Nicolas Freeling

• Born: March 3, 1927
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: July 20, 2003
• Place of death: Mutzig, France

Types of Plot: Police procedural; thriller

Principal Series: Inspector Van der Valk, 1961-1972; Henri Castang, 1974-1996; Arlette Van der Valk, 1979-1981

Contribution

Nicolas Freeling objected to comparisons of his work with that of Georges Simenon (Van der Valk hates jokes about Jules Maigret), and the reader can see that Freeling’s work has dimensions not attempted by Simenon. Nevertheless, there are points of similarity. In both the Van der Valk and the Castang series, Freeling offered rounded portraits of realistic, likable police officers who do difficult jobs in a complicated, often impersonal world. Freeling’s obvious familiarity with a variety of European settings, ranging from Holland to Spain, also reinforced his place as a writer of Continental novels. His concerns, however, were his own. Freeling stated his conviction that character is what gives any fiction—including crime fiction—its longevity, and he concentrated on creating novels of character. Van der Valk changed and grew in the course of his series, and Castang did the same. In A Long Silence (1972), Freeling took the startling step of allowing his detective to be killed halfway through a novel. Freeling’s style evolved in the course of his career, and he relied increasingly on dialogue and indirect, allusive passages of internal narrative.

Biography

Nicolas Freeling was born F. R. E. Nicolas in Gray’s Inn Road, London, on March 3, 1927. He was educated in England and France, and he attended the University of Dublin. He served in the Royal Air Force from 1945 to 1947. After leaving the military, he spent more than a decade as a professional cook in European hotels and restaurants. In 1954, he married Cornelia Termes; they had four sons and a daughter. Freeling lived all of his adult life on the Continent.

Freeling’s first mystery, Love in Amsterdam (1962), began the Van der Valk series. In it, a central character is jailed for several weeks for a murder he did not commit. The novel may partly have been inspired by Freeling’s experience of having been wrongly accused of theft. The work marked the beginning of a prolific career in which Freeling published a novel almost every year. Gun Before Butter (1963) won Le Grand Prix de Roman Policier in 1965. The King of the Rainy Country (1966) won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for 1967. Freeling died in France in 2003.

Analysis

From his very first novel, Love in Amsterdam, and continuing throughout his career, Nicolas Freeling’s dual concerns with character and society dominated his work. He obviously enjoyed the personalities he created: Piet Van der Valk and Arlette Van der Valk and Henri Castang and Vera Castang, as well as the people who surround them. The verisimilitude of those characters has been underscored by Freeling’s strong sense of place; his attention to details of personality and setting ultimately define his concern—the conflicts between the individual and modern bureaucracy, clashes among social castes, contrasts among national types, and the social structures that allow, even encourage, the committing of crime. Freeling’s interest in his characters required that he allow them to grow and change, and those changes, joined with the complexities of Freeling’s own vision, are largely responsible for his works’ great appeal.

The Van der Valk novels are dominated by the personalities of Van der Valk and his wife, Arlette. The inspector looks at his country through the eyes of a native. The child of a cabinetmaker, an artisan—a fact that he never forgets—Van der Valk is too smart not to recognize his own foibles when in Strike Out Where Not Applicable (1967) he celebrates his promotion by dressing like the bourgeoisie. He is well aware of the significance of such things in a country where social class is clear-cut and important to everyone.

Arlette’s French presence in the series adds a second level to this picture of Dutch life. In a mostly friendly way, Arlette mocks Dutch orderliness and insistence on conformity. Although living among the Dutch, she nevertheless maintains French standards, as in her cooking. Her self-assurance and her support reinforce her husband’s willingness to risk failure while coping with the bureaucratic order that seems so congenial to most Dutchmen, but so life-denying to Van der Valk.

Strike Out Where Not Applicable

Class is a constant issue for Freeling’s characters. In Strike Out Where Not Applicable, for example, all the characters are aware of the social hierarchy at the riding school that forms the novel’s central setting. Without sinking to stereotypes, Freeling looks at the defensiveness of the girl of Belgian peasant stock who has married the successful bicycle racer. Sympathetically, Freeling points up their uneasy position at the edge of a society that will never accept them. The couple is compared to the Van der Valks themselves, another couple who will never truly join the upper middle class. The novel’s victim is a successful restaurateur. When his very proper wife must arrange his funeral, Freeling gives significant attention to her dealings with the undertaker as she tries to ensure that everything will seem acceptable to the town gossips.

Double-Barrel

In Double-Barrel (1964), the town of Zwinderin—self-satisfied, rigid, repressive, relentlessly Protestant—becomes a character in its own story when its smugness is shaken by a writer of poison-pen letters. In a small town whose citizens spend their free time watching the shadows on other people’s curtains, little escapes the grapevine; although Van der Valk continues to rely on Arlette for information, she herself is a major topic for discussion. The town both creates and shelters the very crime that must be investigated.

A Dressing of Diamond

The concern with class issues also appears in the Castang novels. A Dressing of Diamond (1974) concerns the revenge kidnapping of a child. The sections of the novel devoted to the child’s experiences mainly record her confusion at the behavior of her peasant captors: She is puzzled by the dirt and chaos in which they live, but most of all, she is bewildered by their constant quarrelsomeness and their shouted threats. Brutality is something that bourgeois children rarely meet.

Other levels of social relationships also come under scrutiny in Freeling’s work. In Wolfnight (1982), Castang must deal with the upper class and a right-wing political conspiracy. In The King of the Rainy Country, Van der Valk has to cope with the seductions offered both literally and figuratively by the very rich. Like Castang, he is acutely conscious of the vast distance that lies between the police officer and the aristocrat.

A City Solitary

One of Freeling’s most subtle examinations of the ambiguities of social bonds occurs in A City Solitary (1985), a nonseries novel that explores the relationship between captive and captor. In it, a novelist and his faithless wife are taken hostage by an adolescent thug who has broken out of jail. They are joined by a young female lawyer who had expected to represent the young criminal in court but who has also stumbled into his power. What happens between predators and their victims? The novel examines their involuntary bonding as they manipulate one another while fleeing across the Continent.

Significantly, when Freeling’s characters suffer real damage, it is done by members of the upper classes. At the end of The King of the Rainy Country, Van der Valk is seriously wounded by one such aristocrat, and in A Long Silence he is killed by a privileged madman. In Wolfnight, Castang’s apartment is attacked and his wife is kidnapped by the upper-class members of a political conspiracy. The representatives of social order seem to have greater power to harm than the thugs and peasants can ever obtain.

Freeling’s Detectives

Although Freeling assigns ranks and offices to his detectives and they have associates and make reports, he had little interest in the day-to-day grit of police work. When Van der Valk or Castang is compared with Ruth Rendell’s Reginald Wexford or J. J. Marric’s George Gideon, one realizes how little time Freeling’s characters spend on writing reports or fruitless interviewing. Instead, their work proceeds as a result of countless conferences, of conversations that have been planned to appear coincidental, even of unexpected bits of information. In this sense, Freeling’s novels are not strictly police procedurals (Freeling himself has protested the various categories into which fiction, including crime fiction, is often thrust). As Van der Valk’s death suggests, however, Freeling intended his work to be realistic. Accordingly, Van der Valk and Castang share the theory that any good police officer must occasionally take the law into his own hands if justice is to be done. Thus, in Strike Out Where Not Applicable, Van der Valk pressures a murderer to confess by implying that he will use force if necessary. In Wolfnight, Castang kidnaps a prisoner from jail to use as a hostage in the hope of trading her for his wife, who is also being held hostage.

Van der Valk’s murder is the strongest testimony to Freeling’s sense of realism. In “Inspector Van der Valk,” an essay written for Otto Penzler’s The Great Detectives (1978), Freeling commented on the real police officer’s vulnerability to violence, using that fact to defend his decision to kill his detective. He then went on to discuss the issue from the novelist’s point of view, implying that he believed that he had developed the character as far as he could. The problem was accentuated by the fact that Freeling no longer lived in Holland and thus felt himself gradually losing touch with Van der Valk’s proper setting.

It is interesting to compare Freeling’s second detective with his first. Like Van der Valk, Castang dislikes bureaucracy, maintains a wry skepticism about what he is told, and spends time reflecting on his world and its problems. Also like Van der Valk, Castang enjoys attractive women but—most significantly—turns to his wife for intellectual as well as physical comfort. In addition, Arlette and Vera are not native to their societies and thus can see societal problems more acutely; both women are strong willed, emotional, and intelligent. Both are devoted to their husbands without being submissive. Nevertheless, Castang is more complex than Van der Valk; he is more given to theorizing and speculation, and the very nature of his job creates a greater variety in his experience. Similarly, Vera, with her Eastern-Bloc youth, injury, and life as an artist, is a more complex character than Arlette. Even the setting seems more complex. Although Van der Valk sometimes left Holland, most of his stories emphasized Holland’s insularity; part of the European community, it was nevertheless set apart and aloof. France may behave the same, but it still has many borders, and the Castang characters seem to cross them regularly.

Only Freeling’s plots lean toward simplicity. He was not given to maps and timetables. Instead, he typically used elements of character to unlock the mystery. Using an omniscient point of view, he sometimes revealed the guilty person well before the detective could know his identity, for Freeling’s interest lay in the personalities he created rather than in the puzzles.

Style Changes

Freeling’s sacrifice of Van der Valk was made in response to his awareness of change, and some of the change is reflected in Freeling’s own style. It became more complex and allusive than in his early novels. Freeling always relied heavily on omniscient narration, and he always used passages of interior monologue, but this element expanded in the post-Van der Valk novels, perhaps in Freeling’s effort to break with some of his earlier patterns. The resulting style, as some reviewers noted, made more demands on its readers than did the earlier one, but it offered more rewards in its irony and its possibilities for characterization. This passage from Wolfnight occurs just after Castang has learned of his wife’s kidnapping:

There was more he wanted to say but he was too disoriented. That word he found; a good word; but the simple words, the ones he wanted, eluded him. It was too much of a struggle.

Dreams? Did he dream, or better had he dreamt? Couldn’t say, couldn’t recall. Not that I am aware. This is my bed. This as far as can be ascertained is me.

Everything was now quite clear. He reached up and turned on the light. I am clear. I am fine. Slight headache; a couple of aspirins are indicated. What time is it?

Small struggle in disbelief of the hands of his watch. Midnight, not midday. Have slept eleven hours.

This evolution of style, particularly its choppiness, its fragments, and its shifting point of view, seems simply one more indication of the increasing complexity of Freeling’s vision. The number of works Freeling produced and the span of years covered by his writing career testify to the rightness of his insistence that he be allowed to go on changing with the rest of his world.

Principal Series Characters:

• Inspector Piet Van der Valk is a middle-aged Dutch police officer. Caught within a bureaucracy he dislikes and distrusts, he reflects on the relationship between society and crime and believes that “criminal” is an arbitrary designation. Tough, realistic, and given to a quietly ironic humor, he is unorthodox, irreverent, and successful at his job.
• Arlette Van der Valk , Van der Valk’s French wife, is attractive, sexy, outspoken in expressing her amusement at Dutch conventionality, and generally opinionated. A fine cook, she has taught Van der Valk to appreciate good food. After Van der Valk’s death, she marries a British sociologist and operates a private investigation service in Strasbourg. She and Van der Valk have two sons and an adopted daughter.
• Henri Castang is a thoughtful, tough veteran of the French National Police, an elite investigation corps that works something like Scotland Yard. Castang is a devoted husband and father and a police officer who is given to analysis as well as action. Sometimes unconventional, he is always suspicious of the bureaucracy he serves.
• Vera Castang , Castang’s Czech wife, was a talented gymnast, but an accident left her paralyzed for several years; Castang patiently helped her regain mobility. Now she has a noticeable limp that may even enhance her Slavic beauty, and she has become a successful artist. The couple has a daughter.
• Adrien Richard , the divisional commissaire, is a talented police officer and a good administrator; his integrity has left him well placed in the corps, but he lacks the ability to maneuver to the highest ranks. He respects Castang, and the two work well together.

Bibliography

Bakerman, Jane S. “Arlette: Nicolas Freeling’s Candle Against the Dark.” The Armchair Detective 16 (Winter, 1983): 348-352. Contemporary review of Freeling’s novel, Arlette, comparing it to earlier works and comparing the title character to her fictional husband, Van der Valk.

Benstock, Bernard, ed. Art in Crime: Essays of Detective Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Includes an essay on Freeling and his contributions to the detective genre.

Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982. Discusses the distinctive features of Freeling’s police novels and their influence on the genre.

Freeling, Nicolas. The Village Book. London: Arcadia, 2002. Biography of the Freeling family and history of the village in which they lived, written by Freeling himself. Provides invaluable background on Freeling’s cultural heritage.

Hausladen, Gary. Places for Dead Bodies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. This study of the settings of crime fiction includes a chapter discussing Freeling’s representation of provincial France. Bibliographic references and index.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Mysteries of Literature.” The New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1994, p. 735. Oates uses this review of Freeling’s collection of nonfictional essays on detective fiction, Criminal Convictions, to discuss the author’s own work, as well as his critical views on the genre.

Penzler, Otto, ed. The Great Detectives. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Argues for Van der Valk’s place among the pantheon of fiction’s greatest detectives.

Schloss, Carol. “The Van der Valk Novels of Nicolas Freeling: Going by the Book.” In Art in Crime Writing, edited by Bernard Benstock. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Essay on Freeling’s most famous detective-fiction series, exploring the author’s particular craft of writing.