Janwillem van de Wetering

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Janwillem van de Wetering 1982

Janwillem Lincoln van de Wetering (born February 12, 1931 in Rotterdam , † July 4, 2008 in Blue Hill , Maine , United States ) was a Dutch writer who was best known for his detective novels .

Life

After school and commercial training, van de Wetering went to Cape Town in South Africa on the mediation of his father . Six eventful years followed: he frequented artistic circles, had a short marriage, had contact with alcohol and other drugs . He lost his job, then had odd jobs and mental health problems. After the death of his father, van de Wetering made an inheritance.

He finally escaped the turmoil to London in 1957 , where he began studying philosophy at University College London before retiring to the Daitoku-ji Zen monastery in Kyoto, Japan , for eighteen months from February 1958 . He later described his search for enlightenment in Buddhism in several books.

Van de Wetering then first worked in the Colombian capital Bogota as a manager in a chemical company. There he met the seventeen year old Juanita and married her. In 1964 they moved to Peru , now with their daughter, and a year later to Brisbane in Australia . From 1966 he took over the textile factory of his wife's uncle in the city center of Amsterdam . Since he had previously evaded his military service , he was granted his service as a patrol officer of the "Voluntary Community Service" at the same time . He stayed in Amsterdam for nine years and during that time seven years on patrol duty, where he rose to become inspector.

Janwillem van de Wetering lived from 1975 in Surry in Hancock County (Maine) in the USA, of which he was also a Dutch citizen. In addition to his work as a writer, van de Wetering was also known as a visual artist, especially as a sculptor .

Van de Wetering died of cancer in July 2008; he left behind his wife and a daughter.

writer

Van de Wetering's experiences in Japan and with the police in Amsterdam as well as his preference for the crime novels by Georges Simenon and Robert van Gulik flowed into his crime series about the police officers of the Amsterdam Murder Commission from 1975 onwards . Several of the crime novels are set outside of Amsterdam, for example in Friesland , but also in Maine or Tokyo . The main characters are the Commissaris, whose last name is never mentioned, Adjudant Henk Grijpstra and Brigadier Rinus de Gier. Grijpstra is a stocky, somewhat phlegmatic cop who leads an unhappy marriage in the first few volumes, while de Gier is a youthful-looking, handsome, and athletic single. The Commissaris is short in stature, suffers from rheumatism and is the spiritus rector of the two colleagues. The police officers are often dealing with strong, unconventional characters. In addition to the actual criminal act, philosophical questions are dealt with, often with reference to the East Asian cultural area and other non-European cultures. Grijpstra and de Gier occasionally improvise in the office on drums and flute. In the last few cases, they left the police and work as private detectives while the commissaris is retired.

Janwillem van de Wetering received the prestigious Grand prix de littérature policière for the novel Massacre in Maine in 1984 .

A peculiarity of van de Wetering was that he wrote his books twice, in Dutch and in English, with some major differences between the two versions. He also wrote a children's book in German.

His other works included a series of children's books about Stachel-Charlie as well as the biography of his compatriot Robert van Gulik , with whom he shared both crime writing and experiences with Asian cultures. Van de Wetering also worked as a translator and was the editor of Japanese crime anthologies in the 1990s.

Quote

"When you get to the end of the universe, you will see that everything is covered with newspapers."

- Janwillem van de Wetering : The empty mirror - experiences in a Japanese Zen monastery. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1992, p. 87.

bibliography

Detective novels / short stories / short stories

The Amsterdam police officers
  • Outsider in Amsterdam ( Het lijk in de Haarlemmer Houttuinen / Outsider in Amsterdam , 1975)
  • A dead person provides information ( Buitelkruid / Tumbleweed , 1975)
  • Der Tote am Deich ( De gelaarsde kater / The Corpse on the Dike , 1976)
  • Death of a street vendor ( De dood van een marktkoopman / Death of a Hawker , 1977)
  • Ticket to Tokyo ( Een dode uit het oosten / The Japanese Corpse , 1976)
  • The blonde monkey ( De blonde baviaan / The Blond Baboon , 1978)
  • Massacre in Maine ( Het werkbezoek / The Maine Massacre , 1979)
  • The commissaris goes to the cure ( De straatvogel / The Streetbird , 1982)
  • Ketchup, karate and the consequences ( Moord zonder lijk, lijk zonder moord / The Mind-Murders , 1983)
    • Note: The first part was published in 1980 as a boekenweek present under the title De Verdachte Verheugt .
  • Brigadier de Gier's cat ( De kat van brigadier de Gier en Andere verhalen / The Sergeant's Cat and Other Stories , 1983)
  • Catching rats ( De ratelrat / The Rattle-Rat , 1984)
  • The enemy from the old days ( De zaak ijsbreker / Hard Rain , 1985)
  • De Gier in Twilight ( Drijflijk / Just a Corpse at Twilight , 1993)
  • Street warriors ( Een toevalstreffer / The Hollow-Eyed Angel , 1996)
  • Oil pirates ( Een ventje van veertig / The Perfidious Parrot , 1997)
Further
  • The safe feeling ( Het veilige gevoel / Safe feeling , or Seesaw Millions , 1982)
  • The butterfly hunter ( De vlinderjager , 1984)
  • Inspector Saito's little enlightenment . ( Inspector Saito's small Satori , 1985)
  • Something like that doesn't happen! (1989)
  • Cow catches rabbit (1991)
  • Sun, Sand and Cool Killers (1993)
  • Greed (1999)
  • The Degenerate Sole (2002)
    • The friend who wasn't . Translated by Klaus Schomburg (December 2008), new edition of Die degenerate sole among other titles

Children's books

  • Sting Charlie . Original title: Stekel Stavast en de rode hoed / Hugh Pine , 1980. With pictures by Lynn Munsinger. Translated by Inge M. Artl. Carlsen, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-551-55001-8 .
  • Stachel-Charlie's favorite place . Original title: Stekel Stavast / Hugh Pine and the Good Place , 1981. Carlsen, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-551-55007-7 .
  • Sting Charlie solves a problem . Original title: Stekel Charlie / Hugh Pine and Something Else , 1983. With pictures by Lynn Munsinger. Translated by Inge M. Artl. Carlsen, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-551-55039-5 .
  • The little owl and the way to life. Original title: De kleine uil und Little Owl , 1979. With pictures by Jutta Bauer . Translated from English by Michael Krüger . Hanser, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-446-17521-0 .
  • Sting Charlie and the Stranded Dog . Original title: Hugh Pine and the Works . With pictures by Jutta Bauer. Translated by Hans Ulrich Hirschfelder. Carlsen, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-446-19820-2 .
  • Eugen Owl and the Fall of the Vanished Flea . Original title: Eugen Eule and the Case of the Missing Flea. With pictures by Sabine Wilharm . Translated by Mirjam Pressler . Hanser, Munich 2001, ISBN 978-3-446-19969-9 .

Zen Buddhism

  • De lay mirror. De Driehoek, Amsterdam 1972
    • English edition: The Empty Mirror. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1973
    • German edition: The empty mirror - experiences in a Japanese Zen monastery. Translated from the English edition by Herbert Graf. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1977, ISBN 978-3-462-01232-3 .
  • A look into nothing - experiences in an American Zen community ( Het dagende niets / A Glimpse of Nothingness , 1973)
  • Pure void - experiences of a disrespectful Zen student ( Zuivere leegte / Afterzen , 1999)
  • The Koan and other Zen stories. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-499-60270-9 .

Biographies

  • Op zoek naar het ongerijmde (1980). Autobiography
  • Robert van Gulik - A Life with Judge Di ( Robert van Gulik - zijn leven, zijn werk , 1989)

Radio plays

The majority of his crime stories about the Amsterdam police officers were produced as radio plays by Südwestfunk between 1983 and 1990 . Editing: Peter Michel Ladiges . Director: Peter Michel Ladiges, Johannes Hertel . Actors: Hans Peter Hallwachs (narrator), Wolfgang Büttner (Commissaris), Gustl Halenke (his wife), Charles Wirths (Grijpstra), Matthias Ponnier (de Gier), Andreas Mannkopff (Cardozo), Edgar Hoppe (ketchup), Michael Thomas ( Karate).

literature

  • Jan Christian Schmidt: Obituaries for 2008 - Janwillem van de Wetering . In: Christina Bacher, Ulrich Noller, Dieter Paul Rudolph (Ed.): Krimijahrbuch 2009 . Pendragon, Bielefeld 2009, ISBN 978-3-86532-119-0 .

Web links

References and comments

  1. ^ Crime legend Janwillem van de Wetering died. In: Der Spiegel , July 10, 2008, accessed on September 16, 2012
  2. ↑ Janwillem van de Wetering: The empty mirror - experiences in a Japanese Zen monastery. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1981, p. 36.
  3. ↑ Janwillem van de Wetering: Pure void: experiences of a disrespectful Zen student. German by Klaus Schomburg. 6th edition. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-499-22901-5 , p. 41
  4. ^ Rowohlt Verlag, author information JW van de Wetering. Retrieved on November 27, 2011. The Rowohlt-Verlag awards another prize, allegedly awarded in 1979, to van de Wetering on its authors' website, the Swedish Royal Mystery Prize . It is very likely that this is a purely sales-promoting measure, the award cannot be found internationally either. Rowohlt himself admitted this, but did not correct the website.
  5. ↑ HörDat, the audio game database
personal data
SURNAME Wetering, Janwillem van de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wetering, Janwillem Lincoln van de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch novelist, crime novelist and policeman
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Rotterdam , Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 2008
Place of death Blue Hill , Maine , USA