The Judge and His Hangman

First English edition (1955)
Author	Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Original title	Der Richter und sein Henker
Country	Switzerland
Language	German
Genre	Detective fiction
Publisher	Harper & Brothers (US)
Publication date	1950
Published in English	1955
Media type	Print (hardcover)

The Judge and His Hangman (German: Der Richter und sein Henker) is a 1950 novel by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt. It was first published in English in 1954 in a translation by Cyrus Brooks, and later in a translation by Therese Pol. A new translation by Joel Agee appeared in 2006, published together with the book's sequel, Suspicion, as The Inspector Bärlach Mysteries, with a foreword by Sven Birkerts. Together with Dürrenmatt's The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, these stories are considered classics of crime fiction, fusing existential philosophy and the detective genre.

Plot

Commissar Bärlach of the Bernese police, who is dying of cancer, must solve the murder of his best officer, Lieutenant Ulrich Schmied. Bärlach is assisted in his investigation by officer Walter Tschanz. As Schmied had been investigating the crimes of Richard Gastmann, a career master criminal who is an old friend and enemy of Bärlach, suspicion immediately falls upon Gastmann. But Bärlach's and Tschanz's "investigation" of Gastmann yields an unexpected twist after Tschanz kills Gastmann, supposedly in self-defense. Bärlach then reveals that he has known all along that Tschanz is the one who murdered Schmied.

Tschanz had purposefully killed Gastmann so that Gastmann would be forever blamed for Schmied's murder. Furthermore, Bärlach had manipulated Tschanz into this action with the manner in which Bärlach had pressed forward with their seeming investigation of Gastmann. Bärlach had deliberately pushed Tschanz toward a final, fatal confrontation with Gastmann, resulting in Gastmann's death: the punishment Bärlach considers just for all of the previous crimes Gastmann had committed, but which Bärlach had been unable to prove.

In fact, Gastmann and Bärlach went back forty years. They had long ago made a personal bet with one another as to whether it was possible to commit the "perfect" crime, such that even an investigator who witnessed it would never be able to prove the perpetrator guilty. After that bet, Gastmann, as Bärlach well knew, had pursued a lifelong career as a purveyor of crime, evil in its comprehensiveness, arrogant and mocking of civilisation itself. And indeed, he always remained one step ahead of Bärlach's tireless but fruitless efforts to convict him. Gastmann recalled to Bärlach: "I wanted to prove that it was possible to commit a crime that couldn't be solved." Gastmann had been correct, and Bärlach's final plot is an acknowledgment thereof. By murdering Schmied during Schmied's investigation of Gastmann, Tschanz had ruined the terminally ill Bärlach's final chance to bring Gastmann to justice in a courtroom. Therefore, using Tschanz as a pawn, Bärlach finds an alternate method to mete out the justice for which he feels Gastmann is overdue.

Themes

The central question of this book is whether or not it is right to frame a person for a crime they didn't commit, if they've committed another crime that was never proven. Bärlach affirms the question when he says to Gastmann: "I couldn't prove that it was you who committed the first crime, but I am transferring this crime to you" – therefore, Gastmann, the very embodiment of evil criminality, was finally punished.

The interplay between Bärlach and Lutz takes on a symbolic dimension. Lutz, the university-educated overseer, insists on the efficacy of modern, scientific crime-solving methods "from the Chicago school", which is based mainly on circumstantial evidence and forensics. Bärlach is skeptical, relying instead on his deep knowledge of human motives, born of lifelong experience. Tschanz, Bärlach's underling, makes use of the modern evidence-to-proof method and serves as a contrast to Bärlach's style of natural intuition and usage of human manipulation. While Tschanz's methods make ostensible progress on the case, ultimately, it is Bärlach's intuitive sense that has long since enabled him to determine the truth, and also enables him to use Tschanz to settle his old score with Gastmann.

One can understand the novel also as question: "When humans determine themselves the fate of others they become the judges, and when they become the instrument of others they become the henchmen." Having been set up by Bärlach to kill Gastmann, Tschanz says to Bärlach at the end of the story, "Then you were the judge and I the hangman". Tschanz then kills himself the following day by stopping his car on an active railroad track.

Adaptations

References