The black birds

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The black birds is a novel by the Dutch writer Maarten 't Hart . The original edition was published in 1983 under the title De kroongetuige by De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam. The German translation by Marianne Holberg was published in 1999 by Arche-Verlag Zurich ( ISBN 3-7160-2252-7 ); In 2001 a paperback edition was published by Piper ( ISBN 3-492-23023-7 ).

action

The pharmacologist Thomas Kuyper leads a childless and increasingly joyless marriage. He uses the week-long absence of his wife Leonie for a violent flirtation with the library worker Jenny Fortuyn. When this disappears without a trace, Thomas is suspected by the police because he was the last to be seen with her at night and witnesses noticed that there was an argument between the two. Suspicions that he may have killed Jenny and disposed of her corpse grows when her clothes are found in his laboratory. Commissioner Joost Lambert tends to hypothesize that Kuyper could have disposed of the body with the help of numerous rats, which he withheld from food for experimental purposes.

While her husband is in custody for several months, Leonie Kuyper carries out investigations herself to fathom her husband's legal and sexual innocence (“Was he in bed with her?”). She comes to the conclusion that Thomas has apparently not slept with Jenny, but finally believes him to be her murderer when she finds the body of a woman in the former museum area of ​​his institute - hidden inconspicuously between containers with dead manatees . She keeps this find to herself as well as her finding that Joost Lambert himself once had a relationship with Jenny and is apparently not only researching for criminal motives. The official investigations now also show that significant amounts of drugs have disappeared from the laboratory. For Lambert the case is that Jenny only got involved with Thomas in order to gain access to the laboratory and thus to the "material". When he realized this, he killed her and made the body disappear in a perfidious manner.

Nevertheless, at the end of the trial, Kuyper was acquitted because there was insufficient evidence and the alleged key witness was embroiled in contradictions. When Leonie Kuyper confronts her husband with the corpse she found - Lambert, who observed the two, joins them - it turns out that it is not the missing Jenny Fortuyn. Thanks to her further inquiries and observations, Leonie can bring about the solution to the case: Jenny not only did the big drug business with her lover Robert, but the two also murdered his wife. On the night of her disappearance, Jenny and Robert lured her into the laboratory, killed her there, and hid the body. Jenny put on the dead woman's clothes and left the country with her passport at his side.

interpretation

Even if some elements of 't Hart's successful novels of the 1990s appear in this book, especially literary and musical quotes and allusions, it is relatively easy to assign it to the genre detective novel . The focus of the plot is the case and its ultimate clarification, the narrated time is limited to the months that pass in between, the events take place in the present - therefore the biographical and historical dimension of the later novels' t Harts is missing.

However, various aspects of the novel do not correspond to the usual pattern of a crime novel. The tension arises particularly in the middle of the book, when Leonie - meanwhile convinced of her husband's guilt and certain of the finality of her childlessness - withdraws from the outside world and spends the autumn in depression with philosophical-theological reflections before the trial begins actual thread of action is spun on.

The multiple change of perspective is interesting from a narrative point of view: while in the first chapter Thomas acts as the first-person narrator , the second chapter consists of an exchange of letters between Thomas (in custody) and Leonie. The third chapter reports in the form of Leonie's diary entries about her research, while the process and the clarification of the case are finally described by Leonie as the first-person narrator.

It is also unusual for a detective novel that the solution is neither brought about by the investigating commissioner nor by the suspect, who alone cannot prove his innocence. Both men have been driven out of their minds by the alleged victim and are unable to see what was really being played.