The Pledge

By Friedrich Durrenmatt

The mysterious and unbearably tense tale of a detective's obsessive pursuit of a child murderer, from one of the post-war era's greatest writers in German
When a young girl is found brutally murdered in a Swiss mountain forest, the brilliant Inspector Matthai can't put the case behind him. Not even when a local felon is arrested. Not even once the suspect has confessed.
Matthai promises the girl's mother that he will stop at nothing to find the real killer.
Adapted into a Hollywood film, The Pledge is the chilling story of a man in desperate search of the truth. A man driven to sacrifice everything, to commit acts of cruelty and obsession in a desperate search for a killer he can't find.
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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
• Release date: Jan 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781782273509

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.

Reviews for The Pledge

[keishont-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[chwiggy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great and truly different variation on the common crime story.

[diefledermaus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[devenish_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[datrappert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.