DeKok and the Immortal Death (1998) by A.C. Baantjer

Today, September 16, 2023, marks what would have been the 100th birthday of A.C. Baantjer. A former Amsterdam police inspector and part of de moordbrigade (the homicide squad) who worked from 1955 until his retirement in 1983 in the red light district at the illustrious, sometimes notorious, Warmoesstraat police station – while nursing an urge to write and tell stories. A talent that emerged in the administrative side of police work as he had to write reams of police reports, but a police report only allowed him to write down the facts without any room for the human and emotional element ("so I am a writer out of frustration"). After a failed attempt in the late 1950s and winning a short story contest in the early '60s, Baantjer properly debuted under his own name with Een strop voor Bobby (A Noose for Bobby, 1964). A novel starring the quickly abandoned character of Inspector Albert Versteegh. Baantjer replaced him with a character who made a one-page appearance in A Noose for Bobby and struck the mother lode.

Inspectors Jurriaan de Cock and Dick Vledder appeared in a series of seventy novels that were published between 1965 and 2008, which sold millions of copies and even enjoyed a small measure of international success.

Regrettably, the thoughtless, dumb down English translations altered and added to the original texts. A notable change is that the name of De Cock was changed into DeKok, which perhaps makes sense to non-Dutch readers, but De Cock always spells out his name (“met cee-oo-cee-kaa”) because DeKok ("with kay-oh-kay") is the most common spelling of the name ("there are many Kok's, De Kok's, Cocq's en Cocky's..."). So there's no reason for DeKok to spell out his name to all the Dutch characters in the English translations. De Kock would have been a better compromise, but, since this blog drones on, and on, to an international, English-speaking audience, I'll try to keep things consistent and simply go with DeKok. I needed to get that out of the way, before continuing.

Upon his retirement from the Amsterdam police, Baantjer had already become the bestselling crime novelist in the Netherlands with over one-and-a-half million copies sold. So the books had always been popular that had attracted a loyal readership over the decades, but the series exploded in popularity, becoming mainstream hot, in 1995 when the TV-series Baantjer debuted on RTL4 – spanning 11 seasons and 123 episodes. A series based on the characters rather than the novels, but proved to be so incredibly popular, even reruns drew an audience of millions. It turned "Baantjer" into a brand and cash cow still being milked to this day.

So the centenary of what would have been Baantjer's 100th birthday is marked with two publications, Uit de verhoorkamer: belevenissen van rechercheur Baantjer van Bureau Warmoesstraat (From the Interrogation Room: Experiences of Inspector Baantjer of Bureau Warmoesstraat, 2023) and P. Dieudonné's Leven en werk van rechercheur De Cock (Live and Work of Inspector DeKok, 2023). The former is a collection of anecdotes and the latter a biography of DeKok. A good excuse to finally return to the series that formally introduced and hooked me on the detective story. Not Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie, but Baantjer and DeKok. However, I first needed to revisit one, or two, of the original novels because it has been a while. I wanted to begin with a title from that comfy period of the late '90s and early '00s. Looking at that period in the series, only one title stands out as imminently suitable for the occasion.

De Cock en de onsterfelijke dood (DeKok and the Immortal Death, 1998) is the fiftieth entry in the series and begins at the end of the evening shift when a pleasant conversation between DeKok and Vledder is interrupted by a knock on their office door – a man with a limp enters. The man introduces himself as Aard van de Koperberg and has come to report to file a missing person's report. Alida van Boskoop is a palmist who relieved him of his "hellish pains" and asked her to marry him, but her three daughters, Angela, Beatrijs and Christina, objected to marriage plan. Now the palmist has disappeared ("...just wiped off the face of the earth"). Angela has told him her mother has gone to France to reflect, but Van de Koperberg believes her own daughters murdered her and done away with the body. A background check on the supposed victim reveals Alida van Boskoop is somewhat of a character. She has called herself in the media Hippocratine, "a sort of female equivalent of Hippocrates," who claims her powers come directly from God. What's more, Alida says she's immortal as God personally ordered her to live forever to bear witness to him for eternity. But in the police archives, there's a record showing she had been prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. Not to mention financially exploiting an elderly, dying lady with the promise of curing her aggressive cancer. Things only get stranger...

Beatrijs and Christina don't agree with their older sister, "she has her own views," who tell DeKok and Vledder that their mother is not on holiday in France. She has passed away, but not in the traditional way mere mortals die. Alida van Boskoop has been "temporarily recalled" to heaven ("Not forever. Hippocratine is not dead. Her soul has gone to heaven for a short visit to heaven. She will return in all her glory").

Needless to say, the reported immortality of Alida van Boskoop is not as cracked up as it's supposed to be. Solving the problem of the missing palmist only lead to the much more serious, darker problem of murder in which all the traces and potential evidence had been obliterated. Vledder sighs, "why do people always come to us with such miserable cases? Why not an ordinary, homely murder with a nice, prestine corpse and a yes-nodding killer within reach?" DeKok and Vledder don't have to wait too long to be confronted with a fresh, undisturbed crime scene as one of the three daughters, "clad in the beautiful, blood-red robe with the signs of the zodiac," is found dead in the consultation room – hanging from "an expertly-knotted noose." DeKok is an old hand and immediately recognizes the tell-tale signs of murder camouflaged as suicide. So now they have to pick around an abundance of motives and potential suspects to find a very determined murderer. Such as the three ex-husbands of Angela, Beatrijs and Christina who all blame their mother for wrecking their marriages. DeKok and Vledder have their work cut out for them, but did it all stand up to memory?

First of all, rereading DeKok and the Immortal Death was a quick, fun and nostalgic trip down memory lane and a reminder this series gained its popularity from its main characters and storytelling. Not meticulous, intricately constructed puzzle plots or adherence to the principle of fair play. There are exceptions, of course, but the reason for picking up these books is simply to tag along with DeKok and Vledder tailing a trail of strange, sometimes downright bizarre or even grotesque murders through the streets of Amsterdam until the time arrives to ensnare the murderer – which is usually done by baiting a trap. It's a formula Baantjer perfected over the years and proved to be very successful. Baantjer did it very well as the years away from this series simply disappeared after reading the first page or two. Baantjer, DeKok and Vledder can be compared to Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin in that regard. You never feel you have been away from Wolfe's brownstone or DeKok's Bureau Warmoesstraat for very long, when it has been years. A decade even! So it's regrettably that plotting here is threadbare and not something I find particular satisfying these days. There are no clues, some information is withheld and the best you can do make an educated guess about the who and why. Which is honestly not too difficult to do as all you have to do is (ROT13: whfg cvpx gur vapbafcvphbhf, yrnfg-yvxryl-fhfcrpg ba gur fvqryvar jvgu n fgebatyl vzcyvrq zbgvir), but a liberal dose of nostalgia helped alleviate those, what I consider now to be, shortcomings.

So a very fun, long overdue trip down memory lane and intend to do one more before the end of the year. I'm leaning at the moment towards De Cock en de treurende kater (DeKok and the Sorrowing Tomcat, 1969) for obvious reasons, but nothing on this blog is ever set in stone.

Shots Fired!

"An armed society is a polite society."

- Robert A. Heinlein  

I had planned Ianthe Jerrold's Dead Man's Quarry (1930) as my next read, but, once again, got sidetracked. However, I hope to read it somewhere around the weekend. So a review is coming!

In the meantime, I dipped into the twelfth entry in the Bureau Raampoort-series: Een schim in de nacht (A Shadow in the Night, 2015). The series was co-created by Simon de Waal and Appie Baantjer, but the former had to continue solo after Baantjer passed away in 2010.  

A Shadow in the Night begins when summer is finally on the horizon and evenings are slowly growing longer, which draws a veteran of the Amsterdam police, Peter van Opperdoes, from his home and into his favorite café – to enjoy coffee and apple pie. It's a quiet, peaceful moment broken by the sound of gunfire emanating from the nearby Noordermarkt.

Van Opperdoes finds a mortally wounded man, recipient of several bullets, who clings to life long enough to mutter these cryptic last words: "ik was het zelf" ("I did it myself"). The nature of the bullet wounds and the absence of a firearm on the body makes suicide unlikely, which is confirmed when a gun and shell casings are found a considerable distance away from the body. But then what did the victim mean that he did himself? Jacob thinks it was simply the incoherent ramblings of a dying man, but their inquiries soon open new avenues of investigation.

The identity of the victim is confirmed when his twin brother reports him missing, which gave Van Opperdoes and Jacob quite a fright in the beginning – as they were confronted with him just after bringing the body to the morgue. I was hoping the body would disappear from mortuary, but this is a contemporary, Dutch politieroman and not a John Dickson Carr novel from the 1930s.

Ideas of mistaken or swapped identities was entertained, but the eventual solution ran in a different direction and was stamped with De Waal's trademark signature: professional underworld figures, small-time, petty criminals and other, enterprising persons operating in the gray areas of the law, who always seem to lurk in one place of a story or other. There are several kinds of them in this story and there's professional in a short, separate story line and a second, unnecessary murder for the story – one that's solved after discovering the crime-scene was stuffed with hidden surveillance cameras that recorded the murder.

There are some petty crimes and criminals involved in the first shooting, but the explanation yielded an unexpected surprise, which was only (somewhat) foreshadowed in the characterization of the people involved. But the surprise was welcome! Unfortunately, the "dying message" was just a red herring to mystify rather than a clue to the identity of the murderer. As Jacob remarked, "it would saved us a lot of hassle if he simply had said (...) had shot him." 

Interestingly, the final parts of the book were apparently penned with a deadline looming ahead, because Van Opperdoes figures out the case while watching footage of the Baltimore riots on TV. Yes. There's something in footage that helps Van Opperdoes to grasp the explanation.

All in all, a good entry in this series of police procedurals, but the best part remains how Baantjer has been kept alive through De Waal's storytelling and Van Opperdoes' character – which is simply nostalgia for me. It was Baantjer who introduced me to the genre and I sometimes miss those heretical days when I used Agatha Christie to bridge the time between the releases of his books.

Rogue's Alley

"He who digs a hole for someone else, falls in it himself."

- Dutch proverb

Well, we're more than a week into the last month of the year and 2014 can be safely summarized as a slow, unproductive year to read and review mysteries on this side of the screen – not to mention the steadily increased backlog of new releases. It's great and all to be smack in the middle of the genre's Renaissance Era, but the pace is nearly impossible to keep up with at this point.

Oh, well, enough complaining for one paragraph and let's take down one of these new releases, before the end of the year. That'll cut one book from my backlog for 2015. Yay, progress!

Een kuil voor een ander (A Hole for Someone Else, 2014) is the eleventh entry in the Bureau Raampoort series by Simon de Waal and the late A.C. Baantjer, who co-created/wrote the series until he passed away in 2010. I have said before how Bureau Raampoort has become my placebo for Baantjer's original politieromans about Inspector DeKok, as he's known in the English translations, which were my gateway into detective stories, but this series tends to be more Simenonean than Baantjer ever was – i.e. stories about detectives rather than detective stories. Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012) was a notable exception to this rule and A Hole for Someone Else can compete with it.

Winter has come to Amsterdam and Peter van Opperdoes, the old, seasoned veteran policeman of Bureau Raampoort, is enjoying what would've been his day off, observing futile attempts of car drivers at mounting a slippery bridge, but the discovery of a body puts an end to that day. A construction worker noticed a peculiar hole in a wall, inside a building that was being renovated, and inside that hole was another hole dug in the ground – containing the body of a man with strangulations marks around his throat. But the hole in the wall has more secrets to reveal: there's a hidden door giving entrance to a hidden room, stairs and the house above, which, according to rumors, have been used as a passage way for criminals. The crime scene was basically a Matryoshka doll.

The hidden cubbyhole for criminals in combination with the wintry landscape gave a charming and classical touch to the familiar elements of the series and characters. Van Opperdoes is reprimanded for having closed the open, starring eyes of the victim, out of old-school piety for the dead, before the forensic team could do their work or the scene of three Amsterdam detectives digging in the half-frozen grounds in the provinces for a second body. De Waal also acknowledged Jacob never uses his surname and Van Opperdoes still talks with the disembodied voice of his late wife, which seems to become dimmer with each passing book. The plot itself is pleasantly busy and moves along multiple lines, which includes the double identity of the first victim, an unknown man who fled from the crime scene, a big criminal from the province of Brabant, a corrupt policewoman, a shady Officer van Justitie (prosecutor) and a third body drenched in bullets. There are even a few clues, but, in the end, it still wasn't, what you'd call, a proper whodunit. However, I did appreciate how the unburied body in the wall, and how the body ended up there, brought everything else to the surface. Gotta appreciate those plot patterns.

In summation: A Hole for Someone Else is a fine, bustling police procedural in the Dutch (Amsterdam) style with all the familiar earmarks of an ongoing series that continues to draw readers back to tag along on a case with Van Opperdoes, Jacob and the cast of semi-regulars hovering in-and out of the stories.

Finally, last Wednesday, SBS6 broadcasted the first of a two-part episode of Bureau Raampoort, written by Simon de Waal (of course!), and it appears that the first (?) adaptation merged several books into a new story. The actors will probably take some time getting used to, because I imagine Van Opperdoes and Jacob as Baantjer and De Waal, but I'm looking forward to part two. Here's the promo, if anyone's interested: 

I'll probably return to the classics and writing good reviews in my next post.

Pulling a Double Shift

"To a cop, the explanation is never that complicated. It's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all."

- The Usual Suspects (1995)

Een tip van de sluier (A Tip of the Veil, 2013) is the ninth in De Waal & Baantjer series about a seasoned homicide detective, Peter van Opperdoes, and his loyal colleague and friend, Jacob. Van Opperdoes was one of the old warhorses of the illustrious Bureau Warmoesstraat, but was transferred to Bureau Raampoort after his wife passed away and continued to have conversations with her ghost – which raised some concerns over his mental health.

The supernatural entity, in the guise of a disembodied voice in Van Opperdoes' head, appears to be actually that of his dead wife, because she has knowledge of things yet to come, but observes the rules of fair play by only alluding to them. Actually, the role of the voice has always hovered in the background, but has been reduced even more since De Waal continued the series on his own. Baantjer created Van Opperdoes a few years after his own wife passed away and since the characters are basically stand-ins for the authors, it was personal touch to the old police inspector and probably why the voice is now mainly there to whisper words of comfort or encouragement.

In A Tip of the Veil, a surging storm is rocking the old city of Amsterdam, but Van Opperdoes has taken refuge in his favorite café, sipping a late coffee, while the bartender informs him there has been someone looking for him. It was important enough for the man to brave the storm and return to the café. Bob Pals is the man's name and his businesses are entrenched in real-estate, which is an occupation sometimes associated with the underworld over here and Pals' problem seems to have all the earmarks of the criminal classes – there are plans in the works for his assassination. The tip came from a man calling himself "Frits," but Pals isn't willing to part with more information than Frits' phone number.

Unusually, for this series, the first three quarters of the book are concerned with a routine investigation of vague death-threats with a murder tugged away at the end of the story. However, the solution of the shooting felt disconnected from the rest of the story and a shameless rework of an episode De Waal wrote for the Baantjer TV-series in the mid-00's. The best part was therefore the routine-investigation, which was lively written with a dose of light-hearted humor and populated with likeable characters. The cast of (semi-) regular (forensic) police characters gathering and analyzing evidence in the background often gives the series a CSI-ish feeling, but often used as a good contrast of between Van Opperdoes' old-school methods and modern police forensics.

De Waal succeeded very well in seamlessly meshing Baantjer's style of story telling with his own, which makes this series as enjoyable to read as the original Baantjer series, but there’s one main difference: Simon de Waal is closer to Georges Simenon with De Waal & Baantjer than Baantjer ever was with his DeKok books – which where at least always structured as detective stories. De Waal & Baantjer are stories about detectives rather than detective stories. And, yes, I'm fully aware that I have made that observation before. More than once. But it’s the best possible description of the series.

So, all in all, as enjoyable a read as they come in this series and (sadly) better than it's follow up.

There isn't a literal translation for the book-title of the tenth novel, Een tien met een griffel (Number One With a Bullet, 2014), but the closest equivalent in any language would be a misnomer. The story began promising enough when Jacob whisked Van Opperdoes away from his favorite café to the scene of a crime. A beautiful young woman has been found strangled in the apartment of her neighbor/lover, who's found dead not much later at an abandoned site – shot through the head. It appears to be a murder/suicide until it turns out the "suicide" happened before the murder and suspects begin to appear: an obsessed man and an ex-convict. The murder here is discovered in the first chapter, but the whole book felt more routine than the investigation of its predecessor. Story telling, characters and setting where as well written and brought to life as always, but the plot was abysmally disappointing and simply failed to grab my attention. And plot is kind-of the key point with me.

Oh, well, the synopsis of the next one sounds promising and, hopefully, it'll be as good as Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012). 

By the way, is it just me or does it seem I'm rewriting the same review, over and over again, for this series?

Oh, Sweet Child O' Mine

"There's enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well!"

- Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 1964)

Last month, I came across a collectible curio, The Dell Mapbacks (1997), during a minor rearrangement in order to create shelf space and it wasn't the only forgotten "bibelot" I rediscovered during this project.

The unimaginatively titled De moord uit woede (Murder Out of Anger, 1998) is a little book of sixty-odd pages containing a script of an episode of the TV-series Baantjer, based on the characters created by the late A.C. Baantjer, and were commissioned by Droste B.V. – a Dutch chocolate manufacture. Peter Römer tasked one of the series regular scenario-writers, Gerrit Mollema, with fleshing out an idea, and the result was the episode/book Murder Out of Anger. The book was send out gratis with free chocolate, if you wrote Droste and asked for it, but that wasn't public knowledge until people began noticing overpriced copies surfacing on the internet a few years later.

"Our Day Begins, When Yours Ends."

I'm sure there were a few who shelled out a couple of bucks for this "rare" edition, and boy, they must've been disappointed when finding out they even paid the postage for something they could've gotten for absolutely nothing and were denied the goodliness of the free chocolate samples. That's just a torturous state of being for the cheap penny-pinching tight-fisted Calvinistic nature of the Dutch, but than again, I think Sir Simon Milligan was C.E.O of the company at the time.

Anyhow, the story is better than I remember from the episode, which I recall as being only so-so, but the scenario for Murder Out of Anger is remarkably well written, plotted and even clued. Opening scene is of a group of soccer playing children looking for their ball in the shrubbery when one of them stumbles over the body of woman. Inspector DeKok (Yes, I'm using the spelling from the English translations here) and Vledder are called-in and they are able to make a quick identification by following up on a missing person’s report filled a few hours before.

Martine de Wech was a partner in a stockbroker's firm and heir to her father's multi-million business empire, "De Wech Chocolade," but her unusual private (and professional) life leaves DeKok with more half-motives and half-alibis than are needed in a murder enquiry. Martine's husband, Pepijn Drijver, is a talented pianist/composer laboring for the past decade on an operatic masterpiece, called "Bismarck," but Pepijn is completely absorbed in this work – and Martine looked elsewhere to get Pepijn couldn’t give her. There's also a disgruntled, ex-collegue who kept bothering her on account of having ruined his career and with many millions changing hands in the background, there’s more than enough suspicion to go around.

Murder Out of Anger is a fairly dark story, if you get down to the barebones and resolution of the plot, but there's still a humorous undercurrent to the story in the playful insults/comments the characters bounce of each other. I also appreciated the scene in which DeKok unwisely allows the deceived wife of Martine's lover in on a round of questioning with her husband or Vledder ignorantly accusing Pepijn of commercialism by riding the coattail of the Titanic-hype with his opera about the Bismarck, because it sank too. However, the biggest joke in this book is that as a product of pure commercialism it gives its consumer a grotesque exaggeration of First World problems of the Upper Class with a bleak message: there's no hope. I know this sounds terribly dramatic, but every bit of good and humanity that could be saved and nurtured back to health was violently stomped out by the end. No. I don't remember the original episode being this depressing 

Well, this review has taken a turn for the worse, but while the subject material of Murder Out of Anger can be on the depressing side it has a decent enough plot and it's publishing history/double life as a TV episode makes it a fun collectible to own.  

Speaking of decent writing: I feel like I gutted through this review like it was the wee hours on the Sunday morning of September 30, 1888 again.

Twofer Tuesday: The Old Fox and 21st Century Criminals

"I just place a corpse somewhere to see what happens next. I look into my own fantasy at the people who get involved and I listen to them. And I write that down. It comes naturally."

- Appie Baantjer (John Bakkenhoven's Het Amsterdam van Baantjer, 1998)  

Before I dashed off, there was somewhat of a realization that I, perhaps, should've prepped one or two posts to keep this place from falling in abeyance for a fortnight, but hey, filler posts are exactly like posting nothing at all – except you actually put an effort into it.

Unfortunately, for my return post, I did not had the time to excavate a classic from my shelves and, instead, knocked the remaining titles from the De Waal & Baantjer Bureau Raampoort series from my to-be-read pile before the latest from that line reaches its top.  

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011) is numbered fifth in the series that was continued at Baantjer's request, before passing away in 2010, in which the circumstances surrounding the remains of a murdered man gives the book a fitting title. The Singelgracht (Singel Canal) is the scene of dredging activities to clean the waters from discarded bikes and other junk, when one of the men drags up a car. It contents: a body that was remarkable well preserved due to the ice-cold water of the canal and the cause of death was strangulation. Whoever the victim was, he never stood a chance when the killer launched at him from the back seat.

The veteran homicide detective in Monty-coat, Peter van Opperdoes, and his younger partner and friend, Jacob, haste to the scene of the crime to start their official investigation, but that proves to be a clash of generations. Van Opperdoes is mournfully looking on how forensic investigators, clad in white overalls, are trampling all over his crime scene. He's pining for the days when he had a scene to himself. When he could drink in the scene and find fragments of the atmosphere of the moment of the crime itself, which he actually gets when Jacob decides to chase everyone out of the inclosure – to give the old fox his moment and not without result. Van Opperdoes recognizes the victim as Albertus Koolschijn, alias "Bertje van de Dijk," a street rat and small-time criminal, who told Van Opperdoes, during their last talk, that his days of petty crimes were behind him.

Even after the car had been dragged from the canal, Van Opperdoes and Jacob are still tossed around by the cross-and under currents that emerged from this case and De Waal introduces an interesting new idea involving stolen cars – even if it lacked finesse. De Waal and M.P.O. Books have apparently discussed how fair the solution of this story really is and I have to side with Books. You can make an educated guess in the right direction, but not, fully and completely, deduce it, because there are only few clues – or, as they're called today, indicators pointing to the truth.

As usually, De Waal delivered a good and fun story about detectives, but not one that can also be considered a proper detective story. And that's pity. I really liked the ideas De Waal was throwing around here.

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bulls-Eye, 2011) actually preceded Een rat in de val, released in the spring of that year, and have no idea why I switched them around for this review. Anyway, Bulls-Eye opens when city cleaner's hand in a phone they found in the trashcan and that's the moment when it goes off. Van Opperdoes picks up to hear the distressed voice of a mother worrying over her son, Michael Zand, missing for the past three days. Michael's father, Frits Zand, is an old acquaintance of Van Opperdoes, who made his name known on the shadier part of the law.

The involvement or just the presence of professional criminal elements are a staple of De Waal's crime fiction and obviously has a lot of fun toying around with their entrepreneurial spirit (albeit an alternative one) and rivalries – and their involvement is tightly woven into the plot of this story. Before they've even begun investigating the disappearance of Michael Zand, they receive a call to go to an abandoned factory where gunfire left casings and a body in the basement. It's a gathering place for junkies and other city misfits, but the most interesting discovery is a piece of paper in the victim's pocket with Michael's phone number scrawled on it! The two investigations have come together, but it's pretty much the same story as before. De Waal tells an engrossing story that captures both the spirit and tone of Baantjer, whenever Van Opperdoes and Jacob interact with each other, but I can be really picky when it comes to plotting and clueing – although I liked this solution a little bit better than the one offered in Rat. So great reads, if you don't expect them to deliver a traditional whodunit.

I really do hope that, plot-wise, the series will look back at Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012), which none of the other entries can hold a candle to in that department. It has the story telling and a good plot to boot!

De Waal & Baantjer series:

Een Rus in de Jordaan (A Russian in the Jordaan, 2009)

Een lijk in de kast (A Skeleton in the Closet, 2010)

Een dief in de nacht (Like a Thief in the Night, 2010)

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-Eye, 2011)

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011)

Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012)

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012)

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, 2013)

Een tip van de sluier (A Tip of the Veil, 2013)

Een tien met een griffel (A Number One With a Bullet, 2014; forthcoming)

Putting the Pieces Together

"Because murder is more fun away from home."

- motto of Detectives Beyond Borders.

Seicho Matsumoto was a Japanese crime writer from post-WWII Japan, who enjoyed a handful of translations that were well-received by Western readers, praised for possessing a social conscience, but, as Ho-Ling observed in his review of Ten to Sen (Points and Lines, 1958), they only illuminated one aspect of his work. Personally, I wouldn't place Matsumoto among my favorite mystery writers, but he has some good and fun stories to his name that can be appreciated by crime readers across the board – and Points and Lines comes especially recommended.

Unfortunately, De Amsterdamse koffermoord (The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder, 1979), a collection of Dutch translations of a novella and three short stories, has only partially appeared in English. The novella, as far as I'm aware, has not been translated in English, but the short stories can be found in The Voice and Other Stories (1995). More on those stories later.

Still Waters (Run Deep)

The titular novella, The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder, appeared originally as Amusuterudamu-unga satsuyin-jiken (The Amsterdam Canal Murder Case, 1969) in the weekly Shukan Asahi and the plot was modeled on an actual, unsolved homicide – which captured the attention of the media in both Europe and Japan. I learned of this sensational murder case when I read my first true-crime book, A.C. Baantjer's Doden spreken niet: veertig onopgeloste moorden (The Dead Don't Speak: Forty Unsolved Murders, 1966; revised in 1981), who was a policeman in Amsterdam at the time of the murder and mentioned the case in the book. Baantjer's description of the case and comments definitely added an extra dimension to Matsumoto's artistic interpretation of the facts.

The names of the people, for one, are altered as are some of the facts (and some were left out all together) to fit the explanation for Matsumoto's fictional case. Matsumoto grounded his story in reality, but drew heavily on his artistic license. The story also notes problems in sharing information between the Dutch and Belgium police, which Baantjer confirms at the end of his piece by saying that they needed the cooperation of the Brussels police to continue the investigation, but that never happened – even though the world was watching them. Baantjer also wrote that one of the police detectives remarked, after the sudden death of a second witness, "even a detective-writer could not come up with an ending for this mystery." Someone must have felt like he was being challenged.

So on to the story, which begins, for the world, on 26th of August, 1965, when a child's attention is caught by a silver colored, metal-like suitcase floating on the Westside of the Jacob van Lennepkade between two houseboats. The macabre content of the suitcase consists of the torso of a man from which the head, hands and legs had been cut-off – alongside shredded, bloodstained pieces of clothing. Chief-Inspector Hendrik van Berkum from Bureau Leidseplein is put in charge of the investigation and immediately reaches out to Interpol and the Japanese police, while they run down the list of missing people closer at home. They eventually make an identification, but the case is shelved when one of the people, although completely cleared from any suspicion, fatally, and "suspiciously," crashes his car in Belgium.

And this is where Matsumoto introduces a narrator and a detective character in the style of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. This is even preceded with a chapter that breaks down the fourth wall and introduces them in a reference to Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Roget," which was also modeled on a real-life, unsolved murder – making it a wonderful homage to both Poe and Dupin. There are also the obligatory references to Sherlock Holmes.

The duo tramps around the Netherlands and Belgium, speaking to witnesses, analyzing facts and theorizing, while drinking in the scenery and sometimes blatantly following the tourists trail. They even visit the Anne Frank House where the detective, who the narrator calls for the purpose of this story Dr. Ukichi Kuma, muses in the hidden room how the Dutch houses are traps that can hold and make people disappear – if that's what its owner desires. I like the idea that, somehow, over the centuries, our historical buildings became sentient, but dog loyal, beings, e.g. moving churches from Jan Terlouw's Koning van Katoren (translated as: How to Become King, 1971).

So the descriptive passages do have the touch of the Dutch police procedurals/mysteries by Appie Baantjer and Simon de Waal, but the observations are clearly from the eyes of a Japanese writer and Matsumoto's explanation for the chopped-up body did not disappoint. There's always another reason in Japanese detective fiction for body mutilations/decapitations besides to make it easier to dispose of a body or make identification of the victim as difficult as possible. There have even been entire (locked room) plots build upon mutilated bodies and the few Japanese mysteries that were translated in English can vouch for their craftiness when it comes playing around with body parts.

The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder was, for me, the highlight of this volume, but there were also three other and much shorter stories. They put more emphasis on characters that drive the story rather than the plot, but two of the three were quite good for what they are.

"The Face" ("Kou") was published in August, '56 edition of Shosetsu Shincho and won a mystery prize the following year, however, this was the only story from the collection I ended up disliking. The premise was good enough to build a solid story on as an actor is slowly gaining traction as an actor and is starting to receive minor parts in movies, but the problem is that he may be recognized by the one person who could identify him as the murderer of a young woman – several years earlier. Every time you think the story is going somewhere, it peters out, before ending predictably.  

"The Cancelled Subscription" ("Chibo-shi wo kau onna") appeared on April, 1957 in the previously mentioned magazine and, basically, it’s the same story but done much better. A woman takes a subscription of a small-town newspaper filled with uninteresting local news on account of an exiting story they're running as a serial, but cancels it after a month and the small-time writers decides to find out why. The only complaint I have is that the story ended with a written confession when it, stylistically, would’ve been if the story had ended with flashback/prologue that tied up the loose ends – and an ambiguous ending would've strengthened the overall effect of the scene that came before the explanation. The plot also suggests that Matsumoto was already playing with ideas for/in the process of writing Points and Lines.

I think this story appeared in The Voice and Other Stories under the title "The Serial."

On July 1958, again in the same magazine, "The Woman Who Wrote Haiku" ("Kanto-ku no onna") was brought into circulation for the first time and has two editors of a monthly haiku publication worrying of a gifted amateur committed to a hospital. She has failed to send in a new haiku for the past three months and they decide to go investigate her faith for themselves. The reader, again, learns of highly illegal things you can do with a corpse and was surprise to read that doctors were (are?) allowed in Japan to lie to their patients, if they think it's in their best interest. 

I drew (heavily) for the publication info from the afterword of the translator, Miyako Vos-Kobayashi. 

All in all, I would say that Matsumoto's The Amsterdam Suitcase Murder was a successful cultural exchange.

Café Noir

"The fact that we are I don't know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people, is to me one of the biggest tragic themes in the world."

- Georges Simenon

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 2013) is the eight in a series that began when Appie Baantjer and Simon de Waal, once colleagues as (homicide) detectives of the Amsterdam police force, partnered up to append another series of police stories to their writing credentials – under the banner Baantjer & De Waal.

After Baantjer passed away in 2010, De Waal continued the series as De Waal & Baantjer, and I have to say, after Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012) that fully warmed me to the characters, it's starting to feel like the good ol' days of the biannual Baantjer releases. Unfortunately, you also burn through them about as fast.

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothes begins when the persistent nagging of the doorbell drags Peter van Opperdoes, a veteran police detective attached to Bureau Raampoort, from his bed to the canal belt where the body of a John Doe is floating face up in the Prinsengracht (Princes' Canal). The cause of death is drowning, but whether it was an accident or murder requires further investigation on his and Jacob's part, which leads them to a barmaid named Rafiqa. Forensics was able to retrieve her number from the victims phone and the place where she works is Café Lowietje! The same café where the bar scenes for the TV-series Baantjer were shot and the place adopted the name of the series.

But the part were Peter van Opperdoes and Jacob seated themselves on the stools of DeKok and Vledder, while Rafiqu conjures a bottle of cognac from underneath the bar, was a wonderful homage to Baantjer – even more so by using some of his own writing to construct that particular scene. I also liked that Baantjer and Piet Römer, who portrayed DeKok, were mentioned and some anecdotes were shared. To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed that Van Opperdoes did not complain to Jacob about Simon de Waal bothering him with questions if he could use his name for the main character in a series of politieromans he's planning to write – similar in vein to DeKok complaining about Baantjer's fertile imagination. It will also confuse readers who picture Van Opperdoes and Jacob as Baantjer and De Waal. 

Anyhow, Jan Willem van Deventer is the name that belongs to the victim and he was student from a family that broke into peaces: the mother would not be surprised if her was son was murdered, while the father is convinced that he's to blame for his son's suicide. The girl in the café Jan Willem was interested in took his gifts, but was seeing someone else and a teacher from the university and his roommates refuse to tell the whole or a straight story – with an unfortunate suicide as a consequence. Meanwhile, Van Opperdoes and Jacob move between cafés, some for breakfast or a cup of coffee and other for work, and in one of them, they come across a polite-mannered, but cut-throat, criminal known as "De Regulaar" ("The Fixer"), who paid students for certain jobs. And here we have another café scene I very much appreciated: Van Opperdoes deducing whom the fixer is in the café and immediately plotting his capture. The guy never stood a chance.

The eventual solution of the death of the young student is a rather bleak one, because the answers they've found resolve nothing for the better for any of the people involved and the court will probably show some leniency on the guilty party. This is definitely not a cozy, but there were some clues in place that made this a (light) mystery as well as a police procedural and the ghost of Van Opperdoes' late wife (see previous reviews) even pointed out a clue of sorts that he had missed, which ended the book on a high note for me. Hey, a non-intrusive spirit entity pointing out something that her husband, The Great Detective, had missed is something I have absolutely no problem with.

De Waal has moved on with this series now that his late partner in crime can't tease him anymore with implausible plot twists, but the style and warm spirit that was so characteristic of Baantjer is what makes his memory and indelible presence in these books.

De Waal & Baantjer series:

Een Rus in de Jordaan (A Russian in the Jordaan, 2009) [De Jordaan = neighborhood in Amsterdam]

Een lijk in de kast (A Skeleton in the Closet, 2010)

Een dief in de nacht (Like a Thief in the Night, 2010)

Een schot in de roos (Hitting the Bull's-eye, 2011) [still have not read this one]

Een rat in de val (Caught Like a Rat in a Trap, 2011) [still have not read this one]

Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012)

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012)

Een wolf in schaapskleren (A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, 2013)

The title for later this year has not yet been announced, but I guess it probably will be something like Een geluk bij een ongeluk (A Blessing in Disguise) or Een adder onder het gras (A Snake in the Grass).

By the way, I use the English name of DeKok on this blog because this is an English-language blog. It also amused me to no end that from all the variations on the name that the translator could've decided on, he picked the one variation that makes him look silly every time he spells out his name when he's introducing himself. DeKok (with Kay-Oh-Kay) is the conventional spelling of the name DeKok or Kok. Why not settle for De Kock (with Cee-Kay), if you insist on changing the name?