A suspenseful tale of a police inspector's unremitting search for a psychopathic killer his superiors claim does not exist. But more than a novel of crime and detection, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's deeply moving drama is the eloquent account of a decent man's gradual decay. With grim irony, the master storyteller shows how a dedicated law-enforcer's obsession for truth and justice can lead him to bait a trap as morally offensive as the evil strategy used by the maniacal murderer he relentlessly pursues.

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.