Customer Reviews

Gun Before Butter

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I didn't think that Freeling was going to be able to equal _The King of the Rainy Country_, but I think that _Gun Before Butter_ achieves that and (just possibly) more. Van der Valk links the melancholy story of Luciene Englebert with the fate of a secretive man found dead in Amsterdam. A sad and gripping story that inspires deep satisfaction in the reader.

Nicolas Freeling is one of those authors, like Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine, & Phil Rickman, who deserve a wider audience.

The "Guardian" newspaper in his obituary noted "the question remained as to whether he was really a crime writer or a straight novelist who chose to use crimes as a forcing house in which to examine questions of personality, propensity, even national characteristics, under abnormal conditions."

It's interesting to see a distinction being made between "crime writers" & "straight novelists" as if crime writing were a lesser discipline. It could be argued that the traditional structure of crime fiction offers an opportunity for the writer to distill the extremes of character & behaviour within a strict framework.

Freeling is an expert, a skilled writer & observer who extends our knowledge of humanity. His characters are believable & his sense of place is unsurpassed. Rather than the black/white, wrong/right scenarios of many crime writers, Freeling's mature & sophisticated worldview encompasses human frailty without descending into an amoral universe.

The murder is solved - but there's no punishment for the killer. Or does the punishment wait in the killer's future, which is spelled out in the book? The policeman hero, Van der Valk, relies on his own sense of morality rather than that of the judicial system.

The author sets his characters firmly in their society & time, in this case in the Netherlands in the early 1960s. He never puts a foot wrong as he relates the story through the viewpoint of Van der Valk. We're with the policeman as he discovers the character of the murdered man through his house, even his choice of soap. Another main character is gradually woven in through contact with Van der Valk & loose ends are neatly threaded together by the end of the book.

Freeling's lyrical, intelligent writing easily transcends the occasional hiccup in the plot, & Van der Valk is a likable protagonist. Freeling wrote a series of books set in Amsterdam, followed by another series set in France, which are more complex & less traditional crime fiction. All are well worth reading.

Freeling mimics Simenon's "Maigret" in his Van der Valk character but misses Simenon's simplicity of touch and dialogue. Rather, Freeling finds his own entertaining voice in the atmospherics of Amsterdam, the countryside of Belgium and the mid sixties tension between the Dutch and Belgians. With two to three strong characters and believable dialogue, this mystery ends with a sensitive tragic love story in the last twenty pages but hiccups in the middle with the implausibility of Van der Valk solution to the crime.

This was the first Freeling book I've read. It's an easy read, and the characters and situations are very interesting, even engrossing. However, the book is driven by a string of highly improbable coincidences. A drunk just happens to remove the license plates from a car. The detective just happens to keep running into Lucienne on odd occasions and critical junctures. The detective just happens to be struck by a painting hanging on the victim's wall. Lucienne just happens to be in a location where some Italians just happen to be talking about the victim's wife, in a language Lucienne just happens to understand. The victim just happens to withhold from Lucienne his crucial conversation with his wife. Van der Valk didn't solve the mystery, the solution just happened to fall into his lap (with some loose ends that are never explained). So after following an interesting enough tale, one is left with a strong feeling of dissatisfaction.