SOURCE: "Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Edgar Wallace," in The International Fiction Review, Vol. 3, No. 2, July, 1976, pp. 142-44.

In the following essay, Arnold compares the plot elements of Wallace's The Four Just Men to those in a novel by German writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

In 1959, Siegfried M. Pistorius interviewed Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the latter's home above Neuchatel and found that Durrenmatt had complete sets of the novels by Edgar Wallace, Georges Simenon, and Agatha Christie on the shelves. In his book on Diirrenmatt's prose works, Peter Spycher mentions this fact, but says nothing concrete about influences from these authors on Diirrenmatt's detective stories. I intend to show elsewhere that Simenon's inspector Maigret has contributed certain traits to the figure of Inspektor Barlach (Der Richter und sein Henker, 1952; Der Verdacht, 1953), and that Diirrenmatt's novel Das Versprechen (1958, based on his filmscript Esgeschah am hellichten Tag) is a clever transformation of...