Original scientific paper
The crime novel in Swiss literature of the 1930s: Friedrich Glauser’s Wachtmeister Studer
Milka Car
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
In this article, Wachtmeister Studer (1936), a detective crime novel by the Swiss author Friedrich Glauser, will be analysed in its literary and historical contexts and brought in connection with socio-historical preconditions for its genealogical categorization as an early example of the so-called social crime novel. In so doing, the article will portray the novel as an example of this genre in German-language literature. F. Glauser is known as the “Swiss Simeon”, so the analysis of his detective Jakob Studer, an atypical investigator of Swiss canton police from Bern, will both yield the rules of crime novel as a genre in general as well as specific patterns Glauser relies on in his innovative form of the detective novel. It will be shown that Glauser’s variety of the detective novel is much more focused on the portrayal of society with the goal of an implicit critique of social problems. It is a crime novel no longer based exclusively on building up the suspense and solving an intellectual riddle, which are features typical of classic crime fiction.
Keywords
the detective novel; the social crime novel; Friedrich Glauser; Swiss literature
Hrčak ID:
238161
URI
Publication date:
21.5.2020.
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