that significant clues appear in some of the conversations. In addition, all of them circle around big epistemological questions. Epistemology—how we know what we know—is the theme; the murder mystery is but one example of how we see it play out. Here’s how William describes his approach:

In the case of some inexplicable facts you must try to imagine many general laws, whose connection with your facts escapes you. Then suddenly, in the unexpected connection of a result, a specific situation, and one of those laws, you perceive a line of reasoning that seems more convincing than the others. You try applying it to all similar cases, to use it for making predictions, and you discover that  your intuition was right. But until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit. And this is what I am doing now. I line up so many disjointed elements and I venture some hypotheses. I have to venture many, and many of them are so absurd that I would be ashamed to tell them to you.

William’s hypotheses do lead him in a useful direction, but not in an obvious way. He gets a lot of things wrong, but his activities naturally influence the murderer. A pattern emerges that might not have appeared otherwise, and the pursuer and pursued end up in a strange collaboration as they “read” each other’s actions.

One of my favorite seminary classes was in medieval theology, and I loved being re-introduced to the medieval way of thinking in this book. (Actually, I think Eco might say that modern thought is so colored by medieval thought that we’ve never gotten away from it, nor should we want to.) It’s easy to mischaracterize the Middle Ages in Europe as the “Dark Ages” and ignore the incredible intellectual work that was done during the period. Eco delves deeply into religious, philosophical, and political thinking of the time and shows how sophisticated it truly was. In his lengthy postscript to the novel, he remarks that several readers identified some of the characters’ statements as being too modern, and those statements were always drawn directly from 14th-century sources.

On the flip side, Eco doesn’t act as an apologist for the period. William himself is a former Inquisitor who gave up his post in disgust at the use of torture and other corrupt practices. The church itself is shown to be horribly compromised, although there are enough bright spots to keep the novel from feeling like a diatribe against the church. Eco also lets the medieval characters be medieval, with all the unfortunate attitudes toward women and sex that this includes. This is not historical fiction in which to be good is to have 21st-century values.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. I’m not sure it’s a book for every reader, although I do think it’s the most accessible of the three novels by Eco that I’ve read (the others being Foucault’s Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery). There are points when it drags, and it’s sometimes hard to follow the political machinations in the background. In his postscript, Eco says that he went against his editor’s advice to trim the opening chapters because he wanted to use those sometimes turgid passages to develop ideal readers who would go where he was willing to take them. I’m not sure I’m quite his ideal reader, but I was more than willing to go along on this ride, and I think it’s one I would enjoy taking again.

If you decide to read this, I strongly recommend that you get an edition with Eco’s postscript; in fact, the postscript by itself is a great read, filled with information about Eco’s method and about the nature of writing, reading, and knowledge. A fascinating capstone to a thrilling novel.

Translated by William Weaver.

The Sweetness of Life

This is the first book I’ve read in my international crime spree that was published this century. I admit I was skeptical. I tend to think that contemporary thrillers are often fairly formulaic, eagerly adding torture and piling up the (yawn) serially murdered bodies instead of deepening character or giving the narrator a twisty strategy or two. Barbara Vine could give lessons, but do they listen? Mostly, they do not. However, Paulus Hochgatterer, an Austrian author and child therapist, won the European Union Prize for Literature for The Sweetness of Life, so I thought I would give it a try.

In fact, I was pleasantly surprised at how gripping it was. It takes place in a small and apparently tranquil Austrian town. Events are unleashed by a particularly gruesome murder: an elderly man’s head is completely crushed, and afterward his granddaughter Katerina won’t say a word. The police superintendant, Kovacs, and Raffael Horn, the child psychiatrist who is treating Katerina, are both working toward the same end — finding the murderer —  though their paths never cross.

But the book has a very loose structure. Horn works in psychiatry at the local hospital, and he sees all kinds of broken and damaged people, from Herr Schmidiger, who is a grinning sadist with his children, to poor sad Heidemarie, who only wants her parents to acknowledge her. He sees drug addicts and postnatal depression, alcoholics with the DTs and elderly men with post-traumatic stress disorder from the second World War, patients who see visions and patients who have entire invented families, elaborate fantasies that sustain them in their daily lives. Reading these sections is like lifting the corner of perception and seeing something new, something you always suspected might be there. The previously tranquil town feels claustrophobic, and yet the possibility of healing remains.

Other sections visit those broken minds more closely. There are sections narrated by a priest on the verge of going insane, and others by a young boy following the instructions of his sociopathic older brother. Which of these committed the murder? In fact, the murder itself loses impact as we follow one person after another. The book is more about the thoughts and lives of the people in the town than it is about the killer or the victim. I didn’t see that as a downside, necessarily, but if you’re looking for a straightforward mystery formula, you won’t find it here. I will say that it worked less well for some characters than for others. Horn’s wife, Irene, for instance, was a wonderful character, but her uneasy relationship with her son was hinted at rather than explored, because we were too busy looking at other fascinating people.

For me, this book was a pleasure to read and yet extremely difficult to continue. One of the main reasons I read is to understand the human condition, so reading about all these case histories — so well- and so sympathetically-told — was fascinating. I wanted there to be even more. The book lacked the normal misogyny of thrillers, as well; the women characters were real people. The book was well-written and well-observed, and I really enjoyed reading it. On the other hand, there were a couple of extremely graphic, gruesome descriptions of violence, and there were children in peril, two elements that I find it very, very hard to read about (particularly the latter, now that I am a mother.) I had to keep taking breaks from the book, but I also had to keep picking it back up again, and had to finish. If you can bear it, I definitely recommend this one.

Translated very smoothly by Jamie Bulloch.

Tattoo

Pepe Carvalho is a small-time private detective from Barcelona who likes women and food and not much else. (Thinking about how he no longer enjoys museums: ”He would give the whole of Rembrandt for a shapely woman’s arse or a decent plate of spaghetti alla carbonara.”) He is an amiable cynic who believes that there are two kinds of people: those who are in jail and those who might go to jail. He no longer believes in literature, because real life provides him with all the insight into the nasty human condition he could possibly need, and each night when he lights a fire, he lights it with a book:

He still had the copy of Suck carefully folded in his inside pocket, but he did not want to sacrifice it after all the effort he had gone to, smuggling it through Spanish customs. He preferred to burn a book, and this time he headed straight for a copy of Don Quijote. It was a work he had always detested, and he felt a thrill of pleasure at the mere thought of consigning it to the flames. His only regret, quickly pushed out of his mind, were the illustrations that accompanied the adventures of that idiot from La Mancha.

A body is pulled out of the sea, its face so badly destroyed that its only identifying mark is a tattoo on the shoulder that reads, “Born to Raise Hell in Hell.” (Manuel Vásquez Montalbán wrote this novel in 1975, when tattoos were much less common in the general population than they are now; tracking this rather mild tattoo to its source is a major plot point.) A local hairdresser asks Carvalho to find out who the man is, which leads him from Barcelona to Amsterdam, and from hippies and drug gangs to the rich and famous, and then right back home — but for what?

Teresa just did a nice Sunday Salon post on confusing plots in mystery novels. Tattoo doesn’t have a plot that’s difficult to follow, but I will say that the plot isn’t the reason to read this novel. It’s there, it’s pacy, it has all the reasonable elements you would logically want in a mystery-thriller — but the real reason to read it is the writing. Carvalho is a wonderful character, a cynical gastronome (don’t read this when you’re hungry) whose affection for women and distaste for the rest of the world is hard to resist. The descriptions of Barcelona are almost poetic:

The Rambla was like an entire universe that began at the port and ended at the disappointing mediocrity of Plaza Catalunya. Somehow it had retained the wise capriciousness of the rushing stream it had once been. It was like a river that knew where it was heading, like all the people waking up and down it all day long, who seemed unwilling to say goodbye to its plane trees, its multicoloured kiosks, the strange stalls selling parrots and monkeys, the archaeology of buildings which told the story of three hundred years’ history of a city with a history. Carvalho loved the Rambla the way he loved his life: it was irreplaceable.

Eventually, the mystery winds to a close, and it’s one that fits Carvalho’s way of looking at the world, but by that time it seems like the right way. We want to sit next to the fire Carvalho has lit, and have some of whatever he’s cooking.

Translated for Serpent’s Tail books by Nick Caistor.

Emil and the Detectives

I would have loved Emil and the Detectives when I was a kid of, say, seven or eight. (I liked it a lot now, too, but that’s probably the perfect age.) It was written in 1929 by Erich Kästner, and it has a clean, lively, neck-or-nothing style that takes everything unnecessary for granted but points out the kid’s-eye details: bad dreams, new suits, the unquestioning loyalty children give to other children.

Emil and the Detectives is the story of Emil Tischbein, who lives alone in Neustadt with his mother. He makes a trip alone on the train to visit his grandmother in Berlin, and on the way, “the man in the stiff hat” robs him of his hundred and forty marks — not a great sum to you, perhaps, but a fortune to Emil and his hardworking mother. Emil, who has enough spirit for fifty boys, gets off the train in a marvelously living Berlin, full of taxis, newspapermen, frying sausages, cafés, trams, florists, and banks, and follows the thief. He picks up the “detectives” along the way — a huge group of Berliner boys, all of whom get in on the act with enormous gusto — and they sort out the mystery with dash, grace, and a hugely satisfying ending.

The best parts of this book are the scenes of Berlin. This book of Kästner’s was the only one of his to escape censorship in Nazi Germany, and while I can’t fathom the logic of book-burners, it may have been because he portrayed Berlin so vibrantly. I also loved Emil’s girl-cousin, the brave and gallant Pony Hütchen, who brings coffee and rolls to the detectives on her bike. The book is full of adventure, and it’s something a kid would want to read over and over again. The book is wonderfully and humorously illustrated by Walter Trier, and translated (in the older version I read) by May Massee.

Note: I understand that there is a new translation out, in which some of the humorous German names are translated into English — Emil Tischbein into Emil Tabletoe, for instance, or Herr Grundeis into Mr. Groundsnow — and in which some of the kids’ phrases are updated to “Berlin parents are so cool!” and “You dork!” and things like that. Not sure what I think of that…

Sunday Salon: Following the Plot

In our post on Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Jenny and I both remarked on how confusing we thought the plot was. In the comments, CB James remarked that this kind of confusion has become common in crime fiction and that it doesn’t bother him (or at least didn’t in this book). That got me to thinking, and following James’s suggestion that some of our thoughts about Smilla were worthy of a full post, I decided to pull the idea out, kick it around a little, and see what others think.

I agree with James that a lot of crime fiction is confusing, and I can think of times when it didn’t bother me at all. In the case of Smilla, the confusion just added to my frustration with other elements. However, when a book has great characters or a compelling atmosphere, I don’t mind so much if I don’t know what’s going on. It’s not crime fiction, but Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter is a pleasure because of its characters; even on a second reading, I couldn’t make heads or tails of some of the politics, but it didn’t matter. In Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching seems deliberately confusing; readers are not supposed to know what’s going on, even after finishing the book. But the writing style and the ambiguity itself make the book compelling. In the world of theatre, Sleep No More is designed to keep the audience on its toes; it’s not even possible to see the whole thing, much less put all the pieces together. The atmosphere, however, makes it a stunning experience.

So it’s true that I can enjoy a book without being able follow the plot. I can even lavish such a book with praise. But there has to be something else there for me to enjoy, and I have to be confident that there is deliberation behind the confusion. If I’m not confident that the author knows what’s going on—or at least is aware of the different possibilities—then I’m less likely to be satisfied. (See, for example, the difference in my reactions to White Is for Witching and There Is No Year by Blake Butler, the latter of which I was a little skeptical about in the end precisely because I suspected that the author was throwing stuff in because it was cool, not because it was meaningful.)

Although I can get past some confusion in fiction, I usually do prefer to be able to follow the plot, to know what’s going on from one moment to the next. In my reply to James, I noted that this preference might be why I often prefer psychological crime novels to whodunits. In the former, you might be inside one killer’s mind; in the latter, you might have a large cast of suspects to keep straight. The potential for confusion tends to be greater in the latter. Thrillers that rely on surprise often leave me cold because the plots have to get convoluted to keep readers guessing. I’d rather be less surprised than to be handed twists that make no sense.

What do you think? How important is it for you to be able to follow the plot? Are there times when you don’t mind being confused? Are there certain kinds of confusion that you can’t stand?

Petals of Blood

It’s probably cheating to include this 1977 novel by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o in our international crime fiction month. It’s certainly not a book you’d be likely to find shelved in a library’s mystery section, and most of the novel is devoted to the history and politics of post-Colonial Kenya. However, a murder is what sets the novel in motion, and the solving of that murder brings it to a close. And the chapters in between are filled with what some might perceive as crimes, despite the fact that they are perfectly legal.

The crime that opens the novel is the murder through arson of three powerful African businessmen. Three other men—Munira, a teacher; Abdullah, a shopkeeper; and Karega, a labor organizer—are brought in for questioning by the police. The bulk of the novel is these three men’s recollections of their long history with the murdered men.

The book is filled with ideas, most of them related to how the new Kenyan government of Africans adopted many of the same practices as their colonial rulers. (As I read, I kept remembering Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.) One of the former African leaders reflects on those first days of independence and what came after:

Aah, that was a time to remember, when the whole world, motivated by different reasons and expectations, waited, saying: they who showed Africa and the world the path of manliness and of black redemption, what are they going to do with the beast? They who washed the warriors’ spears in the blood of the white profiteers, of all those who had enslaved them to the ministry of the molten beast of silver and gold, what dance are they now going to dance in the arena? We could have done anything, then, because our people were behind us. But we, the leaders, chose to flirt with the molten god, a blind, deaf monster who has plagued us for hundreds of years. We reasoned; what’s wrong is the skin-colour of the people who ministered to this god; under our own care and tutelage we shall tame the monster-god and make it do our will. We forgot that it has always been deaf and blind to human woes. So we go on building the monster and it grows and waits for more, and now we are all slaves to it.

Munira, Abdullah, and Karega all have good reason to be angry. They’ve seen men who claimed to be in their corner turn away again and again. Peaceful objections seem futile, and hopes are dashed repeatedly, in large and small ways. It’s clear why their thoughts might have turned to murder.

Although most of the drama in the novel is related to politics and economic oppression, Ngugi also brings up the problems in the education system, which fails to teach African students their own history and remains deaf to student pleas for a more Afro-centric curriculum. There’s also the interesting case of Wanja, the woman all three suspects have loved in one fashion or another. Through her, we see the particular plight of African women.

At times, the novel seems overcrowded with ideas, and the plot, with its multiple flashbacks and narrators, is not as easy to follow as it could be. However, the details of the plot seem less important than the ways the story revolves around the same central problem that manifests itself again and again. The powerful are most interested in retaining power, and once the weak become powerful, they too often fall victim to that same urge. And that’s true not just in Kenya, but all over.

Maigret and the Lazy Burglar

It’s a good thing my father doesn’t read this blog (at least, I don’t think he does), because then he would find out that this is the very first Maigret novel I have ever read. I know! There is absolutely no excuse for my sorry self. I love crime novels, and I teach French, and my dad has read all of these, probably several times, and yet… [Gallic shrug] eh bien, c’est la vie.

If this novel follows the typical Maigret formula, then I can see why people adore it. Its bones are a police procedural. Inspector Maigret is dragged from his bed at four on a frosty morning to see the horribly disfigured corpse of a man he’s known for thirty years. It’s Honoré Cuendet, a Swiss burglar, a quiet, reserved man who lived with his mother and who got his thrills from going into occupied houses, taking jewelry and expensive bibelots, and leaving totally undetected. He has no accomplices, no gang. He’s a reader. He likes to sit and drink white wine in bistros. Who would kill a man like that?

The pleasure of this book comes from the detection, because the detection consists of going around Paris and talking to people. Simenon is very, very good at people.

… And now something odd happens. I have a very clear memory of several of the characters in this book: Cuendet’s mother, Justine, who moved to Paris from her little canton in Switzerland and still maintains her lazy provincial ways and her affirmation that her son is a “good boy” who wouldn’t leave her destitute; Olga, the little prostitute in the hotel, who is so sharply observant, so friendly, and so up-to-the minute on a rich man’s lifestyle that will never be hers; Cuendet’s longtime girlfriend, girlish despite her forty years, so devastated by her loss that she can’t see what’s before her eyes. I was going to quote some of these descriptions for you, so you could see the wonderful style. Simenon is concise, drawing in a few lines what would take some authors a whole novel to accomplish. His atmosphere — of a foggy bistro window, an official spouting bureaucratese — is unparalleled in crime fiction.

But I found that there are few suitable sound bites. Simenon does most of his description through dialogue. Olga is created entirely through her interview with Maigret, and it’s done so effectively that when she suggests sex to him at the end of their conversation, “slightly arced under the covers,” and he refuses, it’s friendly and understanding rather than sleazy, even though those are the only words used.

This was a marvelous novel. There was a subplot involving a series of hold-ups in Paris, and Maigret’s musings about them — that attacks on property are more important to the government than attacks on life — were woven in without undue emphasis, but with a curiously thoughtful approach. I think I could quickly become addicted to these. Another addition to the plus side for the international crime spree.

I read this in the original French (which I recommend if you can; it was terrifically enjoyable), called Maigret et le voleur paresseux, but it’s available in English, translated by Daphne Woodard.

In Matto’s Realm

In Germany, the prize for crime fiction, the equivalent of the American Edgar Award, is the Glauser Prize. It’s named for Friedrich Glauser, a German-language Swiss author of the Golden Age of detective fiction. He was a troubled man, addicted to morphine and opium, and he spent much of his life in psychiatric wards and in prison. But before he died (far too young, he was only 42), he produced a handful of strange, dreamy, somewhat absurdist detective novels, and In Matto’s Realm is one of them.

Although In Matto’s Realm features Sergeant Studer, a detective from the canton of Bern, this isn’t a police procedural. Studer has been called in by Dr. Laduner, a psychiatrist at a nearby insane asylum, to investigate the disappearance of an inmate named Pieterlen, a child-murderer. Soon, Studer discovers the body of the head of the asylum, Dr. Borstli, his neck broken. Everyone seems to think that Pieterlen is the obvious suspect, but there’s more to the case than first appears in “Matto’s realm” — Matto being the spirit of insanity, who digs his “fingernails, as long as those of a Chinese scholar, glassy and green,” into the brains of the patients while they sleep. You can see what I mean about the style, which leaves you with an uncomfortable feeling that you’re not quite sure what’s real.

Studer’s interactions with the other characters are quirky and unpredictable. He likes and respects Laduner (and Laduner’s kind wife), even when evidence against him begins to pile up, and he stays in a room in Laduner’s house — an unusual and often uncomfortable proceeding. He dismisses the two female doctors, because he “doesn’t like working women,” but then he has a thoroughly enjoyable meal and conversation with Fraulein Kölla, the cook. He gets up in the middle of the night because he can’t sleep and has a conversation with the night porter, which leads him to a crucial clue. In other words, he’s not the tiniest bit systematic, but he gets the job done. I never tried to figure out the mystery, myself. I just enjoyed watching Studer wander all over the asylum — surely a place Glauser was intimately familiar with — and probe its secrets.

One final, curious note about this book. It was originally published in 1936, and Glauser never makes overt mention of what is taking place elsewhere in Europe. But in one passage towards the end of the book, Studer and Laduner hear a radio broadcast, in which an “urgent, unpleasant foreign voice” is speaking about having made its nation great. Laduner switches the radio off, and speaks quietly:

…As I said before, contact with the mentally ill is contagious. And there are people who are particularly susceptible — whole nations can be susceptible. I once said something in a lecture to which people objected. Certain so-called revolutions, I said, are nothing more than the vengeance of psychopaths — at which a few colleagues left the room demonstratively. But it’s true.

And true it turned out to be. This was a very welcome entry in January’s international crime spree.

Translated thoughtfully, with attention to the important differences in accent, dialect, and the difference between du and Sie, by Mike Mitchell.