On the face of it Dürrenmatt's first essay into [the detective story], Der Richter und sein Henker, contains sufficient traditional elements to explain its abiding popularity…. Written as it was in installments it enjoys all the sculptured, architechonic advantages of the Roman Feuilleton. (p. 147)

On first reading Dürrenmatt's Der Richter und sein Henker one is struck by the strangeness, the disconcerting oddity of the overall impression which this novel leaves. Where, one asks, is that feeling of delight, that essentially cathartic, reassuring feeling that things have turned out right? In its place one experiences a disconcerting je ne sais quoi, a nagging, worrying feeling that the equation has worked itself out unsatisfactorily. Initially one is inclined to dismiss this reaction, perhaps attributing it to Dürrenmatt's failure to cope with what was, for him at the time, a new form. But this too is unsatisfactory. The reader is left with no alternative but to re-read—and read more closely, paying particular attention to Dürrenmatt's departures from the "classic" tradition.

The figure of Kommissär Bärlach dominates this novel from the earliest stages until the close; small wonder, then, that it is here that we find the causes for the reader's unusual reaction to this novel as a whole. (p. 148)

[The] unreflecting acceptance so characteristic of the usual response to escape literature has no place here. The reader is forced to re-examine, to criticise.

The apparently benign Kommissär is presented in a way which initially makes critical examination rather difficult, for he is clearly the most sympathetic character in the novel. (p. 152)

One feels that his inhumanity, total absence of moral scruple and willingness to involve himself in crime as a matter of whim, without any apparent gain to be drawn from it, marks Gastmann as a very particular kind of criminal. Written only seven years after the end of the war in Europe …, [the novel] echoes ominously the gratuitous criminality and the inhuman treatment of the individual during the Nazi period. This particular thematic strand is central to the sequel, Der Verdacht, written one year later, 1952, which likewise has Bärlach as its hero. (p. 153)