On-the-Job Training

In between working on several editorial projects today, I searched around a bit on the Web but couldn’t find much having to do with the sudden death, at age 77, of Dutch crime novelist Janwillem van de Wetering. As Sarah Weinman already noted, van de Wetering passed away at his home in Maine on July 4. According to the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad (helpfully translated by Google), van de Wetering perished “after a long illness,” though precisely what that illness entailed is not made clear.

A short biography of van de Wetering, provided by the New York City-based New Netherland Institute, says that the author--best known for his late-20th-century yarns about Amsterdam cops Henk Grijpstra and Rinus de Gier--“was born in the city of Rotterdam on February 12, 1931. His father was a merchant with a specialization in international trade. So his father guided him to be his successor in the trading business when he grew up. He attended a small private business school in the province of Utrecht. ... Following graduation, his father helped him find a job in Capetown, South Africa, working in international trade for a firm affiliated with his father’s business interests. He enjoyed Cape Town, and when he was subsequently transferred to Johannesburg, he refused to move and his father had him fired. Van de Wetering stayed in Cape Town for six years, working in a variety of different jobs to support himself.” In 1958, after his father’s demise, he moved back to Europe, and then on to Japan, where he “decided to study at a Zen monastery ... He managed to keep that up for a period of two years, when his money ran out, and he had to find a job to support himself.”

For a while, van de Wetering tried to sell Australian real estate, but eventually he returned to The Netherlands to help salvage a textile business formerly run by his wife’s uncle, who had recently died. It was that relocation that proved propitious for the future author:

[W]hen the Dutch authorities found out that he was back in the country, they threatened to arrest him because, at age 19, he had not shown up for his required military service. He was able to negotiate with the government authorities that he would serve in the Amsterdam Reserve Police, to make up for the time he did not spend in military service. Since by that time he was much too old for the military, they agreed. He started as a police constable, and was later able to pass exams for sergeant and inspector. While in the Amsterdam Police Department, he was able to gather ideas for his later detective novels, which all used three of the characters from the Amsterdam Police.

It wasn’t until 1975, following his move to the coast of Maine, that van de Wetering embarked on his career as a novelist, penning Outsider in Amsterdam. That tale of a supposed suicide introduced both Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant de Gier, who would go on to lead more than a dozen subsequent and often wry novels, the last of them being The Perfidious Parrot (1997). Van de Wetering also composed a variety of other books, including The Butterfly Hunter (1982) and Seesaw Millions (1988), as well as a 1988 biography of fellow Dutch novelist Robert Van Gulik, the creator of ancient Chinese detective Judge Dee.

Looking through my bookshelves, I see that I have copies of The Corpse on the Dike (1976), The Maine Massacre (1979) , and a 1999 collection of Grijpstra and de Gier short stories called The Amsterdam Cops. I think I may have to set aside my other reading in favor of that last book. Just a little tribute to an influential author from my youth. He deserves no less.

READ MORE: “Janwillem van de Wetering Dies at 77,” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders); “Crime Fiction in The Netherlands: A Short History,” by Jan C. Roosendaal (Crime.NL); “Janwillem van de Wetering,” by Michael Blowhard (2Blowhards); “When One Crime Writer Honors Another by Name,” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders).