Das Versprechen: Requiem auf den Kriminalroman, better known as
The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, is a crime thriller written by the Swiss author and playwright
Friedrich Dürrenmatt in 1958.
A very popular subject in language classes throughout the German-speaking world.
It was based on the script for the Swiss made-for-TV movie
Es geschah am hellichten Tag (
It Happened in Broad Daylight), a cautionary tale for the public about child predators and murderers, starring
Heinz Rühmann as the inspector and
Gert Fröbe as the killer.
It was also written by Dürrenmatt himself, but he was unhappy with the
Surprisingly Happy Ending, brought forth by
Executive Meddling.
So, he chose to write his own version of the story, quite a bit
Darker and Edgier and more
complex than the film and its
fairly standard plot. Among other things, it makes both the protagonist and antagonist more tragic, and gives the whole spectacle a
Bittersweet Ending, perhaps even a
Downer Ending.
In return, Dürrenmatt’s book was adapted itself by
Sean Penn in 2001, simply called
The Pledge.
Yet, both later works follow
EGAHT in their basic plot and premise:
Somewhere in Zurich, in the heart of the Swiss Alps, an old peddler named von Gunten makes a horrifying discovery; in a forest, a school-age girl had been cut to death with a razor blade.
From a local village, von Gunten calls
his old acquaintance, Komissar Matthäi of the Canton Police, to come and investigate for himself.
The police investigator meets the murdered girl’s parents, and
promises them to find the killer, delivering the story’s
MacGuffin. Then he goes to the girl’s school, and finds out from a classmate that she claimed a giant had been giving her chocolate hedgehogs. He finds a picture she drew before her death, featuring herself, the giant, a car and a Capricorn.
In the meantime, the locals have decided that von Gunten himself, previously convicted for sexual offence, is in fact the killer, and try to lynch him. To save him from the
angry mob, Matthäi arrests von Gunten and hands him over to the local police. Equally convinced of his guilt, the police conduct a
20-hour non-stop Perp Sweating, and thus torture a confession out of him.
The case seems solved, especially when von Gunten, driven to despair by the interrogation,
hangs himself in his cell. Matthäi gets commended for his work and even the victm’s parents thank him for keeping his promise.
Matthäi himself is ordered by the confederation to travel to Amman, Jordan, to instruct the local police force. However, he gets severe doubts about von Gunten’s guilt and his colleagues’ apt and popularist judgement. Seeing how von Gunten is implicated with two further similar child murders throughout the country, the chances are high that there still is a serial killer on the loose.
Overtaken by guilt, he skips the flight to Jordan
and quits his job as a police investigator, vowing to keep the promise he gave and
track down the killer on his own. He buys a gas station in the alps, in direct vicinity of the crime scenes, and hires Frau Heller, a former
Hooker with a Heart of Gold and her little daughter Annemarie. Having taken advice from local children fishing, Matthäi wants to use Annemarie as bait to catch the killer, who seems to be fixated on killing blondes in red skirts.
Soon, Annemarie starts skipping school, and Matthäi finds her in a forest, where she is waiting for a ‘wizard’. The wizard had apparently been stalking her on her way to school and had given her little chocolate nut pralines, which look a little bit like hedgehogs. Matthäi remembers the last victim’s drawing, and identifies the car as a distinctly American design, and the Capricorn as the coat of arms on its license plates. The wizard is the murderer.
Now knowing that the murderer has now eaten the bait, he informs his former colleagues to prepare to
set up a trap for the killer. One that involves
Annemarie.
The films and the book provide examples of the following tropes:
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