<>Thumbprint by Friedrich Glauser
Available in bookshops from September 2004
Bitter Lemon Press

Thumbprint, a European crime classic, was first published in 1936. It has been translated into six languages and is the subject of a film. This is its first publication in English. It is the first of a series of five novels featuring the Swiss police detective Sergeant Studer. Friedrich Glauser, a morphine and opium addict most of his life, is a legendary figure of Continental crime writing, often compared to Simenon and a strong influence on Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Germany’s most prestigious and best known crime writing award is the Glauser prize.

 <>Glauser wrote in hospitals, mental institutions and prisons. Unstable, always short of money, full of ideas, enough for a lifetime of writing. Went from one school to the other, attempted suicide, passed his baccalaureate with difficulty. Always a fresh start but then he lost all sense of direction, swallowed up by depression. Enlisted in the Foreign Legion (from which he drew a wonderful novel, Gourrama), coalminer in Belgium, labourer here and there. He sank, lived a drug dependent life. An addict between hits, accepting despair. He began Thumbprint (Bitter Lemon Press 2004) in the Swiss insane asylum Waldau in 1935. He was meant to be fully detoxed of his deepest addiction, morphine. Enforced rest, plenty of time to look at the sadness around him. A world of lies and betrayals, of confrontations and fights. Men who cannot let others alone, who cannot accept them as they are. Love their weaknesses.

<>
In 1936 he was released and moved to Brittany, with Berthe, his nurse. He finished In Matto’s Realm (BLP2005), ‘Fever (BLP2006), Krock &Co, The Chinaman (BLP 2007), all novels with Sergeant Studer. Glauser wanted to move to Tunis in 1937 but ended up in Nerva near Genoa. On December 5th 1938, two days before his planned wedding to Berthe, he collapsed at the dinner table and died early the next morning.  <>

Glauser wrote the following letter to his friend  Joseph Halperin in 1937, a summary of his life:
 ‘You want facts? Right then: Born Vienna, 1896, Austrian mother and Swiss father. Grandfather on my father’s side a gold-digger in California (sans blague), on my mother’s side a senior civil servant, (fantastic combination, don’t you think?). Primary school, three years high school in Vienna. Then three years at the Glarisegg Reform School. Then three years at the Collège de Genève. Thrown out shortly before taking the school-leaving examinations…took them in Zurich. Then Dadaism. My father wanted to have me locked away and placed under a legal guardian. Ran away to Geneva . . . detained in Münsingen..for a year (1919). Escaped from there. One year in Ascona. Arrested for morphine. Sent back. Three months in Burghölzli (for a second opinion, because Geneva had declared me schizophrenic). 1921-23 Foreign Legion. Then Paris, washer-up. Belgium, coal-mines. Later hospital orderly in Charleroi. Morphine again. Imprisoned in Belgium. Deported to Switzerland. Ordered to do one year in Witzwil . Afterwards one year labourer in a tree nursery. Analysis (one year) . . . To Basel as a gardener, then Wintherthur. During that time (1928/29) wrote my Foreign Legion novel, ’30/’31 One year course at the Oeschberg tree nursery. July ’31 follow-up analysis. January ’32 to July ’32, Paris as a ‘freelance writer’ (as the saying goes). Went to visit my father in Mannheim. Arrested there for forged prescriptions. Deported to Switzerland. Imprisoned from July ’32-May ’36. Et puis voilà. Ce n’est pas très beau . . .’<>

 

Praise for Glauser and Thumbprint ‘From bitter experience Glauser has painted a portrait  of Switzerland you will never see
in a travel brochure’   Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

<>‘A magician of atmosphere, the best of the George Simenon school’  Neue Zuercher Zeitung <> 

‘A fine example of the craft of detective writing in a period which some regard as the golden age of crime fiction’  The Sunday Telegraph  ‘At the end of his life Glauser had ambitious plans for Sergeant Studer, but the five novels he left us are sufficient to guarantee his hero the place he deserves in the history of crime fiction’  Le Monde<> <> 

‘Like Mankell, Glauser dispels the placid myths of neutrality. This genuine curiosity compare to the dank poetry of Simenon and reveals the enormous debt owed by Duerenmatt, Switzerland’s most famous crime writer, for whom this should be seen as a template’ The Guardian

Background
Glauser read extracts of his novel in 1935 in Zurich to a group of fellow writers. Josef Halperin gave a glowing report in the weekly literary review ABC. “The man spoke with a strange pronunciation, Swiss, Austrian and German sounds, so that one wondered about where he had been raised. Where he had been.” But his listeners were quickly entranced, their curiosity piqued by this Sergeant Studer playing billiards in a café while worrying about a prisoner called Schlumpf. And who played poorly because he was deep in thought about the case. A village was described, became a protagonist of the book in its own right. Just a main street, shop and inn signs everywhere and wireless sounds coming from every window. A façade hiding a void, meant to hide lies. Glauser read and the plot emerged, the vices and secret crimes of the village notables and mercenaries were laid bare. A hollow and fragile society that a Swiss police inspector wanted to expose to justice.

<><>The writers praised Glauser’s work: a brilliant crime novel that shed a new penetrating light on small town life, a spirit seeking truth, a mirror of the times, unflattering but without hatred, strong and clear.

 The Studer novels are similar to those of Maigret as they depend less on the cleverness of the inspector than on a feeling of shared psychology, even a shared destiny, with the criminal. As the enigma is resolved Studer’s says: ‘It’s a funny thing about us humans, sometimes we do the very thing we want to avoid, the very thing our reason warns us not to do. An acquaintance of mine — he’s dead now — always used to talk of the subconscious. As if the subconscious had a will of its own. And you remind me of that, Aeschbacher. You’ve done everything you could to draw attention to yourself. Your passion for gambling might be an explanation, but I think there’s something else behind it. I think that deep down inside you wanted the murder to come out’.<>

 Thumbprint was first serialized in 1936 in the Zuercher Illustrierten as Wachtmeister Studer. The same year it appeared in book form as Schlumpf Erwin Mord, the original title Glauser preferred but could not get the newspaper to accept.

In 1939, a year after Glauser’s death, the film ‘Wachtmeister Studer’ was greeted with critical and commercial success. Studer became more famous than his creator, the mark of true success for a fictional detective. Glauser left us five Sergeant Studer novels, all translated into six or seven languages, but it is our privilege at Bitter Lemon Press to be the first to publish them in English.

 

 

 <>