Swiss Mystery: Friedrich Glauser

Yesterday I read the 1937 Swiss police thriller The Spoke by Friedrich Glauser. What a fabulous find! Glauser’s creation, the crime and mystery-investigating Sergeant Studer, sets the standard for all the future cranky, morally-incorruptible, cigar-smoking, and promotion-avoiding (demotions taken) police detective. He is irascible, fed-up, impatient with everyone and everything but his case. Following his own slow, methodical process of fitting of details into place, Studer’s solution to the crime appears — voila! — and all is suddenly perfectly clear. Glauser is an artist with his detective and his crimes, and the unraveling of the mystery worked like Swiss clockwork, precise and right on time.

Glauser’s supporting characters were as distinctive and compelling as his hero, including the over-fifty “buck”, a charming mix of swain and swine (he sleeps with a red-lipsticked tart as well as with a little piglet); the red-lipsticked woman who has been to the school of hard knocks and back again; the childhood sweetheart of Studer, a sweet girl gone to double-chins and triple worries; and an assortment of paralyzed (or not) sharks preying on the good provincials of a tiny town in the canton of Arbon. Provincial Switzerland in the 1930s is another character in the novel, as well as the background landscape, with locals who don’t know what a symphony is, horse-driven carriages alongside snazzy sports cars, and invalids seeking to improve their circumstances by taking in the healthy airs of the countryside. Shimmering Lake Constance in the distance is the barometer of the mystery: when reddish clouds gather over the water, we can be sure of another insight from our wonderful Sergeant Studer and of his solution drawing closer and closer.

I am beholden to Bitter Lemons Press, a British publishing house that has taken as its goal to bring out in English the great crime and Noir fiction written by foreign writers, for introducing me to The Spoke and Friedrich Glauser, the writer, drug addict and insane asylee who with his Sergeant Studer mysteries created a whole new way of formatting police procedurals. Glauser used dreams, psychological penetration, and history, combined with old-fashioned A to Z storytelling, to create suspense and interest. I will be reading more of his Sergeant Studer mysteries, as well as other authors in the Bitter Lemon Press list, including Belgian Jef Geeraerts, Norwegian Saskia Noort, another Swiss, Jacques Chessex, Italians Gianrico Carofiglio and Luca Di Fulvio, and Argentine Sergio Bizzio. I love great crime fiction and great Noir, and to find new authors from other countries is an intoxicating promise of chills and thrills, and great reading.