The year in books #15: Der Richter und sein Henker

The first book I read during my absence was Der Richter und sein Henker (available in English as The Judge and His Hangman or together with Suspicion in the recently-published Inspector Bärlach Mysteries), by the highly regarded Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I read it at the recommendation of my wife, who read it in Gymnasium (high school for the college-bound) and remembered it fondly.

The story is of the final case of Commissioner Bärlach, who is investigating the murder of his best officer, found shot in his car. The case is to be Bärlach's last because he is suffering from an ailment of the stomach which is never explicitly named but is clearly meant to be a terminal cancer.

This book is a bit difficult for me to render a verdict on. I am not terribly familiar with murder mysteries, and the book is written in a very literary German that, combined with my new fatherhood, caused me to need more than two weeks to get through its mere 118 pages. I honestly didn't enjoy reading the book terribly, but upon finishing it, I had to admit that it was a very compact and cleverly-written story. I suspect that, had I brought it along on a vacation, or at least not begun reading it the day of my first child's birth, and simply read through it in a single sitting, I would have rather liked it. It takes sixty pages to figure out what the real point of the story is; when those sixty pages take a week to get through, that feels like a tortuously slow pace, but if I'd chugged through them in an hour, the same opening might have felt like a simple introduction to the characters.

Six weeks after having read this book, I can at least say that the plot and characters have stuck quite firmly in my mind, which to me is a valuable trait in any story. Beyond that, I'm afraid the circumstances of my reading have left me unable to render a clear verdict for or against reading Der Richter und sein Henker.