The northern Dutch city of Sneek, location for The Murderer, one of Simenon's tightly plotted psychological non-Maigret romans durs.
Dr.
Hans Kuperus, age forty-five, has been moving and acting according to a
set pattern and routine his entire professional career. In his city of
Sneek, the city where he was born and raised, the dedicated doctor has
been seeing patients in his office in the morning, making house call in
the afternoon, playing billiards at his club and then dining with his
wife Alice in the evening. But his life is about to undergo a radical
shift: there he is in Amsterdam, come to the city as he has many time
previously to participate in a medical conference. But this time Kuperus
does not attend; rather, he's walking down a street in the theater
district where there are a number of gunsmiths and he can purchase a
revolver.
Why such a break in routine? And why a gun? The reason
is clear: last year Kuperus received an anonymous letter letting him
know he's been made a fool – every time he travels to Amsterdam, his
wife Alice has been having an affair with his friend Schutter. Kuperus
spent two months of investigation to find out the truth for himself and
ten months to finally take action.
Ah, Schutter, a lawyer who
doesn't bother to practice since he has plenty of money, a man from an
aristocratic family (in fact, he's a count) who, although the same age
as himself, looks much younger, a man who has his cloths custom-made by
an English tailor in Amsterdam, can speak French, English and German,
traveled the world and owns a yacht and the finest house in all of
Sneek, is president of his Billiards Club, and, above all, can get away
with everything, even bedding any woman he wants, married or unmarried.
It's
January and on his trip back to Sneek, Kuperus smiles sublimely as his
thought of the revolver in his inside pocket, a revolver he will use
later that cold murky evening to shoot and kill both his wife Alice and
Herr de Schutter and dump their bodies in an icy canal. And since
Kuperus took Schutter's wallet (the police conclude a thief committed
the crime) and wasn't seen by a soul, he gets away with the murders. The
only thing Kuperus must deal with is his own mind, the mind of a
murderer. 
Classic
Simenon: the author bares the mind and heart of the doctor as he
attempts to continue his set routine in Sneek, at home with his
housekeeper Neel, seeing patients in his consulting room, at his
Billiards Club with his friends, in conversations with the Public
Magistrate. Did he really get away with murder? Kuperus begins to have
his doubts. “Perhaps, unknown to him, an exhaustive enquiry was going on
all around him.” In addition to his increasing paranoia, Kuperus muses,
“The house he had lived in for sixteen years seemed suddenly to have
changed – or rather, it seemed to have died."
Simenon also forces Dr. Hans Kuperus to deal with an unexpected and unsettling discovery...in his very own house! The Murderer is among the author's most probing novels. For fans of existentialism and crime noir, a dark, twisting tale not to be missed.
Belgian author Georges Simenon, 1903-1989
Comments
Post a Comment