The Pledge

I read this book in one day and found it impossible to put down. This is not your average murder mystery or detective story. In fact, the murder in the book is "solved" early on. The story focuses on one retired detective's dissatisfaction with the police force's determination of who the killer was, and his resolve to keep his promise to the murdered girl's mother that he would find the killer of her daughter. This to me is the strength of the story, how trying to keep a promise can lead someone to obsessive behavior and eventually to a mental breakdown. This is one case where I think the movie was just as good as the book, although there were some differences between the two. (For one, the locale was changed from Switzerland to Nevada in the movie.) While Durrenmatt's writing style may seem sparse to some, I didn't find that it affected my interest in the story or the flow in any way, and as a reader you have to remember that the story is being told in a narrative format by one of the characters to another. Overall, a quick read and a fascinating story.

The fact is I was interested in this book because of the film of the same name starring Jack Nicholson and masterfully directed by Sean Penn. I?d never heard of the author before, and am not a novel reader. Were it not for the film, I?d have never read it. But I regret neither the film nor the novel, which would perhaps be better labeled as a novella.For those with my intent of comparing media, the book takes place in the 1940s or 50s, the film is contemporary. And the story in the book took place in Switzerland and in the film in the Western U.S. But they translate well into each other. The murder of a young woman takes place. Someone, in the book?s case a traveling salesman, is accused of the murder. After a grueling interrogation, he seems to have confessed and, shortly after, kills himself. To his inquisitors, that is conviction of his guilt. But to one particular officer, in the book about to undertake an overseas assignment, there was something wrong with the whole affair. He pursues it relentlessly?-looking more in the eyes of the bureaucrats and his former colleagues like an obsessive crackpot. To make a long story short, in both the film and the book, he WAS right. But no one really knows it. The cop who was to have settled into his overseas assignment and retired from it is now stuck in his former community, a burned out lunatic. Only the narrator knows he was right. But now it?s too late.The only difference I felt between the book and the film was that, in the movie, the cop endeared the woman whose daughter was to be bait for the man the cop felt was the real killer. In the book, he just lived with her because her daughter could be bait, a far more insidious motive. Aside from that, as I?ve said about the film, it?s a real life situation. How many of us know of a situation that we know is wrong, despite the popular view of it? Someone, for example, is seen by one?s peers as a hero, while the ?one? knows the ?hero? is a self-indulgent phony, or countless other examples. And the author?s eye for details is commendable. One can nearly smell the environment he describes. It certainly makes the reading worthwhile and easy!I recommend the book and the film. I think I?ll read more of Durrenmatt. May his other stories become films too!

This is a novel that Durrenmatt wrote specially as the scheme of an old Spanish- Swiss film from 1959 entitled "El cebo" (The Lure). Apparently the book is as another police novel although by then the morbid plot was less common than today: a little child is found slaughtered in a Swiss canton. This crime has the pattern of another tree previous sepaparated by several years. Inspector Mattei, the policeman in charge of the case gets deeply impressed and when he has to say the notice to the parents, the mother demands to him the promise to capture the murderer, but Mattei as attained the age of retirement. In fact he has an employement as police adviser in Jordania and his flight is for the next day. But Mattei develops an obsession in order to get the murderer and he rejects the work in Jordania and begins to work in a petrol station because he thinks the criminal lives near here. I think Mattei in some sense fulfils his pledge but that costs him his health and perhaps more. Durrenmatt is a pessimist writer and this novel ins't for these readers that expects a happy end but a cruel and strange one.

'the Pledge' is subtitled 'A Requeim for the Detective Novel', and can be seen as part of the project of dismantling the classic detective story begun by Borges in the early 1940s: the undermining of its affirmations of law, order and reason - the very idea that mysteries can be solved and normality restored. 'The Pledge' is an ironical story in the truest, Greek sense; introduced as the story of a brilliant, loner detective made mad by obsessional dedication to a hopeless case - his belief that the wrong man was found guilty of a child murder, and his insane attempts to catch the 'true' killer, despite the mockery of his superiors and peers. The central scene takes place in a delapidated mental institute; the narrative is structured in a repetitive circle, one the hero Matthai sacrifices his mind trying to break. His obsession puts another little girl in horrible danger; and the complacent, socially-conscious police are driven to abominable acts, the forces of law and order replicating the mania of a murderous defective.'The Pledge' is a detective story about writing detective stories: the narrator is a crime writer giving a lecture about his field: a former police Commissioner tells him the tale of Matthai's downfall, with its atrocious ironies and blind accidents, as a corrective to genre writers' neat and reassuring tidying up of messy life. The frame increases the story's ambiguity; it also allows for a number of psychological studies - Matthai himself; the character of the good-food-loving, cigar-chomping, smugly philosophical Commissioner; and, perhaps most importantly, behind the narrative screen, the narrator/author himself, with his mania for 're-ordering' and improving, and his fondness for alcohol. Those of us for whom knowledge of Swiss culture extends to Harry Lime's 'cuckoo clock' speech in 'The third man' will find in the novel an extraordinary insight into why such an enviably ordered, rational society as Switzerland, with such a high standard of living, could, with its infernal boredom and waiting, produce such horrors. The idea of a casual promise seizing an emotionally lifeless man, like some kind of curse, adds a supernatural frisson to a supposedly rational genre.Despite splices of terrifying, modernist tableaux, such as the near-lynching of a suspect, or the disturbing cries and phantoms of the mental institute, 'The Pledge' can be enjoyed as a straight, gripping crime story, unlike most 'anti-detective' or post-modernist crime works. I read this in the old Penguin Crime green jacket edition, a series including other noted European modernists such as Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner.

I sought out this short but sweet novel after catching the last half of the Sean Penn-directed film (yeah, I snuck in at my local multiplex, what of it?) which it inspired. The film definitely drew me in, despite the fact that I had little idea of what was going on.As is often the case, the book is more profound than the film (which is not a knock against the screen version; after reading Durrenmatt's fine novel, I went back to see the entire movie). Told in the sparest language, "The Pledge" is the story of one man's quest to set right a wrong, taking his responsibility (and its consequences) so far as to threaten his very existence. As other reviewers have noted, this is not a typical thriller, replete with hard-boiled narrative and the requisite twists. I found "The Pledge" to more closely echo the writings of Camus, in its examination of one man's conscience as he faces a challenge he simply can't walk away from. A complex story simply told, "The Pledge" asks the reader to look inward and ask: "How far would you go to keep your word?"