The Pledge: Requiem For The Detective Novel
The Pledge (German: Das Versprechen) is a crime novella by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt, published in 1958, after Dürrenmatt thought that his previous movie script, Es geschah am hellichten Tag ("It happened in broad daylight") did not have a realistic ending. That made-for-television story had demanded an appropriate ending, in line with that of a typical detective story. Dürrenmatt, however, was a critic of that genre of literature, and thus he set out to write Das Versprechen as an expression of that criticism. Although it has been absent from some subsequent editions of the novella, the title of the original edition included the telling subtitle Requiem for the Detective Novel (German: Requiem auf den Kriminalroman).
Read more about The Pledge: Requiem For The Detective Novel: Editions in English, Film Adaptation, Classroom Use
Famous quotes containing the word detective:
“The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practiced by every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)