Fast-paced, understated humor but excessively grim story about a terminally ill detective in his last year taking on a murdered peer in Bern and a possibly ex-Nazi nihilist doctor in Zurich.

Well-translated and mostly well-written except for a weird setup for a backstory with Barlach's Moriarty. The second story, Suspicion, is too dark and for that I will probably not read more in this series. ( )

Okay, both novelettes included in this book - The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion are excellent. Durrenmatt's writing is well above-average and both stories keep the reader in suspense (more or less) throughout the novel -- largely, because the author is playing with the reader on a psychological level. I enjoyed the first story more than the second one (which had some parts which were a bit too violent for my tastes. Having been to Switzerland, I enjoyed the references in both stories to places in Switzerland and Germany. If you like suspense and a mystery, this book and his other novel - the Pledge (or promise) are both quite good. ( )

Hans Barlach is a 60 Police Commissioner in Berne, Switzerland who has been called upon to solve the murder of police Lieutenant Ulrich Schmied. Although knowledgeable in criminal investigative techniques in Istanbull and Germany, Barlach doesn’t like to look at murder victims nor read police reports. There is a feeling of mutual dislike between Barlach and his superior Dr. Lucius Lutz whose deference to Oskar von Schwendi, the lawyer for wealthy Gastmann, interferes with a criminal investigation. Barlach has been trying to bring Gastmann to justice for many years and fellow officer, Walter Tschanz is convinced Gastmann ordered the murder of Schmied. Barlach isn’t so sure and in his own methodical way sets a killer to catch the murderer. ( )

Excellent! I read this a long time ago, but still recall the weird sense of dread that it seemed to instill in me... ( )

Two slim novellas that try to push the novel-of-ideas into the frame of classic detective fiction. It didn't really work for me. As genre fiction they're unsuccessful – the set-ups are extremely implausible and both stories rely heavily on dei ex machina – so the stories stand or fall on the ideas in play, which have to do with the nature of good and evil and the perfectibility of human nature.

The second piece, Suspicion, is the more successful, because realism is abandoned so completely that you feel permitted to ignore the plot and concentrate on the themes. At the same time, the pages are kept turning by the insane melodrama: a mad Nazi doctor, a gigantic wandering Jew, a drug-addicted sadistic nurse, etc etc. For me, the main interest came in the details of Swiss life, both the descriptive passages and the psychic questioning over Swiss involvement in the 1939–45 war. Some of this is picked up in Sven Birkerts's rather grandiose introduction (‘having come of age in the long Walpurgisnacht of World War II, and then nourished on the bitter milk of postwar existentialism…’), which sets Dürrenmatt in context well. Joel Agee's English translation is solid and sounds very natural, with enough flashes of German left in to convey flavour – a minor plot point in the second book turns on the Bernese pronunciation of Miuchmauchterli (a Swiss German word for a milking-stool, though this is not explained in the text). Only thing I'm not quite sure of is why he changed Inspector Bärlach's name to Barlach; I'm sure most English readers aren't scared of a couple of umlauts.

Overall I was left unsatisfied, but other readers may well get more out of this than I did. ( )