Der Richter und sein Henker
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
 Commissar Bärlach of the Bernese police, who is dying of cancer and must solve the murder of his best officer, Lieutenant Ulrich Schmied. Bärlach is assisted in his investigation by officer Walter Tschanz. As Schmied had been investigating the crimes of Richard Gastmann, a career master criminal who is an old friend and enemy of Bärlach's, suspicion immediately falls upon Gastmann. But Bärlach and Tschanz's "investigation" of Gastmann yields an unexpected twist after Tschanz kills Gastmann, supposedly in self-defense. Bärlach then reveals that he has known all along that Tschanz is the one who murdered Schmied. Tschanz had purposefully killed Gastmann so that Gastmann would be forever blamed for Schmied's murder. Furthermore, Bärlach had manipulated Tschanz into this action with the manner in which Bärlach had pressed forward with their seeming investigation of Gastmann. Bärlach had deliberately pushed Tschanz toward a final, fatal confrontation with Gastmann, resulting in Gastmann's death: the punishment Bärlach considers just for all of the previous crimes Gastmann had committed, but which Bärlach had been unable to prove. In fact, Gastmann and Bärlach went back forty years. They had long ago made a personal bet with one another as to whether it was possible to commit the "perfect" crime, such that even an investigator who personally witnessed it would never be able to prove the perpetrator guilty. After that bet, Gastmann, as Bärlach well knew, had pursued a lifelong career as a purveyor of crime, evil in its comprehensiveness, arrogant and mocking of civilization itself. And indeed he always remained one step ahead of Bärlach's tireless but fruitless efforts to convict him. Gastmann recalled to Bärlach: "I wanted to prove that it was possible to commit a crime that couldn't be solved." Gastmann had been correct, and Bärlach's final plot is an acknowledgment thereof. By murdering Schmied during Schmied's investigation of Gastmann, Tschanz had ruined the terminally ill Bärlach's final chance to bring Gastmann to justice in a courtroom. Therefore, using Tschanz as a pawn, Bärlach finds an alternate method to mete out the justice for which he feels Gastmann is overdue.