In 1955 Dr Isaak Kohler, a distinguished Zurich councilman, walks into a restaurant full of well-known politicians, businessmen and artists, and shoots a university professor in open view. For his crime, Kohler is sentenced to 20 years in prison. Dr Kohler, happy as a lark and infectiously content behind bars, sends for Spat, a young, down-on-his-luck lawyer and asks him to reinvestigate his case on the supposition that he is innocent. Spat does the seemingly impossible - he manages to have the murderer acquitted - and in the process is driven to madness. The lawyer becomes obsessed with his intellectual enterprise and, seduced by the notion of justice, decides to murder the murderer. ›The Execution of Justice‹ is a brilliant allegorical thriller that dramatises the distinction between justice and the law.

On April 19th, 1947, Dürrenmatt’s first play, »It is Written«, premiered at the Schauspielhaus, Zurich. It was a calamity, and the audience whistled so loudly that the police had to intervene. Nevertheless, the author, 26 years of age at the time, went on to achieve world fame and attract an audience of millions as a dramatist. »Romulus The Great«, »The Visit«, »The Physicists« and many more remain among the most performed plays on the German stage to this day, as well as being (beloved!) school reading and »universally renowned, modern myths« (Le Monde, Paris). This edition features all plays with detailed references to performance and publication history, as well as a chronicle of Dürrenmatt’s life and work.

Dürrenmatt's essays are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. His best known essays are ›Theatre Problems‹, ›The Winter War in Tibet‹, ›The Bridge‹, ›The Brain‹, ›Vinter‹ and ›Monster Essay on Justice and Law‹.

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 Vale of Confusion is Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s last novel: an accomplished satire composed of deftly interwoven narrative strands which combine scenes from Swiss rural life, encounters with the divine, and excursions into the world of organised crime. Friedrich Dürrenmatt portrays Switzerland as a morally and economically corrupt country riddled with international criminal organisations whose activities are, however unwittingly, supported by the Swiss population.

The letters published here for the first time document the unusual and not always easy friendship between Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers: Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The literary world linked Switzerland's two most famous 20th century writers inseparably together like a pair of comedians, something by which both authors were sometimes amused but more often irritated. Their common ground was their experience of Switzerland, isolated and spared from conflict between 1939 and 1945, and the guilt which the country incurred during World War II; their preoccupation with and different approaches to Kierkegaard and Brecht; their dissimilar but equally definite criticism of the army and anticommunism; their work at the Zurich Schauspielhaus theatre with the dramaturgist Kurt Hirschfeld whom they both admired. An epilogue by Peter Rüedi, for many years a critic of both authors, points out some connections between the letters, the authors' lives and work, and contemporary history.

From the moment F., a woman filmmaker, accepts the assignment to go to the Al-Hakim ruins to investigate the rape and murder of the wife of Otto von Lambert, a psychiatrist, she finds herself becoming the central character in a deepening mystery. In the unnamed Arab country where the crime occurred, she is unwittingly involved in a labyrinthine quest for an elusive truth, with frightening consequences at every turn. Under vigilance by the police, she discovers a recent photograph of the supposed murder victim happily reunited with her husband. But what is even more unnerving, F. is trapped in an increasingly apocalyptic landscape riddled with political intrigue, crimes of mistaken identity, espionage, and terrorism.

Dürrenmatt's essays are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theatre. His best-known essays are Theatre Problems, The Bridge, The Brain, Vinter, Monster Essay on Justice and Law and The Winter War in Tibet, a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth - a Plato's Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt became one of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century. But from our perspective today, we can see that Dürrenmatt's career from start to finish embraced fictional works whose quality and significance are undeniable. His novellas and short stories are searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions. The best known and most successful of them are The Judge and His Hangman, Suspicion, The Pledge, Greek Man Seeks Greek Wife, Justice, The Tunnel, Traps, The Minotaur and The Assignment.

Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. Among his most well known and most successful plays are ›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹, ›Romulus the Great‹, ›Hercules and the Augean Stables‹ and ›The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi‹.

Dürrenmatt's essays are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theatre. His best known essays are Theatre Problems, The Bridge, The Brain, Vinter, Monster Essay on Justice and Law and The Winter War in Tibet, a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth - a Plato's Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.

The texts presented in ›Thought Fugue‹ are records of works in progress: the typescripts, from Dürrenmatt's literary estate, of materials (each one a complete unit), as well as of all essays and stories, which he had planned for additional volumes of ›Materials‹ and which he expanded and revised numerous times between 1987 and the end of 1990. Each text presented here is the final version of the piece concerned. From the Contents: ›Prometheus‹, ›Thought Fugue‹, ›On Imagined Constructs and Emotional Universes with a Parable‹, ›The Dinosaurs and the Law‹, ›Dramaturgy of Imaginative Power‹, ›The Attempt‹, ›Cabala of Physics‹, ›Farewell from the Theatre‹, ›Postscript to Achterloo IV‹.

Over 4000 pages of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's conversations and interviews of all kinds for newspapers, magazines, radio, or television made over three decades between 1961 and 1990 have been handed down (it was not until the 60s that he began keeping authentically reproduced conversations and interviews). These conversations are a unique source of insights into Dürrenmatt's views of the world and reality, his aesthetic and material tenets, and the circumstances which accompanied his work.

When Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a child, his parents told him the Greek myths and the stories of the Old Testament. These became the essentials of his future artistic material. A student of literature and philosophy in Switzerland spared by the cruelties of World War II, Dürrenmatt imagined the apocalypse in expressionistic paintings and in a first play, which scandalized the Swiss and made Dürrenmatt into a household name. In 1952 he moved with his wife and children to Neuchâtel. It was here, in peace and solitude, that he wrote his internationally acclaimed plays (›The Visit‹, ›The Physicists‹) and his bestselling crime novels (›The Judge and his Hangman‹, ›The Pledge‹). His late works, considered by many as his crowning achievement, are yet to be discovered by a large audience. Hundreds of unpublished photographs from the writer's private archives are juxtaposed and ›commented‹ by excerpts from Dürrenmatt's autobiographical works and interviews. A fantastic and vivid life in pictures.

Begun in 1942/1943 and thus at the same time as his early prose and his first plays and subsequently created in parallel with his dramatic, prose and essayistic works, Dürrenmatt's poetry for a long time was only published irregularly, appearing in newspapers and magazines, and even today his poems are known only to a few readers. For Dürrenmatt, poetry was not a medium for retreating into the ivory tower but yet another expressive means, in addition to comedy, novel, short story and essay, through which to penetrate and overcome the world, in the process drawing upon a wide range of fields including science, philosophy, literature, art, politics and dramatics.