The Inspector Barlach mysteries : the judge and his hangman and Suspicion
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The hero - or perhaps anti-hero - of these two classic, genre-bending mysteries is, as Sven Birkerts describes him, "a detective at career's end ... no family, a domestic life no more furnished than Sam Spade's, with only gruff and grumbling ties to his colleagues on the Bern police force." Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice has grown uncertain. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in Suspicion, Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. These two thrillers by the great Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt, newly translated by Joel Agee, bring existential philosophy, and the detective genre into dazzling convergence."--Jacket

Translated from the German.