The Black Mask department of EQMM’s March/April issue (on sale next Wednesday) features a story by Nils Gilbertson entitled “Apple Juice.” Despite the cosy-sounding title, it’s a gritty noir story. In this post, the San Francisco Bay area native tells us about a noir writer whose work he was introduced to in childhood, an author who influenced him much later as a writer. We’re willing to bet most of our readers don’t know much about Friedrich Dürrenmatt, but may want to look for his books after reading about him here. Prior to selling “Apple Juice” to EQMM, Nils Gilbertson had short stories in Mystery Magazine, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir Vols. 2 & 3, Rock and a Hard Place, Mystery Tribune, and elsewhere. His story “Washed Up” was named a Distinguished Story in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022.  —Janet Hutchings

My family has a habit of ending Christmas morning with a stack of new books halfway to the ceiling. Familiar with each other’s preferred genres, we do not always play it safe when it comes to book gifting. There is little excitement in watching someone open the latest release by their favorite author. Rather, the goal is to find a book they have never heard of, an author with whom they are unfamiliar. Hopefully, one they come to love. There is pride in facilitating that journey.

In my late teens, I devoured the noir classics. Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Thompson. Sure, they were dark. But they also shed light on oft-ignored truths. Truths we feel and think and see but are too afraid to acknowledge. I couldn’t get enough of those books, and my family knew it. So, when I tore the wrapping from the thin paperback, I was hoping for a familiar title. The Big Sleep, Red Harvest, Pop. 1280. On this occasion, though, the unfamiliar title surprised me: The Pledge by Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

“He’s an old Swiss author,” my mother explained. “We used to read him in school.” She smiled at my skepticism. “It’s dark,” she said. “Same as the ones you like. We know how to write over there too, you know.”

I came to learn that Dürrenmatt was a prolific Swiss playwright and novelist. His work spanned a variety of genres and incorporated dark comedy, irony, and existential themes. While best known for his plays such as The Visit and The Physicists, it was his psychological crime tales that grabbed my attention. His novel, The Pledge, begins:

Last March I had to give a lecture in Chur on the art of writing detective stories. My train pulled in just before nightfall, under low clouds, in a dreary blizzard.

The peculiar framing drew me in immediately. It is told from the perspective of a mystery writer who befriends a former chief of police, Dr. H, in a bar. The next morning (after a night of drinking whiskey until three a.m.), Dr. H gives the writer a ride back to Zürich. The writer does his best to fend off the hangover as they traverse the icy terrain.

The day seemed still dark, though the sun had risen a while ago. There was a patch of metallic sky gleaming somewhere through a covering of dense, sluggishly lumbering, snow-filled clouds. Winter seemed unwilling to leave this part of the country. The city was surrounded by mountain, but there was nothing majestic about them; they rather resembled heaps of earth, as though someone had dug an immense grave.

The Swiss mountainside has never sounded so grim. On the drive, Dr. H explains that he considers detective fiction to be a lie. A “waste of time” that only perpetuates the falsity that crime-solving is akin to a logical game—put the right pieces in the right spots and the truth will reveal itself. He laments:

What really bothers me about your novels is the story line, the plot. There, the lying just takes over, it’s shameless. You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: here’s the criminal, there’s the victim, here’s an accomplice, there’s a beneficiary; and all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replayed the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed.


Dürrenmatt’s character suggests that honest detective fiction would tell of a world where the characters are so human that the plot doesn’t always make sense. This is the same world where we don’t know who killed the chauffeur. A world that acknowledges, as Dostoevsky put it, that man is not a piano key. It is messy and people are corrupt and act irrationally. In that world, tidy solutions are the exception to the rule. To Dr. H, for art to stray from this reality is a betrayal.

Dr. H goes on to tell the writer the story of Inspector Matthäi, a brilliant and stoic detective who becomes obsessed with solving the murder of a young girl after he makes a pledge to the girl’s parents. But Matthäi’s investigation is spoiled by poor timing and random, unforeseeable obstacles, leading to his downfall. In other words, the case unfolds in a manner that, to Dr. H, reflects the real world, not the “manageable world” often set up in detective fiction. “That world may be perfect, but it’s a lie.” Towards the end of the book, Dr. H reflects on Matthäi’s story, noting that:

[W]e have to realize that the only way to avoid getting crushed by absurdity, which is bound to manifest itself more and more forcefully and clearly, and the only way to make a reasonably comfortable home for ourselves on this earth, is to humbly include the absurd in our calculations. Our rational mind casts only a feeble light on the world. In the twilight of its borders live the ghosts of paradox.

Despite my immediate suspicion that The Pledge fit alongside the noir and hardboiled traditions of mid-century America, it was only later when I read Raymond Chandler’s famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” that I made a more concrete connection.

Chandler’s essay begins: “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.”Chandler and Dürrenmatt work from the same premise: that there is inherent value in art reflecting the world as it is. Chandler and Dürrenmatt also agree that the folly of some mystery fiction is its rejection of the reality of crime.

As Chandler describes, some detective novels adhere to a specific formula and are “sold to the world as problems of logic and deduction.” He notes that truth and plausibility are not considered, which leads to stories that “are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art.”

Chandler praises Dashiell Hammett as an example of an author who “wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction.” In doing so, “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

There, Chandler gets to the heart of what makes good crime fiction so intriguing. It is not only the intricacy of the plot or whether we can crack the case based on the crumbs the author leaves us. Rather, it is the glimpse it offers into the soul of the subject—whether it be the perpetrator, victim, or investigator. It is the psychological inquiry regarding why people act as they do. Crime fiction reminds us that we share a world with such people and that, under a particular set of circumstances, each one of us could be one of them.

While Dürrenmatt and Chandler both embraced the genre’s turn toward realism, they offered different solutions to how literature should confront the dark corners of reality. Dürrenmatt, through his character Dr. H, proposes an absurdist and somewhat nihilistic approach: to understand the limits of reason and logic and to humbly include the absurd in our calculations. Such a conclusion places him in the lineage of Kafka and Camus, and explains why many of his works are steeped in irony and self-labeled as tragi-comedy.

Chandler proposes that there can still be a hero in this grim world, even if it is a fallen hero. This is Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and others who stalked the pages of Black Mask. He closes his essay by describing such a person:

But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it.

Between the rich tradition of hardboiled and noir fiction and the countless talented writers it inspired, there is more to read than most of us can find time for. Nonetheless, I submit my humble proposal: to save a spot on the shelf for Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge. It is beautifully written, yet dread-inducing; chilling, yet honest. The world it takes place in, as Chandler would put it, “is not a fragrant world, but it is the world [we] live in.”

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Cited throughout:

Chandler, Raymond. The Simple Art of Murder, 1950. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1988.

Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. The Pledge, 1958. Translated by Joel Agee, The University of Chicago Press, 2006.