Kommissär Peter Hunkeler has been around since 1993 when Hansjörg Schneider penned the first in his crime series about a police detective from the city of Basel, Switzerland. Even though the German-speaking population has been familiar with the beer and food loving detective for almost thirty years, the rest of the world was denied this privilege. Until now.
The Basel Killings is the fifth book Scneider wrote in the Hunkeler series, but the first translated into English by Mike Mitchell. We meet Peter Hunkeler as an ageing detective close to retirement, somewhat jaded by life and struggling to keep up with inevitable changes in the structure of the police force.
Hunkeler is a simple man. He takes pleasure in good food, beer, the odd glass of red wine and spending time in the seedy haunts of Basel’s red-light district. Like a true classic detective he’s melancholic by nature, a state of mind quite possibly exacerbated by the absence of his long-term girlfriend, Hedwig. While Hedwig is on a three-month sabbatical in Paris, Hunkeler bides his time in Basel’s bars and strip-clubs, “plunging down into the world of the lost nightbirds.” This is where he finds the human contact and companionship he craves and finds what he considers the real Basel, not the distant and unemotional version. After forty years Hunkeler still doesn’t feel like he belongs in the city, not understanding the invisible boundaries drawn by the reserved Swiss.
“There were a surprising number of people out, grumpy-faced as always in November. People kept to them-selves, avoiding each other as best they could. It was always like that in Basel, Hunkeler had got used to it.”
One night late, after visiting one of his regular haunts Hunkeler sees Hardy, one of the locals, sitting on a bench in the street. Lamenting his relationship with Hedwig he barely notices that Hardy’s throat has been slit and his signature diamond stud violently cut from his ear. When Hunkeler starts digging into the victim’s background he finds that he wasn’t the harmless alcoholic with a disability pension who he he thought he was. Hardy, also known as Bernhard Schirmer, was a truck-driver for an Albanian drug trafficking syndicate and regularly transported illegal merchandise from Turkey to Switzerland across the Balkans. When Hunkeler establishes that Hardy might have kept some heroin for himself to resell, the logical assumption is that he was killed by an Albanian gang. Hunkeler is not convinced.
The unsolved murder of Barbara Amsler is still fresh in his mind. The prostitute was also strangled and her pearl stud cut from her ear. What follows is Hunkeler’s attempt at finding the link between these murders with the help of his colleagues at Basel City criminal investigations department: Detective Sergeant Madörin, Corporal Lüdi and Haller. However, when Ismail Binaku, the owner of the Albanian olive oil company Hardy might have worked for, escapes police custody by overpowering and knocking Hunkeler unconscious his fragile career also takes a beating and he is suspended from his duties.
To clear his head Hunkeler escapes to his rural home on a farm in Alsace where he can tend to the hens and watch the cows being milked by the farmer’s wife. Unfortunately the case won’t leave him in peace and while wandering in the woods he finds a car with a charred corpse in it. Considering that it’s just across the border of France Basel police has limited jurisdiction. Basel itself is also a central point where three countries converge, sharing borders with Italy and France, a geographical fact which leads to different police forces becoming involved and unnecessarily complicating cases.
When the corpse of a young man pulled from a pond with a stab wound to the heart the likelihood of a blood feud between Albanian families becomes more of a possibility. Shortly after a sixteen year-old Gypsy girl, Eva Căldăraru, barely escapes with her life when she too is strangled, her ear cut and almost drowned in a pond. The similarities with the Barbara Amsler case is undeniable and since Hunkeler knows the case best he’s reinstated as investigator.
The Basel Killings is in many aspects a throwback to the classic European detective novel. Hunkeler reminded me of the German TV detective Derrick in terms of atmosphere and setting. From the get-go we are made to understand that Basel is a city constantly engulfed in fog and it’s not difficult to visualise characters dramatically lurking around in it. Schneider excels at creating a moody atmosphere.
“Then he heard a tram approaching from the right, from the city centre. The soft sound of the wheels on the rails, metal on metal, a round light, the outline hardly discernible. A ghostly gleam gliding through the fog. Then the lighted windows of the number 3, a man with a hat on in the front car, a young couple in the rear. The girl’s light hair was draped over the boy’s shoulder. The tram disappeared in the fog, heading for the border.”
Hunkeler is similarly melancholic evoking sympathy from the reader, calling himself “… a state cripple, safeguarded against crises and destitution, secure in the Helvetian net of prosperous uprightness.” Yet, he seems to find contentment in the monotony of life and performing everyday tasks. He’s acutely aware of his mortality and anticipates the worst when he believes he’s develop a prostate problem, as well as a possible heart condition. These everyday worries makes him human, relatable and likeable.
However, The Basel Killing’s strength lies in Hunkeler’s shrewd observations of his surroundings and the characters who inhabit it. Whether it’s Nana from the Billiards Centre, little Cowboy and his dog, Luise in her leopard-skin jacket, pale Franz or Richard the foreign legionnaire, Hunkeler knows them all. Through his eyes we get to know them as well and we might even recognise these people who live on the fringes of society everywhere.
St Johann is a neighbourhood where 47% of the population are foreigners. As with many other recent crime fiction novels the way immigrants in European countries are treated and the prevailing prejudices are highlighted. Swiss are threatened by the presence of the “Gypsies” or Travellers, believing that they are criminals from the Balkans or Africa who are unfairly given health insurance, rent and schooling for their children – “… criminal riff-raffs …” Schneider shows the contrast between these immigrants and the wealthy Swiss, while also exposing the skeletons in Switzerland’s closet with regard to the unethical treatment of minority groups in the past.
“Switzerland hasn’t had problems with Travellers. It’s had problems with itself. Because it can’t stand its own foreignness.”
Whether you like a detective fiction story with traditional elements or crime fiction with strong social commentary, you’ll find both in The Basel Killings.
About the author
Hansjörg Schneider, born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1938, worked as a teacher, and journalist. He is one of the most performed playwrights in the German language but is best known for his Inspector Hunkeler crime novels. Schneider has received numerous awards, among them the prestigious Friedrich Glauser Prize for The Basel Killings. He lives and writes in Basel.
About the translator
Mike Mitchell lives in Scotland and has published over eighty translations from German and French, including all the Friedrich Glauser Sergeant Studer novels and Gustav Meyrink’s five novels. His translation of Rosendorfer’s ‘Letters Back to Ancient China’ won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.
The Basel Killings is published by Bitter Lemon Press. Thank you to them and Random Things Tours for providing me with a review copy and inviting me to take part in the tour. See the dates below for more reviews over the next week.
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