The Chinaman
By (Author) Mike Mitchell
By (author) Fredrich Glauser
Bitter Lemon Press
Bitter Lemon Press
2nd February 2007
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
833.912
Paperback
268
When, in later years, Sergeant Studer told the story of the Chinaman, he also called it the story of the three places as the case unfolded in a country inn, in a poorhouse and in a horticultural college, all in Pfrundisberg, a Swiss village - three places but also two murders. Anna Hungerlott, supposedly dead of a gastric influenza, left behind handkerchiefs with traces of arsenic. And one foggy November morning, the enigmatic James Farny, nicknamed the Chinaman by Studer, was found lying on Anna's grave, murdered with a single pistol shot to the heart that did not hole his clothing. Did the fact that the poorhouse inmates had to survive on watery cabbage soup while the Warden drank vintage wines have anything to do with the murders Perhaps. Studer must reconstitute the Chinaman's story, a voyage through asylums, reform schools and institutions for the destitute that, incidentally, were an integral part of Glauser's short life.
Friedrich Glauser is a legendary figure in European crime writing. He was a morphine and opium addict much of his life and began writing crime novels while an inmate at the Swiss insane asylum Waldau.