I'd admit that I had not even heard the name of Friedrich Glauser until I read Hansjörg Schneider'sThe Basel Killings which had won the prize named after him - so I went looking. Both authors are Swiss (Schneider was born in the year Glauser died: 1938) and as luck will have it, they were both translated by Mike Mitchell into English.

Thumbprint is the first of his Sergeant Studer series and is set in and around the village of Gerzenstein, close to the Swiss-French border. A traveling salesman is found dead and a local man has been identified as the murderer. Sergeant Studer is dispatched to apprehend the young man and transport him to the prison to wait for a trial - and except for sending a Sergeant where any policeman would have been sufficient, that should have been the end of it. Except that Studer is sure that they got the wrong man so he decides to investigate - despite now being just a Sergeant in the police force of the canton, he used to be an inspector - before refusing to back down from a sensitive investigation and being fired for standing on his principles and actually discovering the truth.

And off he goes - retracing the victim's last days and uncovering the secrets of the village - just as the usual English village in a British mystery story, the village here is full of secrets and half-truths and finding out what happened requires most of them to be aired out for everyone to see. I am not sure if it is the author's style or the translation but some of the narrative sounded almost lifeless - the style gets some time getting used to but even after you do, sometimes things just seem to deflate. But the investigation carries the story to the end - which is enough for a crime novel.

Some of the references make it clear that the story is set in the mid-1930s but other from that, the story does not sound dated. It has its own style and that may not work for everyone but if you like vintage crime, especially European vintage crime novels, it works very well.

Studer comes out as a bit surly - he is one of the original fallen detectives - a man who puts truth ahead of convenience and who is not beyond using a trick to get to the truth. That kind of story had become almost a cliche these days but then that's normal for successful formulas. I hope that some of the secondary characters will show up in later novels - they gave the Sergeant the touch of humanity he needed.

A good start of a series, even when it was flawed, and I plan to chase down at least a few more of them - too bad that Glauser died so young and did not write too many of them. ( )

Thumbprint was written in 1936 but translated from German to English for the first time in 2004. Glauser, described as the Swiss Simenon, wrote a psychological detective series featuring the Swiss detective Sergeant Studer. Thumbprint is the first. It is surprisingly modern in its outlook, not at all a period piece. Glauser, an opium addict diagnosed with schizophrenia, spent much of his life in psychiatric hospitals. Many of his descriptions of people and surroundings are arresting in their technicolour oddness.

Studer is an honest man. He was once an inspector, but was demoted to the lowest rank for refusing to give up on a case that his superiors wanted to ignore, and has managed to work his way back to sergeant. Studer is an appealing, well-rounded character. He has arrested a young man for murdering his girlfriend's father, but something seems wrong, so Studer convinces the examining magistrate that it would be bad for his career not to allow Studer to reopen the investigation. ( )

This vintage Swiss crime novel is the first in a series. I'm not a particular fan of vintage crime, and although this is a decent entry, I didn't like it enough to continue the series. In this one, a traveling salesman has been murdered in a small Swiss village. The author can write well. I liked his description of one of the characters as looking, "like a pig with scarlet fever."
The author is an interesting character himself. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was institutionalized much of his life. He was also a morphine and opium addict, and died in his early 40's.

2 1/2 stars ( )

I'm not really a fan of crime novels and this did nothing to change my mind. Apparently a popular author in Germany I can see why he might have a following. But it's a simply plotted tale with sketchily filled in characters. Interesting as it has a little historical feel to it but not something that will lead me to find any more in the series By the way - the mayor did it. ( )

Deckare skriven i mellankrigstiden i Schweiz. Bara det gör den ju intressant. Att ploten sedan håller sträck, gör det inte sämre. Lite knaggligt översatt här och där, tyvärr. Men mycket väl läsvärt, javisst. ( )