End of the Game - film review

End of the Game is a 1975 film that is known under various names, including the original German title, Der Richter and sein Henker (The Judge and his Hangman.) It's based on a book published 25 years earlier, written by the Swiss playwright and novelist Friedrich Durrenmatt. When I was studying for my A Levels and S Levels in German, at the tender age of 17, I read Durrenmatt's famous play, The Visit, which I thought was superb. This prompted me to seek out his other work, including Der Richter und sein Henker, a detective story. I really enjoyed it - and not just because it was short and pretty easy to read in the original German!

I did not, however, find out until recently that the book had been filmed. Thanks to Sergio's excellent blog, Tipping My Fedora, I learned about the DVD's existence, and made sure I acquired a copy. I'm glad I did. The cast is excellent. Donald Sutherland has a tough part, playing a cop who is found shot dead in his car right at the start of the story. Jon Voight plays the keen young detective Tschanz, the breathtaking Jacqueline Bisset is the dead man's girlfriend, and Robert Shaw is the nasty criminal whom the lead detective, the cancer-stricken Barlach, is trying to pay back for past misdemeanours,

One very pleasing feature of the film is that Durrenmatt himself makes an appearance - as a writer called Friedrich. We encounter him, musing over a chess game. When asked what he is doing, he says, "I am playing myself." The double meaning is a typical Durrenmatt joke - his specialism was not detection, but comedy, usually with an ironic edge.

This is a stylised film, by no means wholly realistic, but none the worse for that. The mystery element is not at all bad - the complications are piled on rather cleverly, thus blinding the viewer to what is, in truth, an obvious solution to the whodunit question. The cast is very good, and the soundtrack is provided by that wonderful composer Ennio Morricone. I was glad to be reminded of Durrenmatt's excellence. Recommended.

The Gilbert Adair Festschrift

Writing this blog has led to many interesting and enjoyable experiences and encounters, plenty of them wholly unexpected. One example was an invitation earlier this year to contribute to a festschrift celebrating the work of the late Gilbert Adair, whom I'd never met, but about whose detective pastiches I've written on this blog. And now the Verbivoracious Press (try saying that name after a couple of drinks!) has published the festschrift.

My essay is called "Gilbert's Games and the Golden Age of Murder", and it discusses Adair's last three novels, which feature Evadne Mount, in the context of Golden Age game-playing. I rather think Anthony Berkeley, for instance, might have appreciated Adair's ironic and ingenious attempts to play around with the idea of the whodunit.

I haven't as yet read all the other contributions, but I was pleased to see that one essay is written by Sergio Angelini, whose blog, Tipping My Fedora, is chock-full of interest. There's some overlap, not surprisingly, between his essay and mine, but we tackle our subjects from different angles, and Sergio also covers two earlier books by Adair, one of which I haven't read. The other is A Closed Book, which I read not long after it came out. Sergio is an expert on film as well as fiction, and I learned from his essay that A Closed Book was turned into a film four years ago, and with a very good cast. It seems to have sunk without trace in box office terms, but there is a DVD, and I will be sure to seek it out, though Sergio warns that the film is very different from the book.


This essay is the third I've published this year, in very different books. Morphologies, quite a high profile book edited by Ra Page, included my thoughts on Conan Doyle as a short story writer, while Mysteries Unlocked, a festschrift honouring Doug Greene and edited by Curtis Evans, is a splendid resource for those interested in reading essays about the genre; my piece focused on Anthony Berkeley's short stories. There's always a danger that invitations to write essays can distract one from the current novel, and sometimes I'm guilty of digressing when I should be focusing. But the occasional digression is, I'm sure, good for a writer, and helps to keep one's writing fresh.