The case is open and shut. But when the incarcerated murderer hires a disreputable lawyer to investigate the possibility that it was someone else, the case inverts into a claustrophobic entanglement of red tape, sin and checkered pasts.
Tag: friedrich durrenmatt
Probing Friedrich Durrenmatt’s nightmare detective novel Suspicion
Durrenmatt often turns the detective genre on its head. Sometimes the crimes just don’t get solved.
The Judge and His Hangman: When the reader becomes a pawn in a crime writer’s wicked game
The Judge and His Hangman could be devoured in a single sitting, its haunting contents continuing to unspool for days after the backcover folds over.
Requiem for the Detective Novel: The case for Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 masterpiece The Pledge
What really happens to a policeman who can’t solve his most important case? What becomes of a pillar of society whose foundations are crumbling?