The Pledge

"This is a brilliant book because it turns crime fiction on its head. It is a story told by a retired detective to a crime writer who has just given a lecture on crime writing at a police conference. The detective is talking about one of his former colleagues and how he became obsessed with this case about a little girl who was found murdered in some woods on the outskirts of a small Swiss town in the 1950s. The detective who finds the girl was just about to leave his job to go and work overseas, but he makes a promise – a pledge – to the girl’s parents that he will find her killer and bring him to justice, and that pledge takes over his life. It is an immensely moving scene when he talks to the girl’s parents, and very difficult to read. “I don’t want a story where for the first 100 pages the author’s slowly setting the scene. I want to be hooked immediately” Although I don’t want to give too much away, the story’s very interesting because the crime writer to whom the detective is telling this story to thinks, like most crime writers, that crimes can be solved through logic – Sherlock Holmes style. But in The Pledge this doesn’t happen. It turns out that a lot of what happens in the story is based purely on chance. And if something had happened slightly differently, then everything else would have changed. Dürrenmatt’s trying to show that that crime fiction simplifies crime solving, and The Pledge , where chance takes such a large role, is more typical of what it’s really like. Oh, totally. I don’t think crime fiction can be realistic. It can be authentic, but that’s very different. I like to think that my books are authentic insofar as I give the reader the correct information about police procedures. However with my books – and a lot of other crime books – everything is summed up very neatly at the end. Your main detective protagonist solves the crime and catches the killer. It’s always a killer who isn’t very easy to spot, whereas the reality is totally different. Usually with police work, who you think did it usually did do it, and when you get them in the interview room, rather than spilling the beans Hercule Poirot style, they call for their lawyer and say nothing but a litany of ‘no comment’s. And when you finally do get the case before a court, months and reams of paperwork later, the lawyers often get them off! It would make a bloody awful thriller! So that is why it is so hard for crime fiction to be realistic. The Pledge , which is almost like a novella at 140 pages long, emphasised this point, but at the same time it still made a fantastic story. The detective who’d made the ‘pledge’ of the title ended up turning into a nervous wreck and not actually technically solving the case, which was eventually solved completely by chance. The story works precisely because it’s so different."