Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Police chief inspector Baerlach has just undergone surgery when his friend and doctor, Hugentobler, thinks he recognizes one of his own colleagues on a LIFE Magazine picture. The article is about Dr. Neyle, a nazi doctor who practiced surgery without anesthesia in the extermination camps. This Dr. Neyle could now be …

Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim’s mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master …

The mystery follows Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In The Judge and His Hangman, Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. The thriller brings existential …

The world’s greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Möbius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as …

Dürrenmatt once wrote of himself: I can best be understood if one grasps grotesqueness,â and The Visit is a consummate, alarming Dürrenmatt blend of hilarity, horror, and vertigo. The play takes place somewhere in Central Europeâ and tells of an elderly millionairess who, merely on the promise of her millions, …