Do the right thing
'Hunkeler's Secret' a tale of searching for justice in a storied Swiss city

Murder Ink was created some dozen years ago to suss out literary crime fiction, which were three words never linked together in the United States and never separated in Europe or the U.K. In France, crime fiction has been so expertly wrought since the early 20th Century that it falls under the rarefied category of belles-lettres (which translates to “beautiful writing” in French.)

Arthur Conan Doyle perhaps began the genre of crime fiction in 1887 in Scotland with “A Study in Scarlet,” followed by “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” in 1892 and “The Hounds of the Baskervilles” in 1902. Agatha Christie carried the pendant to a broader and gentler audience with 66 detective novels that ushered in a literary movement known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Her contribution to crime fiction is more nuanced than just murder mysteries and set the standard as reflected in her worldwide sales of 300 million.

With Christie and Doyle as trendsetters, many European novelists struggling to write literature on the state of being and belonging or loving and longing. Instead, they saw the eager audience for mysteries and locked themselves in their garrets to write mysteries as literary art. And still today, the more erudite crime fiction comes from across the pond, including and worthy of mention of Africa and Japan.

This episode of “Murder Ink” features author Hansjörg Schneider of Basel, Switzerland, with a new novel dropping in bookstores April 29 entitled “Hunkeler’s Secret.” It is ably translated by Astrid Freuler and published by Bitter Lemon Press of London, a world-leading publisher of some of the finest literary crime fiction in Europe. Schneider is a typical Bitter Lemon front-list author. His first book, “The Basel Killings,” was published in Zurich in 2004 and translated into English in 2021. I featured it in the Telegraph a few days after its publication to the delight of at least the many I heard from.   

“Hunkeler’s Secret” features retired police inspector Peter Hunkeler, of the Basel City Criminal Investigation Department. Considered to be the cultural capital of the tucked-away country, Basel is a picturesque city in northwestern Switzerland on the Rhine River – third in population behind Zurich and Geneva. Our protagonist, Peter Hunkeler, had been the nosy detective in the local cop shop for 30 years before his recent retirement. He collects jazz records, knows his whiskies and fights windmills if they’re in a migration corridor.  

The title of this Schneider book evokes curiosity, and the author is more than adept at teasing that along at an accelerated pace. The secret – Hunkeler’s secret – is revealed in the first scene of the book. That makes us all complicit in the peculiar circumstance of the death of old man Fankhauser in a hospital room shared with Hunkeler after minor surgery and the quiet overnight removal of the corpse.

While Hunkeler is sure he’s seen a crime, he knows that morphine sleep aids can easily disfigure rational minds or bend thoughts.   

And so here is the secret … or here is the secret to the secret of Fankhauser’s death: Hunkeler, in his relaxed lucidity, thought he saw, or indeed did see, a nurse in a traditional blue headscarf and smelling of nutmeg, administer an injection to chattery Fankhauser five or 10 minutes before Hunkeler’s sleep potion took effect.

When Hunkeler awakes in the morning, Fankhauser is gone and his bed freshly made for the next patient. After Hunkeler unlooses his imprinted witness questioning, he is informed that Fankhauser died of a heart attack overnight and had already been cremated without an autopsy or investigation.

The beauty of “Hunkeler’s Secret” is not so much the simplicity of Schneider’s lovely writing, or the thorough tour we get of Basel and the people who live in this storied Swiss city. It’s that we meet and get to tag along with a remarkable police detective and honest man. Peter Hunkeler seems to have been drawn in watercolor, and he’s a breath of fresh air to hang around for 190 pages.

Cutting perhaps too close to the bone, Hunkeler’s secret is a big one after he goes through the criminal investigation made clumsy without his badge. We experience through this admirable man that justice is another word for doing the right thing.

“Hunkeler’s Secret” is not a book that will keep you up reading past midnight; we’ve seen many and will see many more that you shouldn’t live without. But this book is a clever piece of work, and you cannot be disappointed by the imagination of this 90-year-old storyteller. Ask Maria’s Bookshop to order this $17 paperback and take advantage of Evan’s courtesy 15% discount to Murder Ink readers.