Strike Out Where Not Applicable
Nicolas Freeling
175 pages
published in 1967
Since most of y’all don;t click through to my Booklog often enough, I thought I’d put up extracts here as well…
Strike Out Where Not Applicable is a detective novel in the Van Der Valk series, which stars an Amsterdam police commissar, Piet Van Der Valk, who is properly cynical and worldweary. It apparently was very popular in the UK back in the seventies; there even were a couple of television series. Not that I heard from it until a few years ago; I’m not sure how popular these novels ever were in the Netherlands. Because despite the setting and Freeling’s vagualy Dutch sounding name, these are not translations, but were originally written in English. I’ve never seen them in Dutch translation, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t.
This is the first book I read in the series and unfortunately it is somewhat atypical, as it is set after Van Der Valk has left the Amsterdam police for a new post in Lisse, a medium sized town in the provinces, as commissaire in charge of the criminal brigade: a desk job rather than a street job. This transfer was made after he was wounded in the course of duty, with the lingering effects of that wound rendering him unfit for duty in the Amsterdam police.
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