Random Things Tours: The Basel Killings by Hansjörg Schneider

 

One of my biggest literary achievements of the last months is to have come to know and read more Swiss authors. With the Switzerland National Day around the corner - 1st of August - and me still stuck in Germany for pandemic reasons, books offered me a virtual comeback in a country I have so many fond memories about - for all the good and wrong reasons. 

The Basel Killings by Hansjörg Schneider (translated into English by the Scotland-based Mitchell Mike) invited the reader into a slice of Switzerland one may rarely encounter - particularly if just getting the information about the country from glossy travel magazines or short touristic stops into the country. The Basel introduced by Schneider is mostly under the radar, with its red district and petty crime and a high level of intolerance towards foreigners, a category including all those without a couple of hundreds of years local lineage. Most likely this is the world that your average Swiss will experience on a everyday basis though.

The grumpy inspector Peter Hunkeler from the Basel City Criminal Investigation team is tracing a couple of strange crimes that might have been motivated by an ethnic reason. Coping with his aging limitations and with a life less than exemplary - among others, too many hours spent in the red district - Hunkeler is caught between his lifelong duty and the need to take a break from his past, purchase two donkey and spend the best of his time left in their company. Compared to the rough life of humans, donkeys sound as a reward, because most of the characters from this story are far from the glamorous characters of the pristine representations of Switzerland. They are real and direct and do have lost their way home or just want to forget completely who they once were. The reasons for hiding are diverse and so are their everyday life burdens. 

There is a big cast of characters mostly originary from the Balkans as there were many victims of the Yugoslav wars that were taken by the Swiss authorities and distributed within diferent cantons, the member states of the Swiss Confederation. At what extent those people were integrated and how they were locally treated is another story for another time and maybe another book. There is a slight confusion though as countries like Albania or Kosovo are not part of Central Europe, as it is mentioned in a kind of haste in one place. Switzerland´s treatment of its own minorities is a topic rarely approaches in the media or literary depictions therefore The Basel Killings has also an anthropolotical value besides the clear literary skills.  

The descriptions are often infused with references to social discrepancies and priviledges - here is an example of many: ´A state cripple, safeguarded against crises and destitution, secure in the Helvetian net of prosperous uprightness´ - , and some dialogues sound just raw, but so are the characters uttering them.

The pace is not necessarily alert but it flows in a daily life rythm which takes into consideration realistically the normal way of living. Fast forwarding facts and events is exciting for the reader but often disconnected from the reality. For this book, finding the murderer is less important than the construction of the plot as it gives time and space for filling up stories and create diverse characters with individual narratives spectaculary coming together in the end. There is a classical crime novel touch here that I always appreciate when it is set in different setting. 

Schneider is a playwriter and it is literally appreciated for the use of local dialects. If the richly worded translation of the book and the precision of the details recreated at a great extent the local ambiance in a theater-like installments, reading in translation took away from the curious language lover the richness of the dialects. Thus, I can only hope one day to be able to read this author in the original Swiss German language(s).

As The Basel Killings, winner of the prestigious Friedrich Glauser Prize, is the first from the Inspector Hunkeler series, I would definitely be curious to follow the next adventures. He is not at all the kind of person I would ever like to meet, but has a point and a good eye for an underworld that most people abroad never ever meet in real Swiss life. 

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher in exchange for an honest review and as part of a blog tour, but the opinions are, as usual, my own