Janwillem van de Wetering

• Born: February 12, 1931
• Birthplace: Rotterdam, Netherlands
• Died: July 4, 2008
• Place of death: Blue Hill, Maine

Type of Plot: Police procedural

Principal Series:Amsterdam Cops / Grijpstra and de Gier, 1975–99

Contribution

As a writer, Janwillem van de Wetering was far more interested in character than in plot, and his perception of the criminals and the life around him was tempered by his Zen Buddhist experience, bringing a new dimension to the fiction of crime and detection. More than other writers in this genre, he also had a sense of place, and his books convey to the reader a feeling for Amsterdam. At the same time, he was a realist, and if he admired the beauties of the city’s canals, he made no secret of the fact that there often is garbage and filth floating in them. In keeping with his interest in the mental, rather than the physical, excitement of the mystery story, he had a keen sense of psychology and an understanding of dreams.

Biography

Janwillem van de Wetering was born on February 12, 1931, in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the son of Catharina van Hattem and businessman Jan Cornelis van de Wetering. He studied at the Delft Institute of Technology, the College for Service Abroad, Cambridge University, and University College London. In 1954, he married artist Edyth Stewart-Wynne; they later divorced, and in December 1960 he married Juanita Levy, with whom he had a daughter, Thera.

At age twenty, van de Wetering moved to Cape Town, South Africa, at the behest of his father, to work at a Dutch company connected to his father's business interests. It was in Cape Town that he met and married Edyth. He was fired when he refused a transfer to Johannesburg, but he remained in South Africa until his father died in 1957, whereupon he returned to Europe and briefly studied philosophy at University College London as a non-degree student. While in London he developed an interest in Zen Buddhism, and in 1958 he became a layperson in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, Japan. This put an end to what he later described to Peter Gardner for Publishers Weekly as the “beatnik sort of life” that he had previously led.

In 1959 van de Wetering left the monastery and returned to his business career, working with a Dutch trading company in South America. He spent time in Bogotá, Colombia, before moving on to Lima, Peru, where he and Levy were married. In 1963 he moved to Brisbane, Australia, where he worked as a realtor until 1965. After the death of an uncle, he returned to the Netherlands to manage the uncle's textile business. He restored the failing business to profitability and, as an alternative to military service, joined the Amsterdam Reserve Police, where he rose from the rank of patrol officer to sergeant. He went on to make very good use of his Amsterdam police experience: almost all of his novels are set in Amsterdam, and, as he revealed to Gardner, “All my novels are built on police reports.”

In 1975, van de Wetering and his family left Amsterdam for Surry, Maine, to join a Zen community there. The community disbanded soon after, but he remained in Maine with his wife and daughter for the remainder of his life.

In addition to writing novels, van de Wetering contributed to several magazines in the United States and the Netherlands and wrote some plays for Dutch television. Two of the novels in his Amsterdam Cops series, Outsider in Amsterdam (1975) and The Rattle-Rat (1985), have been produced as Dutch films, and a third, The Blond Baboon (1978), was made into a German film in 1999. In addition, a television show based on the series, Grijpstra & de Gier, aired on Dutch television from 2004 to 2007.

Janwillem van de Wetering died on July 4, 2008, at Blue Hill Memorial Hospital in Blue Hill, Maine, due to complications from cancer. He was seventy-seven.

Analysis

Janwillem van de Wetering launched his literary career with two autobiographical nonfictional books, written in Dutch and published in Amsterdam. Both were later translated into English and were published in Boston by Houghton Mifflin, which eventually produced the American editions of almost all of his books. (His novels, conversely, were published in English first and then translated into Dutch.) Both books, De lege spiegel: Ervaringen in een Japans Zenklooster (1971; The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery, 1973) and Het dagende niets: Beschrijving van een eerste bewustwording in zen (1973; A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community, 1975), are accounts of van de Wetering’s study of Zen.

Outsider in Amsterdam

Van de Wetering began his Amsterdam Cops series, also known as the Grijpstra and de Gier series, in 1975 with Outsider in Amsterdam, one of his best novels. Sergeant de Gier and Adjutant Grijpstra are summoned to one of the seventeenth-century gabled houses that line the canals of central Amsterdam. De Gier admires the graceful old architecture and deplores the ugly buildings of a later period. The house to which they have been summoned was once owned by a respectable gentleman of the merchant class. Now, however, it has a body hanging in it.

As the detectives get to work, their characters are revealed, and even the secondary characters come to life. Unlike in some detective fiction, van de Wetering’s characters do not face much violence. They can cope with it when they must, but they do not go out of their way to seek it. Although dogged and relentless, like most of their counterparts in the genre, these detectives are also very human, with distinctive personalities. In his interview with van de Wetering for Publishers Weekly, Gardner wrote, “They’re comfortable people to be around, these policemen, all of them readier to discuss life than to pull the trigger, but each with distinctive traits of character. De Gier, a sensitive fellow with a passion for music and cats, is, says de Wetering, ‘what I would like to be.’ The less imaginative Grijpstra? ‘Me again—my solid Dutch side.’”

Van de Wetering was also an observant critic of society, though not a solemn one, for wit, irony, and humor enliven his style. The house ostensibly belongs to a quasi-religious group, a kind of commune, but the manager of it, now dead, has turned it into a profitable drug-distribution center. As the murder investigation proceeds, the characters hurl barbs at drugs and drug dealers, the underground economy and businessmen who declare only part of their income, and hippies and the founders of communes and new societies. De Gier, for example, is angered by the discovery of young addicts who have been pushed into degradation and self-destruction. Lured by easy profits, a bright university student has set up an “antiques” business, which de Gier correctly identifies as a front for a drug-wholesaling operation. Sneering at de Gier’s low salary, the former student offers him a job. In their exchange, the characters exemplify two very different worlds in conflict. The drug wholesaler offers a percentage of the profits, saying, “You could make more on one deal, a deal taking a few weeks, than you are now making in a year”; de Gier rejects the entire idea, pointing out, “The real money is in drugs. . . . And drugs mean the end of everything. It was the end of China before the communists solved the problem. Drugs mean dry earth, dust storms, famine, slaves, bandit wars.”

Early in their investigation, Grijpstra and de Gier find out that the dead manager, who was a stingy man, had been exploiting the young people who lived and worked in the house and were members of his religious society. His financial adviser, who was also lending him the money for his drug operations, is an elegant, prosperous, and respected certified public accountant. Both detectives are aware of the privileged position of such a professional in modern society: “A chartered accountant is a man trusted by the establishment. Whatever he says is believed and the tax inspectors talk to him as equal to equal.” Another brushstroke completes the ironic portrait: “His smile glinted in the dark room. Grijpstra studied the smile for a moment. Expensive teeth. Eight thousand guilders perhaps? Or ten thousand? The false teeth looked very natural, each individual tooth a work of art, and the back teeth all of solid gold.”

Aside from the two Amsterdam detectives, the most interesting character in the novel is the titular outsider in Amsterdam, the black man who opens the door for Grijpstra and de Gier when they first respond to the call for police assistance. He is a Papuan, from New Guinea, and his name is Jan Karel van Meteren; the assonance with the name of his creator is probably no coincidence. Near the end of the book, van Meteren is identified as the killer. A loyal Dutch soldier and a police officer, he was also a victim of post–World War II political changes:

“In New Guinea I was somebody. I had a uniform, arms, a task in life. I served the queen. My queen. Here you laugh about the royal family perhaps, the crown is a symbol, a symbol of the past they say, but to us in New Guinea the queen was holy. We saluted every time we passed her portrait. Religion and the law are very close. I still think the queen is a sort of saint. I cried when I saw her in the street. She was all I had when I left my island. But nobody wanted me when I came to The Hague to ask for the queen’s orders. I showed them my medals and my papers. They were polite and patient, but they had no time for me. I was a strange black fellow from far away. With a Dutch passport.”

In the end, van Meteren escapes, but nobody is very upset about it. In the words of the commissaris, “Van Meteren is a policeman, a real policeman. I kept on having the idea that he was one of us, even after he had been arrested and was facing us as a suspect. And if you think that someone belongs to you, that he is part of the same group, you don’t pay special attention to him.” Van Meteren is an honest and very competent man, proud of having been both a soldier and a police officer. The real scoundrels have all been arrested, and even the dead man was a scoundrel.

This is not the only mystery by van de Wetering in which a killer is allowed to go unpunished. It is all tied up with the author’s study of Zen and his view of the world. The commissaris, older and higher ranking than the two detectives and a wise and kindhearted man, suggests that van Meteren may find a little island where he can spend his life in meditation.

The Blond Baboon

Grijpstra and de Gier, and their colleagues, are part of a paramilitary organization and a hierarchical social group, as is evident in many of the things they do and in the customs they observe. When they meet in the office of the commissaris in The Blond Baboon, for example, Grijpstra sits in “the commissaris’s chair of honor, a heavy piece of furniture capped by wooden lions’ heads.” Cardozo, a young new detective and the lowest-ranking member of the group, sits “on a hard-backed chair.” During the conference, the commissaris asks his more senior men for their ideas on the case, then says, “I am not asking you, Cardozo, I will ask you in a few years’ time. That doesn’t mean I don’t value your opinion but it has to be formed first.”

There is intraservice rivalry as well as cooperation. When de Gier takes a flying leap into the Amstel River while pursuing a suspect attempting to escape in a boat, Grijpstra radios the water police, who soon pick them up and offer de Gier spare dry clothes, which they keep for such emergencies. The water sergeant and Grijpstra admire de Gier in his new uniform. Grijpstra says, “I prefer the gold trim to our silver. Why do the water police have gold trim anyway?” The water sergeant responds, “Because gold is noble and so are we. The water may be polluted these days, but it can never be as dirty as the shore.”

Although most of van de Wetering’s novels are set in the Netherlands, specifically in Amsterdam, many international influences can be felt and seen. Many Asians, New Guineans, and Middle Easterners have settled in the country, and American dropouts and hippies hang around the squares and canals. Indeed, the adventurous spirit of the seventeenth-century merchants can still be found in the neighborhood where a South American streetbird (actually a type of vulture) belonging to a black witch doctor flies undisturbed, accompanied by a small, domestic cat.

The Maine Massacre and The Japanese Corpse

Not all of the Amsterdam Cops books are confined to the Netherlands. Part of The Blond Baboon takes place in Italy, and The Maine Massacre (1979) is set in the United States, where the commissaris has gone to help his widowed sister dispose of her husband’s estate so that she can return to Amsterdam. Although the commissaris does not wish to admit his frailties, his men are worried; de Gier accompanies his superior to protect him. Once there, they discover that several people living on an isolated peninsula have died, leaving their homes to be destroyed by fire and the weather. The Japanese Corpse (1977) takes place mainly in Amsterdam, but part of it is set in Japan, and much of the background material “came from Tokyo police files,” as van de Wetering told Gardner. There is a scene in the novel in which the head of a Japanese gang, the daimyo, gives a party for the commissaris, who he believes is the leader of a rival gang. The party leads not to a confrontation but to a discussion of jin-gi, an ancient Chinese idea “that two men can only truly meet after they’ve destroyed their own desires.” The commissaris, who is a seeker of truth, both physical and philosophical, enjoys his encounter with the daimyo.

Van de Wetering’s cops and crooks are not simply “good guys” and “bad guys”; they are ordinary men drawn from the world of reality. They work hard but enjoy having dinner together in inexpensive Chinese restaurants. Aware of the beauties of the city of Amsterdam and of nature, they are also sensitive to one another’s feelings. Yet they do not take themselves too seriously, for they are aware that they are servants of the Dutch people.

The commissaris sums it up for de Gier in The Blond Baboon:

“‘The turtle is fine. I saw him trying to plow through the rubbish in the garden this morning. The garden is covered with broken branches and glass and the garden chairs of the neighbors, but the turtle just plows on. He looked quite cheerful, I thought.’

“‘Maybe he’ll be reincarnated as a police detective.’

“The commissaris touched de Gier’s sleeve. ‘He has the right character.’”

Bibliography

Gardner, Peter. “Janwillem van de Wetering.” Publishers Weekly, 26 Sept. 1977, pp. 48–49.

Hausladen, Gary. Places for Dead Bodies. U of Texas P, 2000. This study of the settings of mystery and detective novels includes a section on the Stockholm of van de Wetering.

Hawtree, Christopher. “Janwillem van de Wetering.” The Guardian, 13 Oct. 2008, www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/14/netherlands. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017.

“Janwillem van de Wetering, Mystery Novelist, Is Dead at 77.” The New York Times, 13 July 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/13wetering.html. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017.

Vanacker, Sabine. “Imagining a Global Village: Amsterdam in Janwillem van de Wetering’s Detective Fiction.” Imagining Global Amsterdam: History, Culture, and Geography in a World City, edited by Marco de Waard, Amsterdam UP, 2012, pp. 169–85. Includes a brief but detailed overview of van de Wetering’s life.

Van de Wetering, Janwillem. Interview. By Diana Cooper-Clark. Designs of Darkness: Interviews with Detective Novelists, by Cooper-Clark, Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1983, pp. 145–58. Van de Wetering is one of the novelists interviewed in this study of the craft of crime fiction in Canada, England, and the United States.

Van de Wetering, Janwillem. “Reality in a Zen Monastery.” Adventures with the Buddha: A Personal Buddhism Reader, edited by Jeffery Paine, W. W. Norton, 2005, pp. 233–61. Autobiographical reflections on author’s experience of the nature of the real; provides insights into his attitude toward literary representation.

White, Jean M. “Murder by Zen: Janwillem van de Wetering.” The New Republic, 22 July 1978, pp. 34–35. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=17148553&site=ehost-live. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017. Brief study of the role played by van de Wetering’s Zen Buddhism in his crime fiction.