"The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892)
Dr. Gerhardus Hellinga was a Dutch
internist, endocrinologist and the founder of andrological fertility science in
the Low Countries and a founding member of De Vereniging voor
Fertiliteitsstudie (Society for Fertility Study), which lead to him becoming a
Principal Assistant in the Department of Internal Medicine of the Free
University of Amsterdam. He worked there until his retirement.
After retiring from a professional life
dedicated to medical research, Hellinga began to work on fulfilling a life-long
cherished ambition: writing and crafting a misdaadroman (detective
novel). I did not make that up in order to fluff this piece up. It was
mentioned in his "In Memoriam,"
which noted "he had once said he would like to write a detective novel,"
but he put four of them to his name – before passing away in 1991 at the
respectable age of 84. So, now that we got that shakily and clumsily written
introduction out of the way, we can take a look at his debut novel.
Under the penname of "Hellinga
Sr," he wrote not one, but four, mystery novels and three of them had a
small village physician, Dr. Joris Joris, as the detective. Moord in het
vierkant (Murder in the Square, 1981) was the first one in this
short series.
Dr. Joris suffers from "ziekelijke
vetzucht" (morbid obesity) and as a result he's colossally fat with
enormous shoulders and arms. Fat bulged around his neck and on his back. He
barely had any hair on the top of his head, but it grew wildly above his ears
and on the sides of his cheeks, which made his face look extra wide – giving it
the appearance of "the head of a lion." His impossible fatness made him
depended for personal care on his assistant, Hannes. Otherwise, he would have
been regarded as an invalid, but the personal care he received from his
assistant allowed him to continue to work as a doctor and make his patient
rounds in the village.
The village of Bikhoven is a fictional
place, nestled in a quiet polder landscape of the Province of North-Holland,
which has a square grassy area that's completely surrounded by a complex of
houses and streets – known in the village simply as Het Vierkant (The
Square). Life in the village has remained relatively simple and there are still
living remnants of the past, but, above all, it's a peaceful and quiet place.
But that all changes when one of the prominent locals is murdered.
 |
| Scene of the Crime: Bikhoven, N.H. |
Paul van Dam was a Public Notary, or
simply notaris in Dutch, whose lifeless body is found inside his office:
a revolver was clasped in his hand, blood stain on his coat and the door of a
wall safe was swung wide open. After the discovery, the rumor mill of the
village assumed Van Dam had shot himself, but Dr. Joris immediately determines
the blood seeped from a stab wound. It's murder!
You could easily describe the subsequent
investigation as a "Case for Three Detectives," because there are three of
them. Firstly, there's Dr. Joris and he tows around a young man, Alexander
Arnolds, who's dating one of the doctor's daughters, Dolly, but he may have
been in the village at the time of murder on a work related assignment – as
he's attached to one of the government ministries and usually does
investigative work for this ministry. It may have been related to another
village prominent. The last one is a rechercheur (detective) from
Amsterdam, Mr. Verlinde, but he's a fairly minor character in the story.
Well, they encounter a surprising amount
of suspects and motives in the small village, which cuts through all of the
social strata of the village life: the Belgian wife of the mayor, who had an
extramarital affair with Van Dam, and her husband may have wanted him out of
the way because he was against the purchase of a plot of land by the village
counsel. Klaas ten Cate is a chemist and claims to have made an important
invention, which he wanted to sell to the Ministry of Defense, but he's not
very popular with his fellow villagers on account of his loose morals and
cruelty to animals. A Japanese man was beaten up by a German guest in the local
lodging house, called "De Kat," after which he vanished from the stage and
Japanese man was brought to the local hospital. There's woman suffering from
insomnia, known to everyone as Aunt Alie, who keeps an eagle eye on her fellow
villages with a pair of spyglasses and Dr. Joris calls her "the best spy he
has." There's an old-fashioned barber, who saves his customers "like his
father did fifty years ago," but he's also one of the prime movers of the
local rumor mill.
This all makes for a very readable and
enjoyable story, but, as the cogs of a plot, they were rendered useless when
both the false and correct explanation fingered two persons outside of this closed community of suspects who only played a
small part on the sidelines of the story – which also tied in with the obvious
motive and made the murders incidental. Oh yeah, there's a second, completely unnecessary,
murder and the culprit conveniently commits suicide. So I was left profoundly
disappointed after that rather under whelming ending. It's why this review is
so poorly written without much of substance, because, plot-wise, most of
interesting stuff was thrown out of the window by the end.
I wish I could end my return to the
homegrown detective stories of my country on a more positive note, but the
ending was really disappointing.
Well, I did like the Dell Mapback-like map of Bikhoven and enjoyed the character of Dr.
Joris Joris. Several times, Dr. Joris took a break from the story itself to
sit down on his soapbox and lecture about his unorthodox opinions on doctor-patient confidentially, village life, the future of medicine and the effects the sound of
a name has on shaping a child's personality. It gave him
that aura of the Great Detective and he deserved a better case to help solve,
but I've read De breinaaldmoorden (The Knitting-Needle Murders,
1983) is supposedly to be his best effort. So I'll probably give that one a
shot somewhere down the line.
No comments:
Post a Comment