The Business with the Bank

The business with the bank

The same phrase turns up in all five novels, always in the same evasive form, never explained. The business with the bank. It is how everyone refers to the reason that the most gifted investigator in the canton of Bern is a sergeant.

Jakob Studer was chief inspector with the Bern city police for fifteen years. He had the corner office. He speaks French, Italian and German and reads English, he trained under Hans Gross in Graz and Edmond Locard in Lyon, which is to say under the two men who effectively invented forensic science, and he is the one his force sends to international conferences. Then he investigated a bank, and a Colonel Caplaun demanded his dismissal and got it, and Studer began again at the bottom with the cantonal force.

Glauser gives the whole thing one sentence: Things could be tough if you had too strong a sense of justice.

And then the detail that tells you what sort of books these are. The chief of police, in his unbuttoned moments, likes to say that there is nobody he would rather see inside Thorberg Prison than Colonel Caplaun. Everybody knows. Everybody agrees. Nothing whatever happens. Studer will retire in six years and tells himself, on the whole, that he got off lightly.

The man who wrote it

Friedrich Glauser was born in Vienna in 1896 to a Swiss father and an Austrian mother, and had the most catastrophic life of anyone who has ever written detective fiction.

He was twice expelled from school. His father had him placed under legal guardianship. He went to Zurich to read chemistry, found the Dadaists instead, and was addicted to morphine and opium before he was twenty. In 1918 the authorities appointed him a guardian in January, he was arrested for forging a prescription in June, and in August he was admitted to the Münsingen asylum, the first of many. He attempted suicide at least five times. Between 1921 and 1923 he served with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Afterwards he worked as a coal miner in Belgium, a hospital orderly, a gardener.

He began writing the first Studer novel while an inmate at the Waldau, which is a short tram ride from the centre of Bern. He died at Nervi on 8 December 1938, aged forty-two, of a stroke he suffered the evening before his wedding day. Since 1987 the leading German-language crime writing award has carried his name.

This matters because of what it does to the books. Glauser did not research asylums, prisons, labour camps and guardianship proceedings. He was processed by them. When Studer walks into a locked ward, the author has been on the other side of that door as a patient, and it shows in every line.

A method made out of patience

Studer is heavy, with a long thin pointed nose that does not go with the rest of him. He smokes cheap Brissago cigars, lighting them with an elaborate ceremony that the examining magistrate in the first novel finds unbearable and is too polite to say so. He sits in his favourite position, legs apart, elbows resting on his thighs, hands clasped. When he talks to himself he uses the royal we, like a king. There is a wife, Hedy, and a married daughter, Marie. He gets about on a bicycle.

His colleagues say he has the odd screw loose, and what they mean by it, Glauser explains, is that he has rather too much imagination for a man from Bern.

The method is simply that he sits down with people. He eats with them. He listens for a long time and declines to condemn. In the first novel a travelling salesman is found dead in a wood, there is already a suspect with previous convictions and already a confession, and Studer refuses both, and says the thing nobody in the room wants said: that the lad will go to Thorberg for life and hang himself there, and it’s a shame about the lad, really. In a later book two men try to mug him on the Thunstrasse, and having flattened both of them he recognises one and asks, with real hurt, whether he did not treat him decently last time, whether he did not buy him a drink.

That is not a technique. It is a disposition, and it is the exact opposite of every other detective in this collection. Studer has no mission, no vengeance, no code, no gun that matters. He is a middle-aged civil servant of the canton of Bern who happens to believe that the people he arrests are people.

Matto’s realm

The second novel is the masterpiece, and it opens with the most revealing paragraph Glauser ever wrote. He explains, defensively, that there are three psychiatric clinics in the canton of Bern, Waldau, Münsingen and Bellelay, and that his fictional Randlingen is none of them, and that the characters are entirely invented, and that a story has to happen somewhere, and that presumably one is still allowed to tell stories. A man who had been an inmate of two of those three institutions, writing a nervous disclaimer to the authorities who had committed him.

Inside, a patient called Schül has given a name to the spirit of madness. Matto, which is Italian for mad. The deputy director, Dr Laduner, warns Studer at the door that he is about to visit the naked subconscious, and adds a correction that in 1936 amounts to a small revolution: he says patients, not lunatics.

Then comes the inversion the whole book is built on. Late at night, with a march playing quietly on the radio, Laduner tells Studer about standing outside the town hall at lunchtime and watching the officials come pouring out, diagnosing each one as he passed. Incipient catatonia in the man with his thumb in his waistcoat. Something schizoid in the one balancing along the kerb. Manic depression in the one swinging his stick and greeting everybody. His conclusion is that no line can be drawn between illness and normality, and that the only real measure is how well a person adapts to the society around him. The asylum is not the opposite of the town. It is the town with the walls made visible.

And the administrative violence sits everywhere in these books, mentioned in passing and never argued about. A drunk sings in the street and Studer notes that this is striking in Bern, a town given to shutting even moderate drinkers away in labour camps. Witzwil, which his petty thieves call the Big Moss, was real. Thorberg was real. Glauser had been through that machinery, and he lets his sergeant mention it the way you mention the weather, which is far more damaging than a speech would have been.

Dürrenmatt, and where to begin

Fifteen years later a second Bernese writer put a second old, ill, out-of-favour policeman on the page. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, born at Konolfingen in the canton, gave Kommissär Hans Bärlach two novels, The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion. Bärlach is elderly, has about a year to live because of his stomach, and has spent a career being passed over by superiors who find him an embarrassment. The family resemblance to Studer is unmistakable.

But the two men answer the same predicament in opposite directions, and that is the argument between them. Studer’s response to a crooked world is patience and sympathy: sit down, eat with people, refuse to condemn, and the truth arrives. Bärlach concludes that the law cannot reach the guilty at all, and so arranges for one murderer to serve as the instrument that executes another, which is what the title means. And in 1958 Dürrenmatt wrote The Pledge and subtitled it a requiem for the detective novel, on the grounds that the whole form is a lie, because reality is governed by chance and not by logic.

So the same small canton produced the humanist and, fifteen years later, the man who wrote the funeral oration. Glauser did not live to read it. I doubt he would have been surprised.

Begin with Thumbprint (1936), the case in the wood at Gerzenstein, where the confession is already signed and Studer will not have it, and where a tidy village turns out to be built on envy, usury and abuse. Then In Matto’s Realm (1936), which is the one to read if you read only one.

Then Fever (1938), which sends Studer to Paris and North Africa and lets Glauser use his Legion years, and in which we finally meet Frau Studer. Then the two posthumous books, The Chinaman (1939) and The Spoke (1941), the latter a murder committed with a sharpened bicycle spoke. All five exist in Mike Mitchell’s translations.

Everyone in these novels knows about the business with the bank, and nobody will say what it was. The colonel who destroyed Studer will not go to Thorberg, and the chief of police will go on saying over a glass of wine that he wishes he would. Glauser understood that arrangement from the inside, because the same canton had declared him incapable of running his own life and put him away for it.

Too strong a sense of justice. That is the entire charge sheet. Every time.