The King of the Rainy Country

Freeling writes with a very light touch. His dialog, and plots, wanders like the distracted, tired, cynical and reflective mind of his protagonist, Dutch detective van der Valk. Freeling creates a classic detective story, a wealthy man on the run across Europe, and the truth buried behind marital estrangement and corporate betrayal. It is gripping and fast paced, and draws out the discovery of the true state of affairs in a very satisfying manner. Freeling's unique gift, the ability to depict confusion, humanity and decency in his characters through dialog and subtle observation, is fully employed in this short novel.

Nicolas Freeling's THE KING OF A RAINY COUNTRY was the 1967 Edgar winner for Best Novel. I was already reading a lot of mysteries in 1966, and Freeling's name was familiar to me from library shelves, but for some reason I'd never picked one up. In this case, I think I will need to read at least one more of the Van der Valk books before I can figure out exactly what I think! So far, 6 out of 14 Edgar winners have been series books, if you count Ed Lacy's ROOM TO SWING (he wrote a sequel many years later, but at the time it wasn't a series). I'm also not sure whether THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM was the first of the Quiller series. Anyway, the standard for a series book becoming a Best Novel winner seems to require something special. THE KING show more OF A RAINY COUNTRY -- well, a title out of Baudelaire should tip you off right away that this is going to be, as my spouse said, "weird." It's full of philosophy and philosophizing (and stereotyping of the various European nationalities). For me, it was a bit too talky, but still good enough to make me want to check out another of the Van der Valk books to compare with it. For what it's worth, I've never been a big Maigret fan either, and some of the jacket blurbs compared Van der Valk to Maigret. show less

I had read this at least once about 1977, but today I picked it up to catalog it and just got swept away by it --read the whole book. With that kind of quality, I should give it five stars, but I must admit I found the ending unsatisfying. The heir of a very rich man vanishes; it turns out he has run off with a teenage girl from the equivalent of Mardi Gras in Koln. Van der Valk is sent after him, joined intermittently by the man's wife.

A very different type of detective novel, I enjoyed the philosophising and somewhat negative attitude of the main character. I am slowly working my way through all the Van der Valk stories.