The Judge and His Hangman

The Judge and His Hangman (German: Der Richter und sein Henker) is a 1950 novel by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt. It was first published in English in 1954 in a translation by Cyrus Brooks, and later in a translation by Therese Pol. A new translation by Joel Agee appeared in 2006, published together with the book's sequel, Suspicion, as The Inspector Bärlach Mysteries, with a foreword by Sven Birkerts. Together with Dürrenmatt's The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, these stories are considered classics of crime fiction, fusing existential philosophy and the detective genre.