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    The Pledge
    The Pledge
    The Pledge
    Ebook150 pages2 hours

    The Pledge

    By Friedrich Durrenmatt and Joel Agee

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    About this ebook

    Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim’s mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Dürrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee’s skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.

    One of Dürrenmatt’s most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, The Pledge was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 15, 2017
    ISBN9780226530680
    The Pledge
    Author

    Friedrich Durrenmatt

    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist, most famous for his plays The Visit and The Physicists, which earned him a reputation as one of the greatest playwrights in the German language. He also wrote four highly regarded crime novels - The Pledge, The Judge and His Hangman, Suspicion and The Execution of Justice, all of which will be published by Pushkin Vertigo.

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    Reviews for The Pledge

    4/5

    263 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Interesting story in that the solving of the crime is secondary to the detective who is obsessed with solving it and foolishly makes a "pledge" to find the killer. The story has a twist that will make you shake your head in sympathy.
    • 5/5
      A great and truly different variation on the common crime story.
    • 3/5
      Always interesting to pick up a book by a "world-famous" author whom I've never heard of. This was translated from the original German (the author is Swiss) and is a strange tale of a police captain who makes a pledge to find a child killer, which he keeps in his own peculiar way. The story is very artificial in that it is told by the captain's chief to the narrator, who just finished a lecture on mystery stories. At the end, the chief even proposes a number of endings to make the story more satisfactory. This is followed by an ending - but my assumption is that it is an artificial one, in the spirit of the chief's suggestions, to tie up the story in some way. The book is engaging, short, and well-written (or translated) and has a certain fascination. While not exactly a scintillating and happy read, I do suspect that its premise will stick with me a bit longer than those of some of its more sensationalistic brethren.
    • 4/5
      A little girl is brutally murdered and the man in charge of the case makes a solemn pledge to the parents that he will discover the murderer. Shortly after this a pedlar is arrested for the murder,but hangs himself in his cell. This seems to tie things up nicely,but the police inspector is not satisfied. The remainder of the book concerns the attempts by the inspector to honour his pledge.The ending is not entirely satisfactory.
    • 4/5
      Intriguing crime story in which Dürrenmatt speculates about the whole premise of detective fiction: does the ingenuity of the detective really play as big a role as we would like to think, or are crimes really solved by a combination of patience and pure chance? Of course, we're meant to read this as a broader question about human agency and the absurdity of life, set against a discussion about the authority of the writer in fiction. Very neatly done: the philosophical discussion doesn't overwhelm the story; the reader gets a crime, a maverick detective, and a clever hypothesis; there's plenty of rain, snow and Zürich atmosphere; and the whole thing is neatly wrapped up in 150 pages. So, perfect discussion material for a literature class, but also perfectly readable for pleasure as a straight crime story. Two for the price of one!Minor niggle: we're very wrapped up in the fate of the detective and his chief (the inner narrator), so we do rather lose track of the other characters involved, and of the crime itself.
    • 4/5
      An interesting, if not too memorable, meta-detective story. Related in a cool factual style, the story is told to the narrator – a crime novelist – by a retired police chief. We know the unhappy ending of the dogged detective, Matthäi, who is the main character, as they visit him at the beginning of the tale. The first half is a very standard setup. Matthäi is the best detective on the force, although he has no personal life, is obsessive, and clashes with the other officers. A young girl is found murdered in a small town and Matthäi makes a promise to her mother that he will find the culprit. Suspicion immediately falls on the peddler who found her body as he has a criminal record, and the circumstantial evidence also points to him. Some of Matthäi’s associates extract a confession, but only after nearly a day of questioning. However, Matthäi believes the real killer is still out there and goes rogue, becomes fixated, and does morally questionable things to discover the truth. There is some musing by the police chief on the tidiness of detective stories and the lionization of rogue, smartest-man-in-the-room type detectives, and the ending subverts the usual expectations. A quick and interesting read.

    Book preview

    The Pledge - Friedrich Durrenmatt

    30

    1

    LAST March I had to give a lecture in Chur on the art of writing detective stories. My train pulled in just before nightfall, under low clouds, in a dreary blizzard. As if that wasn’t enough, the roads were paved with ice. The lecture was being held in the hall of the Chamber of Commerce. There wasn’t much of an audience, since Emil Staiger was lecturing in the school auditorium about Goethe’s late period. I couldn’t summon up the right mood, and neither could anyone else; several local residents left the room before I had ended my talk. After a brief chat with some members of the board of directors, two or three high-school teachers who also would have preferred the late Goethe, and a philanthropic lady who volunteered her services as manager of the Domestic Workers Alliance of Eastern Switzerland, I received my fee and traveling expenses and withdrew to the room I had been given at the Hotel Steinbock, near the train station—another dismal place. Except for a German financial newspaper and an old illustrated magazine, I couldn’t find anything to read. The silence of the hotel was inhuman. Impossible to even think of falling asleep, because that would give rise to the fear of not waking again. A timeless, spectral night. It had stopped snowing outside, no movement anywhere, the street lamps were no longer swaying, not a puff of wind, no denizen of Chur, no animal, nothing at all, except for a single heaven-rending blast from the train station. I went to the bar to have another whiskey. There, in addition to the elderly barmaid, I found a man who introduced himself the moment I sat down. He was Dr. H., the former chief of police in the canton of Zurich, a large and heavy man, old-fashioned, with a gold watch chain running across his vest. Despite his age, his bristly hair was still black, his mustache bushy. He was sitting on one of the high chairs by the bar, drinking red wine, smoking a Bahianos, and addressing the barmaid by her first name. His voice was loud and his gestures were lively, a blunt and unfastidious sort of person who simultaneously attracted and repelled me. When it was nearly three o’clock and our first Johnnie Walker had been followed by four more, he offered to drive me to Zurich the next morning in his Opel Kapitän. Since I did not know the area around Chur or that whole part of Switzerland, I accepted the invitation. Dr. H. had come to Graubünden as a member of a federal commission, and since the weather had prevented his departure, he, too, had attended my lecture, about which he had nothing to say beyond remarking that I had a rather awkward delivery.

    We set out the next morning. At dawn, I had taken two Medomins to catch a little sleep, and now I felt virtually paralyzed. The day seemed still dark, though the sun had risen a while ago. There was a patch of metallic sky gleaming somewhere through a covering of dense, sluggishly lumbering, snow-filled clouds. Winter seemed unwilling to leave this part of the country. The city was surrounded by mountains, but there was nothing majestic about them; they rather resembled heaps of earth, as though someone had dug an immense grave. Chur itself was quite evidently made of stone, gray, with large government buildings. It seemed incredible to me that this was a wine-growing region. We tried to penetrate into the old inner city, but the heavy car strayed into a network of narrow lanes and one-way streets, and only a complex maneuver in reverse gear got us out of the tangle of houses. Moreover, the streets were icy, so we were glad to have the city behind us at last, although I had seen almost nothing of this old episcopal residence. It was like a flight. I dozed, feeling leaden and weary; vaguely, through the low scuttling clouds, I saw a snow-covered valley gliding past us, rigid with cold. I don’t know for how long. Then we were driving toward a large village, perhaps a small town, carefully, and suddenly everything was illuminated by sunlight so powerful and blinding that the snowy planes began to melt. A white ground mist rose, spreading imperceptibly over the snowfields until, once again, the valley was hidden from my sight. It was like a bad dream, like an evil spell, as if I was not supposed to experience these mountains. My weariness came back. The gravel with which the road had been strewn clattered unpleasantly; driving over a bridge, we went into a slight skid; then we passed a military transport; the windshield became so dirty that the wipers could no longer clean it. H. sat sullenly next to me at the wheel, absorbed in his own thoughts, concentrating on the difficult road. I regretted having accepted his invitation, cursed the whiskey and my sleeping pills. But gradually, things improved. The valley became visible again, and more human, too. There were farms everywhere, and occasionally a small factory, everything spare and clean, the road free of snow and ice now, glistening with wetness, but safe enough for us to accelerate to a decent speed. The mountains no longer hemmed us in from all sides but had opened out, and then we stopped next to a gas station.

    The house immediately struck me as peculiar, perhaps because it stood out from its neat and proper surroundings. It was a wretched-looking thing with streams of water flowing down its sides. Half of it was made of stone, the other half was a wooden shed whose front wall was covered with posters. Evidently this had been its use for a long time, for there were whole layers of posters pasted one over the other: Burrus Tobacco for Modern Pipes, Drink Canada Dry, Sport Mints, Vitamins, Lindt’s Milk Chocolate, and so on. On the side wall, in giant letters: Pirelli Tires. The two gas pumps stood on an uneven, badly paved square in front of the house; everything made a run-down impression, despite the sun, which was now exuding a stinging heat that seemed almost malevolent.

    Let’s get out, said the former chief of police, and I obeyed without understanding what he had in mind, but glad to step into the fresh air.

    Next to the open door sat an old man on a stone bench. He was unshaven and unwashed, wore a pale smock that was smeared and stained, and dark, grease-spotted trousers that had once been part of a tuxedo. Old slippers on his feet. His eyes were staring, stupefied, and I could smell the liquor from afar. Absinthe. The pavement around the stone bench was littered with cigarette butts that were floating in puddles of melted snow.

    Hello, said the police chief, and he suddenly sounded embarrassed. Full up, please. Super. And clean the windshields. Then he turned to me. Let’s go in.

    Only now did I notice a tavern sign over the only visible window, a red metal disk. And over the door was the name of the place: Zur Rose. We stepped into a dirty corridor. The stench of beer and schnapps. The chief walked ahead of me. He opened a wooden door; evidently he had been here before. The barroom was dark and dingy, a couple of rough-hewn tables and benches, the walls papered with cutout pictures of movie stars; the Austrian radio was giving a market report for the Tyrol, and behind the counter, barely discernible, stood a haggard woman in a dressing gown, smoking a cigarette and washing glasses.

    Two coffees with cream, said the chief.

    The woman went about preparing the coffee. From the adjoining room came a sloppy-looking waitress who looked about thirty years old to me.

    She’s sixteen, the chief muttered.

    The girl served us our coffees. She was wearing a black skirt and a white, half-open blouse, with nothing underneath; her skin was unwashed. She was blond, as the woman behind the counter must once have been, and her hair was uncombed.

    Thank you, Annemarie, the chief said, and laid the money on the table. The girl, too, did not reply, did not even thank him. We drank in silence. The coffee was awful. The chief lit himself a Bahianos. The Austrian radio was now discussing the water level and the girl shuffled off to the room next door, where we saw something whitish shimmering, probably an unmade

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