Thursday 20 October 2016
“American readers... use fictional bloodshed as a gateway into another society and culture.”
pseudonym of Ivans, modelled his stories on those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Rene Appel, whose third novel, The Third Person, won the Golden Noose in 1990 (the prize for the best Dutch crime novel), considers the pioneer book to be P Tesselhoff, Jr’s The Detective’s Success. Published in 1900, Appel concisely observes, it keeps to the traditional parameters of crime fiction: “a corpse, a detective, a few suspects and finally the solution”. Beginning in 1963, Appie Baantjer–an Amsterdam police officer–wrote 70 novels featuring Inspector DeCock. Baantjer was immensely popular. “Baantjer often published two books a year, and many people in the Netherlands bought only two books a year,” Appel says. “Both of them by Baantjer.” Despite that local appeal, however, efforts to bring the series to a wider audience floundered. But, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, American audiences were introduced to Adjutant-Detective Henk Grijpstra and DetectiveSergeant Rinus de Gier, two eccentric plain-clothes members of the Amsterdam Municipal Police’s Murder Brigade, who appeared in 14 novels by Janwillem van de Wetering, including 1978’s The Blond Baboon, as well as in short stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Van de Wetering’s work was inspired both by Van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels, which he read after spending some time in a monastery, as well as his own service as a reserve constable in Amsterdam–works that are still available from Soho Crime. Tomas Ross, the alias of Willem Hogendoorn, who still awaits English translation, broke onto the Dutch scene in the 1980s, with the first of more than 30 books that made use of cause célèbres, such as the assassination of rightwing politician Pim Fortuyn; and a corruption scandal involving Prince Berhard (the late husband of Queen Juliana), KLM and Lockheed. Ross’ shift towards realism, and away from the puzzle mystery, helped to burnish the image of the genre in a country, like so many others, where writing thrillers or crime-themed stories was looked down upon by some of the intelligentsia. Bitter Lemon Press brought Dutch mega bestseller Saskia Noort to American audiences with 2007’s The Dinner Club and 2009’s Back to the Coast, and also Continues on page 38 g
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