Stranded when his car breaks down in a village a traveller gladly accepts the invitation of a retired judge to spend the night in his house and to join him and a few friends for dinner and their Game. This could happen to anybody. But only Friedrich Dürrenmatt could have used such a commonplace occurrence as the starting point for the nightmarish story that follows.

In The Judge and his Hangman (1950) Dürrenmatt's investigator takes to the stage for the first time: Inspector Bärlach, an old fossil of the judicial system. For health reasons, he has only very little time left to solve a murder case. Bärlach's approach to the issues of justice, morality, guilt and punishment is a common thread running through all of Dürrenmatt's crime novels. In Suspicion (1951), for example, the inspector fights once more against death and injustice, driven by his boundless defiance at »existing in this world and fighting for another one, a better one«. In The Pledge (1958) another investigator, Matthäi, doggedly tries to hunt down a child-murderer, showing no fear of danger or its consequences. Justice (1985) focuses on a young lawyer's entanglement in the delicate web of justice, the judicial system and morality. Dürrenmatt began his fifth (and uncompleted) crime novel The Pensioner (1995) as early as 1969, but kept re-writing it. The novel's protagonist, the ill, gluttonous Inspector Höchstettler, is the spitting image of Bärlach.

The hero of the novel, the gluttonous and ailing Superintendent Gottlieb Höchstettler, is the spitting image of Superintendent Bärlach in Dürrenmatt's successful earlier novels The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion. Other characters are Bärlach's former superior, Dr. Lucius Lutz, and a Swiss dramatist engaged in writing a detective novel for the first time in many years. Dürrenmatt began The Pensioner in Puerto Rico in 1969, and he reworked, revised and lengthened it several times between then and 1979. Although the novel was never finished, the essential of its ending is clearly discernible. Facsimile reproduction of manuscript and typoscript.