The retired

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The Retired is a novel by the Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt and was first published in 1995 by Diogenes Verlag with the subtitle Fragment of a detective novel. The manuscript was started by Dürrenmatt in Puerto Rico in 1969 and revised several times, but remained unfinished. The retired is Dürrenmatt's fifth detective novel .

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The protagonist of the novel, the police captain Gottlieb Höchstettler, who only describes himself as a commissioner , is very similar to the literary figure of the commissioner Bärlach from the crime novels The Judge and His Executioner and The Suspicion . But he is not a bachelor like Bärlach , but has just been divorced. In total, Höchstettler was married seven times, but his wives never played a major role in his life.

According to Dürrenmatt, the novel was originally intended to be about "how, after the first days of his retirement, a Bernese police inspector visits all of his criminals whom he had let escape in the course of his long activity out of humanity and knowledge of the inadequacy of human justice" . In the fragment, however, there is only one such visit to a group of intruders. However, the inspector later committed a break-in himself together with the criminals.

A second storyline deals with a politician whom the commissioner values ​​and who is threatened with a scandal. The inspector had once failed to uncover his criminal homosexual acts. According to Dürrenmatt's ideas, "there should still be a murder and a suicide" . The politician's suicide is actually hinted at at the end of the fragment. The connection between the two storylines, however, no longer takes place in the fragment.

Enough

The Swiss writer Urs Widmer wrote a possible ending to the novel on behalf of the Zurich weekly newspaper Die Weltwoche . The reason was the preprint of the novel in the supplement to Weltwoche in October and November 1995. The conclusion was published in book form together with the novel in 1997 by Diogenes Verlag. Widmer lets many years go by during which the inspector was happy with Clair, whom he had also let escape. After her death, he broke in again with the same criminals from back then and ended up in the wine cellar of the writer Dürrenmatt. In the end, burglars, police officers and the author sit together in tears and ponder about law and justice. Finally, everyone step outside, where the morning sun is already shining brightly.

Press reviews

“The retiree sheds new light on the Dürrenmatt case. The commissioner i. R. investigates unfinished business cases - just like Dürrenmatt, who took up unfinished business at the time, made a breakdown inventory, thought his career was over. A parallel action of abysmal wit. And proof of the Dürrenmatt thesis that in difficult times, art is best done where nobody suspects it, for example in a crime thriller. Goal: Literature must be so light that it no longer weighs anything on the scales of today's literary criticism. This is the only way to make it weighty again. "

- The mirror

“A book like a family celebration. Just as we don't look for something surprising at a family celebration, but rather something familiar, the plot with its twists and turns and surprises is not the decisive factor in a detective novel whose characters we already know and love. What remains in memory are the characters and certain problem and conflict constellations: Constable Studer and fear in dense social structures, Hercule Poirot and the crime in the salon, Maigret and the hopelessness of human relationships. "

- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted from diogenes.ch
  2. ↑ Quoted after review: Fiction - Another Mord - in the FAZ
  3. ↑ Quoted from diogenes.ch
  4. ↑ Quoted after review: Fiction - Another Mord - in the FAZ