'WHEN a hotel dinner to celebrate Sgt Studer's daughter's wedding is interrupted by murder, the owner asks the sergeant to investigate. A man has been found with a sharpened bicycle wheel spoke embedded in his back. The man who runs the nearby bicycle repair shop is quickly arrested - but...
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'Had he been a privileged American adolescent in the 1980s, Friedrich Glauser might well have been sent off to an institution like the Santangelo Academy. Instead, Glauser, who was born in Vienna in 1896 and died at age 42, spent much of his adult life in psychiatric wards and prisons,...
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'Friedrich Glauser's Fever (from the wonderful Bitter Lemon Press) has to be one of the more interesting books I've read in ages. It's a rather complicated mystery involving some dead sisters (who were each married to the same brother), the dead brother (died years before), a clairvoyant who claims the...
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'The Spirit of Madness. After reading Friedrich Glauser's dark tour de force In Matto's Realm (Bitter Lemon; paperback, $13.95), it's easy to see why the German equivalent of the Edgar Allan Poe Award is dubbed "The Glauser." But it's surprising to note that this classic, originally published in German in...
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'Friedrich Glauser, the Viennese born author of THUMBPRINT (Bitter Lemon Press, 197pp) - first published in a 1930s periodical - was addicted to opium and its derivatives. He wrote this book while in Waldau asylum, and died in 1938 on the eve of his wedding. He has left to us...
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