Author. Born in Vienna, then the splendid capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Charles Pierre Glauser, and Theresia Glauser, née Scubitz, from Graz, Austria. As a boy, he lost his mother at an early age, and suffered under the bare cold-heartedness of his ambitious father, a French teacher from Switzerland and later school principal, who, newly married, had moved to Mannheim, Germany. On his father’s legal request, Friedrich Glauser would later be deprived of his civil rights and liberties, which was a very widespread way to deal with the underprivileged and the non-conformists whatsoever in Switzerland at that time. When 14 years old, Friedrich Glauser was sent from Austria to Switzerland, in order to attend boarding school, where he struggled against authorities and transgressed the limits imposed upon him, just as he would continue to do all through a lifelong Odyssey: First experiences with morphine abuse in Geneva where followed by his artistic awakening in Zürich, the world capital of DADA. He was a French Foreign Legionnaire in Algeria and Morocco; a dishwasher in Paris; a laborer in the foggy coal mines of Belgium; a gardener in Basel; an inmate in a madhouse in Bern and elsewhere. And from all this, emerged his literary oeuvre: Long-time forgotten, because it was supposedly "only" a crime writer’s light fiction, Friedrich Glauser was rediscovered in our post-modern days as a keen chronicler of his time and of the society he lived in. When Switzerland started to rise from its humble agricultural and industrial beginnings to what is now a land of wealth and ease, he looked at those men and women who were disqualified and left behind. In an unhealthy frenzy of relentless literary production, one novel or short story followed the other in rapid succession. With his emblematic fictional protagonist "Wachtmeister Studer", a clumsy senior investigative policeman, who archetypically represents the sometimes conflicting conformist and at the same time anarchistic character of the Swiss, Friedrich Glauser has created a timeless Don Quixote-like figure, everyone can still identify with. After long years of deprivation, struggle for recognition, and continued drug abuse, Friedrich Glauser finally found love and stability in his relationship to Berthe Bendel (1908–1986), a psychiatric nurse, whom he had met at the Münsingen psychiatric hospital near Bern. Together, they moved to France, and later to Nervi, a seashore village close to Genoa in Italy, but these hopeful new beginnings came to a sudden and tragic end, when Friedrich Glauser fell into a coma on the eve of their wedding day, and died in Nervi on December 8, 1938. Reading Glauser today, can be a key to a better understanding of modern-day Switzerland (and of our own parents and grandparents perhaps), but first and foremost, it makes good reading for every aficionado of crime fiction, a genre, literary pioneer Friedrich Glauser has brought to life here in the German-speaking world.