The King of the Rainy Country
by Nicolas Freeling
Summary
The novel opens with its detective already shot: Inspector Piet Van der Valk of the Amsterdam police, shot and half conscious, drifting through fever dreams of Napoleon and Baudelaire, and the book then rewinds to explain how a routine discreet inquiry put a bullet in him.
The inquiry: Jean-Claude Marschal, forty two, heir to one of Europe's great private fortunes, has walked out of his Amsterdam life, and his firm wants him found quietly, no scandal, no police file. Van der Valk, seconded into the errand with instructions that smell wrong from the first briefing, follows the trail into the geography of European money, ski resorts, spa towns and carnival cities, and assembles a portrait of the missing man that converts the case from retrieval to tragedy: Marschal is not hiding from anything except a life in which nothing has ever been at stake, a man so insulated by inheritance that only flight, risk and finally violence feel like existence. Baudelaire's title phrase, the king of a rainy country, rich, impotent, young and very old, is the diagnosis.
Freeling's manner is the opposite of procedural tidiness: essayistic, digressive, interested in food, marriages and national character, with Van der Valk's own marriage to the French Arlette supplying the warmth. The ending, back at the opening's gunshot and past it, refuses every consolation the genre keeps in stock.
A short novel, around one hundred and sixty pages.
Best for readers who want the European literary crime novel at its source, Simenon's territory annexed by an essayist with a body count.
Historical Context & Significance
King of the Rainy Country won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1967, confirming the arrival of Nicolas Freeling's Van der Valk series as the connoisseur's European procedural: English born, Freeling had cooked professionally across the continent, and began writing in prison, briefly held over a kitchen theft, producing in the Amsterdam inspector a detective built for cultural observation rather than deduction.
The series' fame grew until Freeling committed the genre's most notorious act of authorial violence: he killed Van der Valk in mid career, tired of him, and wrote on with the widow Arlette and then the French detective Henri Castang, a decision fans have never entirely forgiven and critics have never stopped admiring.
British television's Van der Valk adaptations, in the seventies and again in the 2020s, kept the character public; the Baudelaire titled sixth book remains the series peak on most accountings, the Edgar's judgement holding.