Confectionery, courtesy and witty wit: Martin Suter’s new, fine crime novel “Allmen and Herr Weynfeldt”.
Anyone who only knows the film adaptations with Heino Ferch in the leading role of the art detective Johann Friedrich von Allmen might be tempted to assume that the Swiss author Martin Suter is primarily interested in slightly spread pretensions and snobbish all sorts of things with a criminalistic touch. But anyone who looks into the novels will be pleasantly surprised that the common world is an interesting mixture of confectionery, courtoisie, perfumery, elegance and witty wit, which in its best moments touches the ground of reality just as little as it does allowing the “ugly head of probability” (Alfred Hitchcock) to rear its head.