The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel

The Pledge (German: Das Versprechen) is a crime novella by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt, published in 1958, after Dürrenmatt thought that his previous movie script, Es geschah am hellichten Tag ("It happened in broad daylight") did not have a realistic ending. The film's star, the popular actor Heinz Rühmann, had insisted that Dürrenmatt collaborate with the screenwriter Hans Jacoby, and the story had an ending in line with that of a typical detective story. Dürrenmatt, however, was a critic of that genre of literature, and thus he set out to write Das Versprechen as an expression of that criticism. Although it has been absent from some subsequent editions of the novella, the title of the original edition included the telling subtitle Requiem for the Detective Novel (German: Requiem auf den Kriminalroman).