Snowy Reception

"The spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand."

- Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843). 

Een licht in de duisternis (A Light in the Darkness, 2012) is the seventh entry in the Bureau Raamport series, recording the daily caseload of a pair of Amsterdam homicide detectives, Peter van Opperdoes and Jacob (last name unknown), who were modeled on their creators – former homicide cop Appie Baantjer and now part-time detective Simon de Waal. Originally, the books were published under the byline Baantjer & De Waal, but after Baantjer passed away, at his request, the series was continued as De Waal & Baantjer with Baantjer's share of the royalties going to charity.

On a night, a dark and cold December night, Peter van Opperdoes wakes up to find the city wrapped in a blanket of snow and inclines to melancholic musing on things past, when the whispering voice of his late wife disturbs his reverie and encourages him to take a short walk. As I noted in my review of Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012), the ghostly, disembodied voice of Van Opperdoes' wife is a non-intrusive, supernatural entity hovering in the background and she's not allowed (from the higher up's) to intervene in human affairs. She's merely there to give spiritual support to her husband or, in this case, act as a catalyst.

Van Opperdoes strolls through the deserted, snow covered streets and the quiet, dream-like image of the city gives him a sense of unreality, as if he fell through the cracks of time, expecting any moment a hansom cab coming down the street or bump into a 19th century gendarme, but his actual discovery isn't any less strange. Between a troupe of statues, now mantled in robes of snow, someone placed a sculpted head of clay with a candle on the ground – it's flame flickering like a ghost light.

This dreamy sequence is probably my favorite part of the book and shows that De Waal can write, and I almost wished he continued this style of story telling through out the book, but morphing it back to a straight-up police procedural was probably the best decision. When Van Opperdoes and Jacob revisit the scene the next morning, when life resumed its normal tenor, it conveyed that sense of waking up – with everything snapping back to normal. Except that the head is still there! It's a recognized as a young man, named Martin, who's a local and his mother hasn't heard of him from in three months. 

Martin's father Willy, an intimate acquaintance of the police who spend most of life behind bars, went missing around the same time and thus begins a long pool expedition search pass cafés and even an obscure coffeeshop – and nearly everyone they question seems to be either criminal or appear to have close ties to them. This eventually leads them to a crime-scene that went undiscovered for months, but the dry conditions of the house and the cold weather has preserved it remarkably well and it was briefly teased as a locked room mystery.

However, I'm long since pass wanting a baffling impossible crime from De Waal. Ok. Maybe not that long. But the first chapter of A Light in the Darkness has convinced me that a double-layered story, one taking place in the time of C.J. van Ledden-Hulsebosch and the other in the present with Van Opperdoes and Jacob, with the two threads tying together in the end, would be even better. I even have a title that fits the series: Een gebed zonder einde (a proper, but not literal, translation would be A Never-Ending Story). It also fits into the religious themes Baantjer was so fond of working into his plots and sort-of a nod to the Baantjer TV-movie De wraak zonder einde (An Endless Wrath, 1999; co-written by De Waal). 

Somehow, somewhere, Frederic Dannay is looking over a copy of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and nods approvingly. I... I just know he is.

De Waal & Baantjer

A note for the confused: De Waal co-wrote a handful of excellent historical novels with Dick van den Heuvel about Van Ledden-Hulsebosch, a real-life counterpart of Dr. John Thorndyke, or rather, a real-life colleague of Dr. Joseph Bell – Conan Doyle's teacher whose methods of observation were adopted by Sherlock Holmes! I always wondered, if that awful, untranslatable pun they had planned for a book title (if you're curious, the title was Moord(w)apen) killed the series prematurely. Their publisher had good reason to believe they had lost it after their spoof of The Da Vinci Code (2003), in which Albert Einstein helped C.J. clear up a dark conspiracy enwrapping Amsterdam (De Rembrandtcode, 2006). Note to self: reread that series! Anyway, lets wrap things up here as well...

A Light in the Darkness was better than I anticipated and the story ended up not being just another charming, urban police procedural that spends more time looking at buildings (or other trivial matters) than at the clues. It's still a police procedural that puts emphasis on investigative police methods and characterization, but the plot was well put together and stands comparison with the works of Bill Pronzini and William L. DeAndrea.

I think Baantjer would've been rather proud, if he knew he co-wrote this book. Two years after his death. The critics can defile him, decease can kill him and his remains can be buried, but even the most devout excorcist could not keep his "spirit" from the bestseller lists!

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) [have not read this one]

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

Death Notes

"Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home."

- Sherlock Holmes.

Over the past week, I made several attempts at sprinting to the concluding chapters of Willy Corsari's De weddenschap van Inspecteur Lund (Inspector Lund Makes a Bet, 1941), in which the titular policeman has to tell several stories from his own experience that are as interesting as a detective story, but I kept stumbling before finally deciding to abandon it altogether – which is as rare a occasion as a solar eclipse. It was not a bad book as a poor book, which is arguably worst because a bad book can still be readable (hey, we all have our guilty pleasures in this genre) while a poor book has nothing to offer except dull mediocrity.

Though the book was obviously meant as a send-up of her British and American contemporaries, it completely failed to capture their spirit, plotting technique or ingenuity. Take, for example, the second story, "Sporen in de sneeuw" ("Tracks in the Snow"), in which a broken leg and the story of an elderly woman of a long forgotten, unsolved and impossible murder turns Lund into an armchair detective, but the solution was pedestrian and listless. This left me, of course, with the problem of what I was going to do once I decided to put this book aside. I had a deficiency of time to read to begin with and this place hadn't seen an update for nearly a week, so I needed a nimble read in order to put something up here before the end of the weekend and that sounded like a perfect excuse to revisit the man who introduced me to the detective story: the late Appie Baantjer. The fact that this is also my 200th blog post is nothing more than a lucky timed coincidence.

A Deadly Threat, 1988

The book I excavated from my congested shelves was Een dodelijke dreiging (1988; translated as DeKok and the Deadly Warning), which also happened to be one of the first detective novels I touched and vividly remember that delightful feeling of surprise when I learned its solution, but, in my defense, I was new to the game back then. So how did the book stand-up to being read after all these years? Well, it's definitely a worthwhile read in spite of one notable flaw.

Een dodelijke dreiging takes place between the darksome, cold, but often cozy, days between Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas) and Christmas, and DeKok cynically asks himself if the peaceful holiday ahead of them has any influence on the influx of baffling crimes in December. DeKok's ruminations appear to be answered in the affirmative when the body of a man, clad in shirtsleeves and a vest, is found slumped against the bark of a tree on the Keizersgracht (Emperor's Canal). His head is turned towards the water and three bullet holes tore holes in his chest. The name that belongs to the stiff is Emile van den Aerdenburg, a designer, who, earlier in the day, came to Vledder with a threatening letter – asking in an almost illegible handwriting how much his life was worth to him and to place an ad with that amount in the newspaper mentioned in the note.

A journalist, attached to that newspaper, has been receiving similar scribbles and narrowly survived an attempt on his life as ex-wives, silent partners, estranged wives, white-collar crime, newly-wed wives and blackmail bob up and down in this case without taking the old veteran bloodhound off his game. Throughout the book, DeKok's reasoning is logical and sound as is the characterization of the man himself and the murderer is a perfect foil to the good inspector. A very memorable and even a sympathetic character, who was exposed to the reader in a very unconventional manner. Well, for this series anyway. No theatrical denouements or a cleverly set-up trap, but DeKok reading a poem by Guido Gezelle – encapsulating the basic truth of the case. Deliberately understated and very effective. Also the aftermath of this murder case was done very well and you can't help but feel that the murderer should've gotten away with it, where it not for a third and unnecessary murder, clumsily disguised as a suicide, which was the only thing that weighed on the murderer's concience and provides the book with a tragic ending.

Unfortunately, there's one blemish concerning the motive, which was not fairly clued at all and made it impossible to anticipate the full solution – and that's what robbed this book of its status as a minor classic. Even the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia could not turn that into an easily ignored blind spot, but, aside from that one complaint, this is still one of my favorite entries in the DeKok and Vledder series and definitely worth picking up if you can get your hands on the translation.

On a side note, I'm compiling a new list of favorite mysteries because the last one I posted left me dissatisfied (i.e. too many glaring omissions).

"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact"

"Sometimes the most illogical answer turns out to be the correct one. Reality is often stranger than anything we can imagine ourselves, but I'm not the first one who has said that. It probably was Sherlock Holmes, who always had something clever to say."

- Peter van Opperdoes (Een mes in de rug, 2012)

The book I alluded to in my previous post, read on a sultry and lazy afternoon in the cool shades beneath the trees, was Een mes in de rug (A Knife in the Back, 2012), published under the names De Waal & Baantjer, but the series has been a solo-project of Simon de Waal ever since Appie Baantjer passed away in late August, 2010. It's the sixth installment of a series that began after Baantjer retired the successful DeKok-series that ran for nearly five decades, sold millions of copies and spawned a television series that kept millions of viewers glued to their televisions. A decision as unpopular as Conan Doyle's resolution to wash himself from Sherlock Holmes in the churning waters of Reichenbach Falls, but it was also an understandable one coming from a writer in his eighties, penning two or more books a year, who had just lost his wife – and I thought that with the publication of Dood in gebed (Death in Prayer, 2008) we had reached the end of an era.  

But the writing bug reared its ugly head and the itch began, and before long, he was working on a new series with his ex-police colleague and fellow crime-writer Simon de Waal as a writing buddy. The main characters are the old-school veteran Peter van Opperdoes and his younger partner Jacob, who are basically thinly disguised versions of themselves. You can find traces of them all over the characters. Peter van Opperdoes has also lost his wife, but in the books he still talks with her and the first part makes it clear that he's not imagining things, however, she's only there to speak words of encouragement to her husband and not to whisper the name of the murderer into his ear. It's very unusual to have such a non-intrusive, supernatural entity hovering in the background of a straight-up police procedural. Anyway, Simon de Waal worked as a rookie-cop with Baantjer and this joint-project must have seemed like things coming full circle for them. Writing the first few books must have been fun as Baantjer loved to leave impossible plot-twists for De Waal to sort out. But she didn't have a sister indeed. Good luck with that, Simon! De Waal described Baantjer as someone with the mindset of a charming young man and acted as such, which makes me think of Baantjer as Archie Goodwin in his eighties.

So I settled down with A Knife in the Back (yes, yes) and expected nothing more than a charming, uncomplicated roman policier because the first three books were kind of disappointing – with a last-minute introduction of a culprit and a lack of fair play. They were as fun to read as the DeKok novels, but, plot-wise, insufficient to satisfy this spoiled brat. But A Knife in the Back was a marked improvement on its predecessors.

The problems for Van Opperdoes and Jacob begin when they have to go to a hotel where a guest has failed to emerge from his room, but the foul smell of murder does not stink up the place despite the presence of a body and the medical examiner seems to agree. Cause of death: heart failure. However, the manager made sure that the detectives did not leave the building without a problem and notified them that the body and the man who had rented the room were not one and the same person. With suspicion on his mind, Van Opperdoes goes over the body again and finds evidence suggesting murder – albeit an accidental one. The old detective showed that an old fox may lose his hair but not his cunning and prevented a murder from being filed away as a natural death. The rest of the plot unfolds through follow-ups on witness testimonies, credit card information and everything else that comes to the surface over the course of a police investigation, but in the end this was more a story about detectives than a proper detective story. Not a bad one, but still not a genuine detective story. Still, that should take nothing away from the book for the average reader because it’s not that kind of story and this will only bother individuals hooked on GAD. 

Baantjer & De Waal signing their second book

De Waal is a fictioneer who dabbles in variety of styles (police procedurals, thrillers and historical mysteries), but has yet to write a classically styled mystery (the historical ones echoed Doyle and his contemporaries) filled with locked rooms, clues and baffling crimes! I know it's an unreasonable expectation, but it would be awesome if one of our top-tier crime writers would pen an old-fashioned whodunit. Because we have to reduce the monoculture of modern thrillers dominating the shelves of our bookstores before it kills millions of people to keep the genre fresh, inventive and more importantly it would make me happy.

Bibliography:

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)

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

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

The Historical C.J. van Ledden-Hulsebosch series:

Moord in Tuschinski (Murder in Tuschinski, 2002)

De wraak van de keizer (The Emperor's Revenge, 2003)

Spelen met vuur (Playing with Fire, 2004)

De Rembrandt code (The Rembrandt Code, 2006)

The Boks series:

Boks en de lege kamer (Boks and the Empty Room, 2005)

Boks en het verkeerde lijk (Boks and the Wrong Corpse, 2006)

Boks en de spoorloze getuige (Boks and the Vanished Witness; never published)

Thrillers:

Cop vs. Killer (2005)

Pentito (2007)

De vijf families: Duivelspact (The Five Families: Devil’s Pact, 2011)

Wie een kuil graft... (Whoever Digs a Pit, 2011) [a twiller = twitter novel]

The next post will be a return to our beloved Golden Age.

There's Evil Under the Sun

 "Look! That's France you can see over there, twenty minutes away by boat, an I'm as lost as if I were in the heart of Africa or South America."

- Inspector Maigret (My Friend Maigret, 1949).

Last Tuesday, fellow mystery enthusiast and scholar Curt Evans, who's still tramping past the musty covers and brittle pages of detective stories that were abandoned a long time ago to accumulate dust particles, pulled out a novel that not only looked pretty good for its age but also had managed to clung to the public's collective memory. "The Passing Tramp" had hitched a ride with Georges Simenon to review Un Crime en Holland (Maigret in Holland, 1931), which infused me with pure, undiluted nostalgia as I always associate Georges Simenon with the late Appie Baantjer – whose politieromans ignited my love for the detective story.

As might be expected, from a chronophobiac on a nostalgia rush, I wanted to read one of their novels next, but picking between both men and deciding on a specific title proved to be more difficult than it should've been. I was initially inclined to go with Appie Baantjer's De broeders van de zachte dood (The Brothers of a Merciful Death, 1979), but decided to make an offensive gesture at that mocking demon in the clock and went with Georges Simenon's Mon ami Maigret (My Friend Maigret, 1949).

The scenery of Mon ami Maigret moves from the rain swept streets of Paris to the perfidious tranquility of a Mediterranean island, Porquerolles, where a two-bit criminal was brutally murdered after he boasted in a crowded bar about his friendship with a policeman named Maigret. He can even show a signed letter as proof. Maigret is dispatched by train and ferry to delve into the matter, but even though the island is as rich in suspicious character as in sunshine, from a wealthy old English lady with her much younger French secretary to a Painter from Holland with anarchistic tendencies and his Belgium mistress, nobody of them seems to be equipped with a motive good enough to empty a gun on a bragging crook.

But Maigret also has another matter that plagues him like a Big Brother: The presence of Mr. Pyke who follows him around like a discreet shadow. Mr. Pyke is an inspector from Scotland Yard and was invited to study Maigret while he's working on a case – and this worries the inspector to no end. Maigret is very pre-occupied what a colleague from such a prestige's institute might think of their simple methods, like roughing up a suspect to loosen up their tongues, difference in cuisine, clothes (etc.) and the inevitable discovery that there's no order or method to how handles a murder case.

At one point in the story, the reader becomes privy of Maigret's thoughts and how he would've preferred to roam the island and soak up the atmosphere as oppose to interviewing people in order to keep up an appearance of professionalism to Mr. Pyke. Unfortunately, the opportunity to pit Maigret's intuitive method against the sound police work of a Scotland Yard tech was left unexploited.

Statue of Maigret in Delfzijl (Holland)

All in all, Mon ami Maigret was a nice, quiet read for the most part, but the pace became so slow that I began to loose interest and the only encouragement for going on was that I was only two chapters removed from the back cover. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad story but very little happens and that goes on for far too long. And unlike the book Curt Evans reviewed, this was not a pure detective story. The case got solved by a few very late discoveries, but then again, I knew beforehand that Simenons was, for the most part anyway, not that kind of writer, however, the solution and motive were interesting – especially the motive, which was later reused and improved upon in one of Baantjer's best efforts at penning a genuine whodunit. 

So even though this was not a thoroughly bad book, au contraire, I do think I prefer Appie Baantjer over Georges Simenon any day.  

After thought: the French cover gives off the impression that the book takes place on the dirty backstreets instead of a sun soaked island.

Remembering Appie Baantjer II: A Spate of Crimes

"We only die if we're forgotten about. As long as someone, even one reader, remembers us... we're immortal."

- Taro Suzuki (Kamen Tantei, vol. 4.)

On August 29, 2010 Albert ("Appie") Cornelis Baantjer passed away after a brief, but exhaustive, duel with the specter of death and as a commemoration of the first anniversary of his passing, I announced the intension to post a review on that date – with an open invitation attached to it to clog the live feeds of the blogosphere that day with book critiques. Only two of my confreres officially gave the heads-up that they will be participating in this little tribute, but I hope they aren't the only ones who will be submitting book reports. Yes, I'm mindful of the fact that I posted this a day before the actual date, but there's a particle chance that I won't be able log-on to the web tomorrow and I'd rather be a few hours too soon than a day too late with this tribute – and isn't that thought more important than a number on a calendar? Oh, and before you read this review, it's advisable to take a look at the previous post first.

The Corpse Adrift

The book I plucked randomly from my overpopulated shelves for this testimonial is Het lijk op drift (The Corpse Adrift, 1998). It's a novel from the later period, in which the plots habitually kow-tow submissively to the tyrannical reign of a thriving formula, however, what was done with this particular story attests my assertion that even the formulaic books are not entirely without interest.

The opening chapter is unusually busy, in which a grumpy DeKok and Vledder wrestle themselves free from the warm embrace of their blankets and head for a malodorous alley where two policemen found the body of a man with a blood smeared shirt, but before arriving at the scene of the crime the victim rose up and walked away – leaving two rookie cops flabbergasted. Back at the precinct, the detective duo is confronted with a man, one Gerard van Nederveld, who reports his widowed mother missing and a message from the water police informing them that they've dragged up a dead woman from the murky waters of the IJ (pronounced as AY) who had a note among her possessions with DeKok's name scribbled across the surface. 

Needless to say, these spate of crimes are interlinked with eachother and the victim is swiftly identified as Alida van Nederveld-De Ruijter, the widowed mother of four grown children reported missing by her eldest son, but the family turns out to be as dysfunctional as your typical, 1920s aristocratic inbred family – rive by a mutual dislike for one another. The source of this animosity was probably the family's father, an indiscriminate collector who pumped nearly all of their money in his hobby and was not averse to employ unsavory underworld characters to acquire a particular item that caught his fancy, and was also dragged from the IJ a year previously. At first, his death was filed away as an unfortunate accident, but the autopsy on the remains of his wife turned up a couple of broken cartilage rings indicating death by strangulation – and suddenly DeKok and Vledder are burdened with what appears to be a double homicide.

Even though the plot somewhat stagnated after this opportune set-up, there's still more than enough pleasure derived from Baantjer's storytelling and the characters that inhabit this story. The fractured shards that was once the Van Nederveld family showed that he was still interested in characterization at this point and it's always fun when he brings members of the Amsterdam penose into a story. The inevitable dénouement was all right, but lacked finesse and suffered a bit from a too obvious a murderer. Nevertheless, the motivation for no less than three murders and the emotional aftermath made for a satisfying conclusion as DeKok relates the entire history behind these crimes.

While The Corpse Adrift is not Baantjer at his finest, I think it has merits and it was fun to tag-along with DeKok and Vledder again for the first time in over three years. As I said before, it was Baantjer who lit the furnace in which my undying love for the detective story has roared ever since and have always felt very much indebted to him.

And for that, I salute Appie Baantjer with a last bow: 

 

An Amsterdam Policeman: Remembering Appie Baantjer

"You're are a warm person with a cold job in a chilly country."

- An old Surinamese man to DeKok (DeKok and the Dead Pall-Bearer, episode 9.5).

A.C. Baantjer (1923-2010)

Despite the fact that foreign critics draped the mantle of Georges Simenon and Conan Doyle over Appie Baantjer's shoulders, in recognition of his talent as a storyteller whose words gave life to a detective as human as Jules Maigret and possessive of amaranthine qualities comparable to those of Sherlock Holmes, he continues to be tagged as a second-rate hack – and admitting that you derive any sort of pleasure from his writing is not entirely like openly fessing up your dirty bedroom secrets. But as someone who tirelessly champions the legacy of archaic, unremembered mystery writers, I defy this snobbish notion and proudly proclaim that it was Appie Baantjer who lit the furnace in which my undying love for the detective story has burned ever since.

The Thirteen Cats, 1963

Albert ("Appie") Cornelis Baantjer came into this world on September 16, 1923 in the small seafaring village of Urk, but escaped from a predestinated life as a fisherman when the family moved to Amsterdam – where they lived as a regular, working class family until the war. During the German occupation, Baantjer voluntarily took the place of a colleague, a father of two children, who was designated for labor in Germany, but ended up in prison after forging leave notes for fellow laborers. After the war, he wanted to go to Dutch-Indonesia but his father prevented that from happening by scrawling his sons name on a job application form – which landed him a forty-year career on the Amsterdam police force where he ended up finding a second vocation as the nations best-selling crime novelist.

The literary talents of this rookie cop were gradually discovered through the obligatory paperwork that came with the job. Police reports rolled effortlessly from his typewriter, while colleagues were struggling to find the correct words or right turn of phrase. This inevitable resulted in a book, 5x8 grijpt in!: politie-ervaringen uit de grote stad (5x8 Intervenes: Police-experiences From the Big City, 1959), which he co-authored with a fellow policeman, Maurice van Dijk, under the penname, A.C.M. Baandijk. Unfortunately, it was not a premonition of things to come and it did so poorly that the book was never reissued after its initial publication, making this, in combination with a limited print run, a rarity on the collectors market.

Murder by Moonlight, 1996

Baantjer persevered in writing stories, mostly semi-fictionalized anecdotes, which were collected under his own name in a volume entitled Het mysterie van de doodshoofden (The Mystery of the Dead Heads, 1963), all the while slowly, but surely, making a name for himself as an up-and-coming crime novelist. He achieved minor successes with Een strop voor Bobby (A Noose for Bobby, 1963) and De dertien katten (The Thirteen Cats, 1963), but they were atypical of the stories he would come to write in the years ahead. The former begins as a noirish study of characters but turns into a full-fledged locked room mystery in the final quarter of the story, while the latter has an unusual plot in which everyday crime seemingly goes hand in hand with the supernatural – tantamount to John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court (1937) and Robert van Gulik's The Chinese Gold Murders (1959).

Early 1965, marked the first appearance of Inspector DeKok, whose worn hat and rumpled raincoat became as iconic as Columbo's tousled head of hair and stumpy cigar, and his trusty sidekick Vledder – solving their first case in De wurger op zondag (The Sunday Strangler). DeKok and Vledder are crude and undefined characters in these primordial tales and the plots unimpressive and often cheated by withholding crucial information from the reader. For example, in Het lijk in de kerstnacht (The Corpse on Christmas Eve, 1965) and De dode harlekijn (The Dead Harlequin, 1968) the characters assuming the role of the murderer aren't introduced to the reader until the final chapter.

The Merry Bacchus, 2001

The publication of De treurende kater (The Sorrowing Tomcat, 1969) ushered in a sort of neo-classicist period, in which the plotting tightened, the characterization sharpened and conventional tropes from a previous era began popping-up. De stervende wandelaar (The Dying Stroller, 1972) has a solution that hinges on a dying message; Moord in séance (Murder in Séance, 1981) has a classic closed-circle of suspects situation reminiscent of Agatha Christie and De ganzen van de dood (The Geese of Death, 1983) is a take-off on the British country house mystery – stocked with members of an aristocratic, inbred family. These books, jotted down between 1969 and 1989, were not yet bound by a rigid formula and evinces a lot of imagination and willingness to experiment – which naturally make these best and most rewarding reads in the series.    

Admittedly, the fully developed formula validates part of criticism launched against Appie Baantjer as a writer and can't be written off as invidious accusations over his record breaking book sales, which left literary thrillers in a cloud of dust kicked up as each novel made a dash to the top echelons of the bestseller lists, since it's undeniable that it stifled the tentative plotting and experimental creativity. But this later, formulaic period is often put forward as an argument in dismissing his entire body of work as hack writing, which is not only unjust but also petty and childish. The early and mid-period books deserve to be recognized for what they are, and even the formulaic ones aren't entirely without interest.

The Frisky Widow, 2006

The sheer readability of his prose easily distracts your attention away from a routine plot and some of them hark back to the days that lay behind them: Tranen aan de Leie (Tears at the Leie, 1997) centers on a series of bizarre poisonings and has Baantjer sniping at the leniency of criminal prosecutors and judges; De onsterfelijke dood (The Immortal Death, 1998) is a throwback to the supernatural tinged stories; De blijde Bacchus (The Merry Bacchus, 2001) has a very original motive and De dartele weduwe (The Frisky Widow, 2006) was his last performance that was above average before the great drop off, but that's to be expected from a writer in his eighties who turned out books on a yearly basis for over fifty years!

After his wife passed away in 2007, he decided to put an end to the long running DeKok series with Dood in gebed (Death in Prayer, 2008) and quit writing altogether, but after a while he started to get the itch again started a new series with a co-author, Simon de Waal, who also happened to be an ex-colleague of Baantjer. The main characters are thinly disguised versions of themselves and Baantjer's character is an elderly detective who recently lost his wife, but continues to have long conversations with her. Awwww!

Unfortunately, he only contributed to the first three titles in the series before losing a short, but intensive, bout with cancer, which was, at the end of this month, exactly one year ago. My motivation for hastily scribbling this summary overview of his life and career is the hope that my fellow bloggers will join me in a little tribute on August 29, 2011 – in commemoration of the one-year anniversary of his passing.

Don't worry, Baantjer's novels are readily available, including a batch of brand new translations from Speck Press, and I hope we can clutter the blogosphere on that day with reviews of his books. Let me know if you want to join the party.

(yes, I know, this isn't exactly a scholarly piece of writing, but I did it in a hurry because I want to give everyone enough time to obtain a book to read at their leisure. And yes, I used the English spelling of DeKok's name, because the Dutch spelling makes the filters of search engines a bit nervy).