Friedrick Durrenmatt
Il Giudice e il Suo Boia

THE REVIEW

I'm back to writing after a few months away from the site, trying my hand at this novelty of books. Please don't hold it against me if the results are what they are.

I deliberately choose a short but impactful book, like "The Judge and His Hangman" by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, a Swiss writer and polemicist (1925-1991), who, even in Italy, has enjoyed a reputation perhaps inferior to his merits and his influence on the development, I would almost say on the deconstruction, of genre writing, and of detective stories in particular.

We cannot define Dürrenmatt as a mystery writer in the strict sense, as he did not strictly devote himself to writing detective stories, but rather as an Author who deals with universal themes, starting from the detective genre as a pretext, using a familiar scheme to readers, and also appealing to non-initiated, to say something entirely different.

The effect is twofold: on one hand, the detective story becomes a tool to go "beyond the genre," and on the other, the genre itself is laid bare and surpassed in its schematics and results, with an enjoyable outcome for the reader: who is intrigued and entertained, at least until they fully understand the depth of certain ventures of the Author, more frightening than any narrated crime.

"The Judge and His Hangman" (1952) can be read precisely in this way, and thus, on at least a dual level, relating to the detective plot and the "implications" of the narrated events.

As for the actual plot, a policeman is found murdered along a road in a Swiss valley, near the residence of a wealthy and mysterious man, with a murky past, a certain Gastmann. The investigations are conducted by an elderly and ailing inspector - Bärlach - with the help of an ambitious and daring policeman, Tschanz: the former, who had already been on Gastmann's trail and the origins of his wealth in the past, invites the latter to investigate in that direction until the culprit is discovered. But the truth is not what it seems, and, above all, only at the end will the role of the judge and the hangman, and the ultimate purpose of the sentence issued, be clear.

Without getting too much into detail, and without wanting to spoil the reading and rereading of the text, I just observe how in the development of the story Dürrenmatt already alters the foundational features of the detective genre: reduction of characters, absolute concentration of action in a narrative descent that, far from clarifying the dynamics of the events, becomes more and more twisted upon itself, until a finale that overturns the sense of the plot and the behavior of all the characters, made to act by the writer according to only apparent logic. It's an antithesis to the classic detective story, to the positivistic investigation of a Conan Doyle and various epigones: in the classics, the investigation was a means to bring order to reality, by a scientist-investigator rationalizer; in Dürrenmatt, the investigation is almost the existential condition of the individual, and imperfect individuals, driven by passions, impulses, and obsessions, can only conduct imperfect investigations, with imperfect outcomes.

Regarding the reported "implications" related to the narrated events, there emerges a pessimistic view of Man and Justice, seen not as values - if we want in a humanistic, classical... Latin sense - but as factors at the mercy of impulses, or the pseudo-rational designs of the individual, alone in a world of which they do not really understand the sense, and in which chaos and domination prevail.

The judge and the hangman, in this perspective, are not promoters of a justice that, however violent, aims to punish evil and restore the good, or the previously violated order of things, but, in judging and executing the sentence, they themselves become continuers of an immanent Evil, promoters of an endless Disorder that sometimes also masks itself behind the reassuring face of institutions.

This pessimism owes much to Protestant conceptions widespread in Central and Northern Europe, but in Dürrenmatt, it is emphasized by a fundamental agnosticism: in a world without God, and without possibilities of salvation, anyone could be the judge and hangman of another, inside and outside institutions, and the sacrifice of the guilty, however such, ends up being a small part of an immanent holocaust.