Book Review: The King of the Rainy Country

Nicolas Freeling
1966
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book is a detective story along the lines of Raymond Chandler, but it takes place in Europe instead of Los Angeles.

The main character, Van der Valk, is a police detective from Amsterdam who gets assigned to track down an eccentric millionaire who has run away from home. The hunt involves a lot of competitive skiing and car chases through the Austrian alps, west across France and finally down to the western border with Spain.

Throughout the book Van der Valk endeared himself to me by comparing himself to Philip Marlowe and James Bond and other fictional detectives that he felt he should be more like, but wasn't. 

I liked the story a lot but sometimes it was a struggle for me to follow Freeling's writing, what with all of the author's European 1960s-era historical and literary allusions. I read it with Wikipedia at hand and it was quite an education. 

For example, I didn't know that bleach was originally called "eau de Javel," after the town where it was first invented. Or that "blackwater" is an awful complication of malaria that brings on chills and jaundice. I learned that the gentian flower can be used to flavor liqueur and that Lethe is the name of the river of forgetfulness in Hades. I also got to learn all about the "Incident at Mayerling," an 1889 murder-suicide scandal involving the heir to the Austrian empire, and about an infamous bloodbath of a battle that was fought in the French town of Malplaquet during the War of Spanish Succession.

It's a fun read, but be prepared to pull out the encyclopedia.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.