Fredrich Glauser – författare

Studer investigates when the director vanishes and a child murderer escapes from an insane asylum in Bern, an environment Glauser knew all too well from personal experience. Set in the 1920s, the novel explores the no-man's-land between reason and madness where Matto, the spirit of insanity, reigns. Dubions psychological theories and therapies abound and the asylum darkly mirrors the world outside.

When two women are "accidently" killed by gas leaks, Sergeant Studer investigates the thinly disguised double murder in Bern and Basel. The trail leads to a geologist dead from a tropical fever in a Moroccan Foreign Legion post and a murky oil deal involving rapacious politicians and their henchmen. With the help of a hashish-induced dream and the common sense of his stay-at-home wife, Studer solves the multiple riddles on offer. But assigning guilt remains an elusive affair. "Fever", a European crime classic, was first published in 1936. It has been translated into four languages. This is its first publication in English and the third in the "Sergeant Studer" series published by Bitter Lemon Press.

When, in later years, Sergeant Studer told the story of the Chinaman, he also called it the story of the three places as the case unfolded in a country inn, in a poorhouse and in a horticultural college, all in Pfrundisberg, a Swiss village - three places but also two murders. Anna Hungerlott, supposedly dead of a gastric influenza, left behind handkerchiefs with traces of arsenic. And one foggy November morning, the enigmatic James Farny, nicknamed the Chinaman by Studer, was found lying on Anna's grave, murdered with a single pistol shot to the heart that did not hole his clothing. Did the fact that the poorhouse inmates had to survive on watery cabbage soup while the Warden drank vintage wines have anything to do with the murders? Perhaps. Studer must reconstitute the Chinaman's story, a voyage through asylums, reform schools and institutions for the destitute that, incidentally, were an integral part of Glauser's short life.