The hero of the novel, the gluttonous and ailing Superintendent Gottlieb Höchstettler, is the spitting image of Superintendent Bärlach in Dürrenmatt's successful earlier novels The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion. Other characters are Bärlach's former superior, Dr. Lucius Lutz, and a Swiss dramatist engaged in writing a detective novel for the first time in many years. Dürrenmatt began The Pensioner in Puerto Rico in 1969, and he reworked, revised and lengthened it several times between then and 1979. Although the novel was never finished, the essential of its ending is clearly discernible. Facsimile reproduction of manuscript and typoscript.