Once More with Freeling

By Timothy Foote

AUPRES DE MA BLONDE by NICOLAS FREELING 228 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Few enterprises launched in the hopeful '60s have been as successful as a square, spare gumshoe called Inspector Van der Valk. The humane Amsterdam police detective was the creation of Nicholas Freeling, a 45-year-old ex-hotel cook who put away his pots a decade ago and took to publishing suspense novels at the rate of one a year. Since then, Van der Valk has been probing characters, savoring cookery and solving crimes (mainly murder in high or low degree) around Holland and neighboring countries. Van der Valk books have attracted a steadily growing international audience and collected a handful of top mystery-writing prizes. More than that, Freeling goes beyond the formulas of suspense to offer a complex picture of postwar Europe, uneasy with its new prosperity and haunted by past fears. In American thrillers, only Ross Macdonald's use of the surf and drug culture of California has similar resonance. Like Macdonald, Freeling writes so well that readers may feel he should devote himself to straight fiction or --considering the state of the contemporary novel--be grateful that he does not.

Van der Valk is a plebeian with little formal education. But he reads a lot, looks hard at the world and thinks fast. He also has a blonde French wife who provides Gallic insight and underdone foie de veau, modifying her husband's tendency toward Dutch stolidity. In short, Van der Valk is the perfect medium through which Freeling, himself a multilingual, self-educated, cultural nomad, can express his own sharp-eyed perceptions of life. While getting on with the crime, readers are treated to idioms in several languages and quotes from the likes of Horace and Kipling. They are also encouraged to consider such things as the qualities of Napoleon's marshals, and unexpected parallels between a Feydeau farce and suspense fiction (the inevitability of a preposterous denouement).

As with Simenon's Inspector Maigret, exposure to Van der Valk is likely to prove infectious. Even when the story seems to unwind in slow motion, Van der Valk's reflective concern for the role of character in crime makes the trip worthwhile. The prizewinning Criminal Conversation (1966), for instance, presents an Amsterdam society doctor, highly intelligent but neurotic and febrile, who is unprovably guilty of murder. In a long series of informal conversations, Van der Valk, in effect, kills the man with kindness and understanding, finally inveigling him into admitting his crime by laying bare the poverty and loneliness of his successful life.

The steady reader grows affectionately aware of Van der Valk's changing circumstances. His two sons grow up. He slowly mounts the bureaucratic ladder from simple detective to special commissaris. His wife, Arlette, keeps feuding over sweetbreads with her swinish butcher. In King of the Rainy Country, Van der Valk is shot and nearly killed by a hysterical woman. He is seduced just once, in Ireland, but is miserable until he confesses it to Arlette.

This policeman's progress is picked up in Aupres de Ma Blonde with no hint that Van der Valk may not hold out through nearly as many volumes as Maigret. The commissaris is on detached duty with a special law commission, but becomes involved with a possible case of corruption and tax evasion concerning the sale of old master paintings. As he begins to move in on the criminals, the reader settles down for another satisfying circular plot. Then, bang (or rather, bang bang), the suspect shoots Van der Valk twice with a 9-mm. Luger. Tender thoughts of Arlette. No noticeable sense of regret. An exit line from King Lear ("Ripeness is all") characteristically delivered in German (Bereitsein ist alles). And there, stone-cold dead at the top of page 87, is Commissaris Van der Valk.

The reader clutches his head. It can't be! Maybe it's a trick. Van der Valk has been shot before. Both Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty were left for dead, only to return later for more sin and sleuthfulness. Freeling, meanwhile, rushes in shock troops. He even intrudes upon the scene himself, confirming a persistent rumor that he actually knew the real-life counterpart of Van der Valk. Met him, in fact, during his hotel days after some slight difficulty with the law and was so impressed that he started writing detective novels. After this infusion of verisimilitude, Arlette appears with some neighbors, including the swinish butcher, and bravely takes over the detective work.

Thriller readers, who usually have to face the loss of a first-rate detective only when his creator dies, will be stunned by the demise of Van der Valk.

But after ten years marked by more critical than financial success, the author is adamant. Freeling, who lives with his wife and five children outside the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg, insists that his literary murder was "deliberate policy." He adds, "It becomes necessary to free oneself. Aupres de Ma Blonde is an epitaph."

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