: The Judge And His Hangman Novel plot and novel summary. What is The Judge And His Hangman Novel about

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The Judge and His HangmanThe Judge and His Hangman (German: Der Richter und sein Henker) is a 1950 novel by the Swiss writer Friedrich D�rrenmatt. It was first published in English in 1954, in a translation by Cyrus Brooks and later in a translation by Therese Pol. A new translation by Joel Agee appeared in 2006, published together with its sequel Suspicion, as The Inspector B�rlach Mysteries, with a foreword by Sven Birkerts. Together with D�rrenmatt's The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, these stories are considered classics of crime fiction, fusing existential philosophy and the detective genre.

Plot
Commissar B�rlach of the Bernese police, who is dying of cancer, must solve the murder of his best officer, Lieutenant Ulrich Schmied. B�rlach is assisted in his investigation by officer Walter Tschanz. As Schmied had been investigating the crimes of Richard Gastmann, a career master criminal who is an old friend and enemy of B�rlach, suspicion immediately falls upon Gastmann. But B�rlach's and Tschanz's "investigation" of Gastmann yields an unexpected twist after Tschanz kills Gastmann, supposedly in self-defense. B�rlach then reveals that he has known all along that Tschanz is the one who murdered Schmied.

Tschanz had purposefully killed Gastmann so that Gastmann would be forever blamed for Schmied's murder. Furthermore, B�rlach had manipulated Tschanz into this action with the manner in which B�rlach had pressed forward with their seeming investigation of Gastmann. B�rlach had deliberately pushed Tschanz toward a final, fatal confrontation with Gastmann, resulting in Gastmann's death: the punishment B�rlach considers just for all of the previous crimes Gastmann had committed, but which B�rlach had been unable to prove.

In fact, Gastmann and B�rlach went back forty years. They had long ago made a personal bet with one another as to whether it was possible to commit the "perfect" crime, such that even an investigator who witnessed it would never be able to prove the perpetrator guilty. After that bet, Gastmann, as B�rlach well knew, had pursued a lifelong career as a purveyor of crime, evil in its comprehensiveness, arrogant and mocking of civilisation itself. And indeed, he always remained one step ahead of B�rlach's tireless but fruitless efforts to convict him. Gastmann recalled to B�rlach: "I wanted to prove that it was possible to commit a crime that couldn't be solved." Gastmann had been correct, and B�rlach's final plot is an acknowledgment thereof. By murdering Schmied during Schmied's investigation of Gastmann, Tschanz had ruined the terminally ill B�rlach's final chance to bring Gastmann to justice in a courtroom. Therefore, using Tschanz as a pawn, B�rlach finds an alternate method to mete out the justice for which he feels Gastmann is overdue.

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