The Execution of Justice

Friedrich Durrenmatt is a master of what you might call the philosophical crime novel, but calling his crime fiction that makes it sound inaccessible or pretentious in some way, which it's not. I'd read The Pledge and his two Inspector Barlach books, The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion, decades ago, but I'd put off reading the last of his crime novels, The Execution of Justice, published in 1985, for a long time. Why did I put it off even though I liked the other three books a lot? Well, you know: sometimes you put off reading a certain thing because you want to look forward to it and you know it will be the last of its kind from that particular writer. Once you read that particular book, there'll be no more first experiences of that type of book from that writer.

Last week I finally read The Execution of Justice, and it lived up to my expectations. At the back of this excellent edition from Pushkin Vertigo, there is a paragraph touching on some views Durrenmatt held about crime fiction. It reads:

Durrenmatt thought detective novels should reflect the absurdity of real life rather than proceeding like mathematical equations with a definite solution. Of the traditional crime writers, he once said, "You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replays the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed. This fantasy drives me crazy." 

Now I enjoy traditional detective stories, the ones set up a bit like a chess game, recognizing of course that they are fantasy. The fantasy is part of the fun. But I love Durrenmatt for putting into practice through his novels the antithesis of this kind of crime fiction, most famously, I suppose, in The Pledge, a relatively early example of a mystery novel whose main point is to lay out a portrait of a typical obsessive detective who never gets resolution, (meaning, a solution) to the murder he is investigating. This failure drives the detective into alcoholism and insanity, though in a final ironic twist it is revealed that all his investigative instincts were correct and the only reason he didn't catch the murderer had to do with a chance accident.

The Execution of Justice is something different. In it, Durrenmatt I think is putting into practice his idea of letting a detective novel reflect the absurdity of real life. The central crime involves a professor who is shot dead in a crowded Zurich restaurant, in front of many witnesses. Everybody knows who did the killing, and the criminal doesn't deny it. He doesn't plead insanity or any kind of emotinal duress. He then hires a somewhat seedy lawyer to defend him, and once, as expected, he is convicted and sent to jail, he asks the lawyer to investigate the murder as if he hadn't done it. "But you did do it?" his lawyer says. "I know I did," the killer says, "but look into the case as if I didn't do it and see if you can find out who actually did it."

An utterly absurd request, but the lawyer, who needs the money, can't resist the fee the wealty killer offers him to do the investigation. From here, the story gets progressively more twisted and convoluted and absurd, and yet, in a way, possible. Much social criticism of Durrenmatt's native Switzerland is presented. The book is bleak and funny and unsparing of human pretensions and hypocrisy. The lawyer, named Spat, finds himself enmeshed with the duplicitious upper echelons of Swiss society, and by the end, finding out things that come as a complete surprise, he is convinced that justice has not been done in the murder case. Yes, his client the killer went to jail, but after what he has found out, Spat concludes that justice has not been done and can only be restored with another crime. Another murder. Which he will commit. If only his client will cooperate with him...

This is a crime novel of an unusual sort, by someone determined to twist genre conventions into knots, but it still holds up as a story with plenty of suspense. As you approach the conclusion, you really want to find out what the hell happened. And you do find out. And the ending, in its absurd way, works.

Durrenmatt delivers, again, in The Execution of Justice.