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Amsterdam Cops Mysteries #6
The Blond Baboon
While in the neighborhood investigating a pet poisoner, Grijpstra and de Gier of the Amsterdam police are called to the home of a wealthy, middle-aged woman, the former lover of a man known only as "The Baboon," when her body turns up in her garden.
218 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
8 people are currently reading
143 people want to read
About the author
Janwillem van de Wetering
145 books129 followersJan Willem Lincoln "Janwillem" van de Wetering was the author of a number of works in English and Dutch.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
April 6, 2015
This memorable quote reflects the quirky but enjoyable qualities of this mystery that originally was published in 1978: "...and the suspects being human, invariably showed themselves to be little more than brown paper bags filled with farts...". While I had a little bit of trouble following the cast of characters in the early parts of the book, my efforts to get everyone straightened out were rewarded. The plot was engaging & the challenges of policing without cell phones & laptop computers are reflected in a different pace & rhythm to the police investigation. Interviews & repeated sifting of minimal evidence to develop solutions to a crime puzzle provide the author with a platform from which the thought process of unique and memorable detectives can be displayed with dramatic results. I will most certainly check out other books in this series.
September 12, 2014
Grijpstra & de Gier are on patrol during a big storm and are more concerned with the weather than actual crime committed as any smart person would be curled up in front of the fireplace. You would think so.
There is a robbery and a dead lady lying in her garden. The men do ask the commissaris to have a look and he wants Cardozo along. Very quickly they notice that matters do not add up. Cardozo knew the dead lady as he investigated the poisoning of her dog. And do these matters have something to do with each other?
What is the role of the fellow nicknamed the Blond Baboon, the managing director of the ladies company, and how about that Italian peacock who is in Amsterdam to collect money. And why is the daughter lying and what about?
All gets solved in the usual laid back way that is the signature of this series and this writer. This novel is more about the policemen and what they think and how they finally manage to solve the case. And too be honest this time is a lot about the commissaris (chief of police) and his abilities mentally and physically.
A great policier that might upset the American reader as it is less about action and more about people and their motives and choices in living.
There is a robbery and a dead lady lying in her garden. The men do ask the commissaris to have a look and he wants Cardozo along. Very quickly they notice that matters do not add up. Cardozo knew the dead lady as he investigated the poisoning of her dog. And do these matters have something to do with each other?
What is the role of the fellow nicknamed the Blond Baboon, the managing director of the ladies company, and how about that Italian peacock who is in Amsterdam to collect money. And why is the daughter lying and what about?
All gets solved in the usual laid back way that is the signature of this series and this writer. This novel is more about the policemen and what they think and how they finally manage to solve the case. And too be honest this time is a lot about the commissaris (chief of police) and his abilities mentally and physically.
A great policier that might upset the American reader as it is less about action and more about people and their motives and choices in living.
August 19, 2018
The Blond Baboon by Janwillem van de Wetering is the sixth book of the Amsterdam Cops series, set in late 20th-century Amsterdam. From the wealth of description of Amsterdam's streets and character, it's clear the author is fond of his city. The novel follows a leisurely pace, unlike a typical police procedural, focusing more on the interplay of the detectives' personalities and their reflections on solving crime, than the case itself.
Like the previous book in the series, the novel opens with Grijpstra and de Gier traveling through Amsterdam during a severe storm. They're investigating a pet poisoning when called to a possible murder: a woman killed by a fall downstairs in her apartment building. A suspicious quantity of money is found under her mattress. Her daughter, her business partner, and a former lover are all potential suspects. The most interesting character is the "Blond Baboon". He intrigues the detectives with his strange artwork and personality quirks that are opposite of the norm.
The Commissaris is absorbed with his own health issues throughout, but that doesn't prevent him from cleverly outwitting a doctor in a cute subplot near the end.
Like the previous book in the series, the novel opens with Grijpstra and de Gier traveling through Amsterdam during a severe storm. They're investigating a pet poisoning when called to a possible murder: a woman killed by a fall downstairs in her apartment building. A suspicious quantity of money is found under her mattress. Her daughter, her business partner, and a former lover are all potential suspects. The most interesting character is the "Blond Baboon". He intrigues the detectives with his strange artwork and personality quirks that are opposite of the norm.
The Commissaris is absorbed with his own health issues throughout, but that doesn't prevent him from cleverly outwitting a doctor in a cute subplot near the end.
November 2, 2014
Yet another Grijpstra & de Gier novel finished. And yet another one that was rather enjoyable. This one centered around the death of a woman during a nasty gale wind storm. There are plenty of suspects and some rather odd characters as there have been in most of the previous Grijpstra & de Gier stories.
If you liked the previous novels in the series, you will probably like this one also.
Looking forward to the next one in the series The Maine Massacre...
If you liked the previous novels in the series, you will probably like this one also.
Looking forward to the next one in the series The Maine Massacre...
January 24, 2015
It’s been a while since I read one of the books in this series which, written in the 1970s, can be a bit quirky. There are just some things done in the Amsterdam police force that just wouldn’t happen now, and not even in North America in the 70s. However, always fun to read and good for a smile. The crime committed is interesting, and wonderfully solved by Grijpstra and de Gier, and the rest of the Amsterdam team of crime fighters.
May 12, 2017
Its far too long since I read anything in this quirky procedural series.
January 5, 2018
Now that I understand Buddhism better, I see it everywhere in these books. They're so satisfying to read.
January 7, 2024
For those who remember actively the 1970s and 1980s in Amsterdam, the Grijpstra/De Gier romans policiers are very good value. Van de Wetering captures the mood then very well, woven in with generally a very solid plot line.
Here, Elaine Carnet, a relatively elderly woman and owner of a prosperous furniture importing and show room company, falls or is pushed from a ladder in the middle of a severe storm in Amsterdam, and dies. A neighbor has a big one-eyed cat, who had already gotten into some scraps with the terrier owned by Elaine's daughter, Gabrielle--and had just the previous week tried to poison the dog. Are these two events related?
Grijpstra and de Gier get on the case, overseen by the almost ready to retire Police Commissioner for murders in Amsterdam, and a very wise man not quite with the "times."
As the investigation proceeds, we meet two free spirited children of the 1970's--Gabrielle (complete with colorful textile rugs and curtains from India and Nepal--and a sometime artist (a Mr Vleuten, but whom everyone refers to as the Blond Baboon/Baviaan. Thrown into the mix is the businessman who actually runs the furniture business and a somewhat disreputable Italian who started his entrepreneurial career as a furniture producer in Italy by buying and selling furniture to the American military occupying Italy and France after the end of WWII. At the end, we also see how a doctor practices his own sort of fraud by scaring his patients into believing they may have brain tumors only to have them pay for expensive tests on a new machine the doctor has bought which show that--wonders of wonders--they are fine after all.
Delving into the relationships between all the above delivers surprising but also to some extent believable fields of love, jealousy and conflicting selfishness.
In all this, the Commissioner is the wise man who seeks not only to "solve the crime(s)", but also to see how the people who are continuing to live may do so without being too heavily damaged by it--not by his turning a blind eye to certain actions, but to working out how confessions and cooperation can lead to acceptable sentences.
We see first that understanding the past is (generally) vital to understanding the motives for a crime today--something which Grijpstra and de Gier do "get" and which is a basis for their respect for the older Commissioner.
Van de Wetering makes a few wonderful descriptions capturing the times--where for example mothers greet their husbands returning from work with waves from behind the tulle (partially transparent) curtains and young children run out of the house to compete as to who can carry father's briefcase in and the sun going down gives that wonderful clarity and precision that is so peculiar to the Netherlands.
One important theme which the Commissioner explores is the selfishness of the Blond Baboon and that of Gabrielle---the latter who seeks to use "free love" to get men to do what she wants, and the former who rejects any kind of conventional commitments, but who also rejects the drug addicted path already by the late 1970s too much in evidence in Amsterdam. The Blond Baboon makes a somewhat decent case for swimming against the stream, noting this is difficult and that it requires flexibility to take some detours and unconventional paths--perhaps signaling v/d Wetering's own views, he notes that he has no idea whether he will succeed in the end, or even what success will look like other than what it can NOT look like.
At the end, the commissioner and the "guys" discuss the individuals they have gotten to know during the investigation, and note that Gabrielle, while not evil, is also not good. "She cannot be good, because she tries continually to prove the superiority of the "modern woman" in trying to control the men she meets. Not the way to happiness.
And in the end, the commissioner also "gets" the doctor who was preying on fears of cancer he in fact introduced in his patients--and does so very cleverly from the standpoint of getting the proof without potentially being accused of entrapment.
So--a book in which a lot of things happen, and one can say which would likely be more the norm than those other policier novels where we only see the monomanic focus on the one case, over many weeks and as if nothing else came up during their investigation, and also one which provides a very strong reminder of historical evolution.
Here, Elaine Carnet, a relatively elderly woman and owner of a prosperous furniture importing and show room company, falls or is pushed from a ladder in the middle of a severe storm in Amsterdam, and dies. A neighbor has a big one-eyed cat, who had already gotten into some scraps with the terrier owned by Elaine's daughter, Gabrielle--and had just the previous week tried to poison the dog. Are these two events related?
Grijpstra and de Gier get on the case, overseen by the almost ready to retire Police Commissioner for murders in Amsterdam, and a very wise man not quite with the "times."
As the investigation proceeds, we meet two free spirited children of the 1970's--Gabrielle (complete with colorful textile rugs and curtains from India and Nepal--and a sometime artist (a Mr Vleuten, but whom everyone refers to as the Blond Baboon/Baviaan. Thrown into the mix is the businessman who actually runs the furniture business and a somewhat disreputable Italian who started his entrepreneurial career as a furniture producer in Italy by buying and selling furniture to the American military occupying Italy and France after the end of WWII. At the end, we also see how a doctor practices his own sort of fraud by scaring his patients into believing they may have brain tumors only to have them pay for expensive tests on a new machine the doctor has bought which show that--wonders of wonders--they are fine after all.
Delving into the relationships between all the above delivers surprising but also to some extent believable fields of love, jealousy and conflicting selfishness.
In all this, the Commissioner is the wise man who seeks not only to "solve the crime(s)", but also to see how the people who are continuing to live may do so without being too heavily damaged by it--not by his turning a blind eye to certain actions, but to working out how confessions and cooperation can lead to acceptable sentences.
We see first that understanding the past is (generally) vital to understanding the motives for a crime today--something which Grijpstra and de Gier do "get" and which is a basis for their respect for the older Commissioner.
Van de Wetering makes a few wonderful descriptions capturing the times--where for example mothers greet their husbands returning from work with waves from behind the tulle (partially transparent) curtains and young children run out of the house to compete as to who can carry father's briefcase in and the sun going down gives that wonderful clarity and precision that is so peculiar to the Netherlands.
One important theme which the Commissioner explores is the selfishness of the Blond Baboon and that of Gabrielle---the latter who seeks to use "free love" to get men to do what she wants, and the former who rejects any kind of conventional commitments, but who also rejects the drug addicted path already by the late 1970s too much in evidence in Amsterdam. The Blond Baboon makes a somewhat decent case for swimming against the stream, noting this is difficult and that it requires flexibility to take some detours and unconventional paths--perhaps signaling v/d Wetering's own views, he notes that he has no idea whether he will succeed in the end, or even what success will look like other than what it can NOT look like.
At the end, the commissioner and the "guys" discuss the individuals they have gotten to know during the investigation, and note that Gabrielle, while not evil, is also not good. "She cannot be good, because she tries continually to prove the superiority of the "modern woman" in trying to control the men she meets. Not the way to happiness.
And in the end, the commissioner also "gets" the doctor who was preying on fears of cancer he in fact introduced in his patients--and does so very cleverly from the standpoint of getting the proof without potentially being accused of entrapment.
So--a book in which a lot of things happen, and one can say which would likely be more the norm than those other policier novels where we only see the monomanic focus on the one case, over many weeks and as if nothing else came up during their investigation, and also one which provides a very strong reminder of historical evolution.
March 22, 2021
I have found myself more and more attracted to mystery novels. Two writers are largely responsible for this: Georges Simenon and Ruth Rendell. They made me realize not all mystery novels are detective driven or simply clever puzzles. They can be just as complex as the best literary fiction. So I’ve been trying to expand on my list of good mystery writers to follow. I recently added the quirky Patricia Wentworth (who often doesn’t seem to even care who murders her characters) and now I have added Holland’s Janwillem van de Wetering. While not quite up to the standards of these other authors mentioned, I appreciated the depth of his character development, his Simenon-like concern with finding meaning in bourgeoisie life, and a spot-on portrayal of 1970’s Amsterdam. He also has a fairly lackadaisical attitude toward solving the crime (his murder victim is a fairly horrible woman that no one will really miss, and he solves the crime with 50 pages still to go in the book). The writing comes first, the mystery second. That is my kind of mystery writer.
March 13, 2024
#7, al kan het dat ik de volgorde met 'Werkbezoek' heb verwisseld. Het was wel weer een aangenaammeigenaardig politie verhaal, de ontwikkeling vand e braove broeders G. en de G. is interessant, al wordt het type opduikende psuedo-verlichte en onthechte loslater, in dit geval de Baviaan genoemd, wel een beetje een cliché, van de Wetering hangt er steeds zijn wat superieure Polder-Zen beleving aan op, en het is net nog niet irritant aan het worden. Waarschijnlijk ook omdat de boeken zo heerlijk tijdgebonden jaren 80 zijn.
Dit keer, geweld in de meubelhandel. Inclusies stereotype Italianen en een erotisch intermezzo van de recherche met één der betrokkenen, dit keer Cardozo, nog altijd in zijn versleten fluwelen pak.
Kleine pauze, dan de laatste vier, denk ik. Een project is een project.
Dit keer, geweld in de meubelhandel. Inclusies stereotype Italianen en een erotisch intermezzo van de recherche met één der betrokkenen, dit keer Cardozo, nog altijd in zijn versleten fluwelen pak.
Kleine pauze, dan de laatste vier, denk ik. Een project is een project.
November 15, 2020
I've read eight books of the Detectives Grijpstra and de Gier, the Amsterdam criminal investigation department series. I find them very enjoyable and entertaining because of the different perspective and approach to crime and criminals. The author's Buddhist training and beliefs woven into the dialogue from various characters, particularly the commissaris ... "Jail space is limited and reserved for those who have translated their faulty thinking into wrong acts." The other character that appears, the Baboon, impressed the police with his deeds and words..."Happiness is a silly word because it has to do with security and security does not exist."
February 14, 2022
I was worried this would be another Grijpstra and de Gier book without flute and drums. And while the drums were absent at least we got de Gier and his flute.
Also, the way the Commissaris’ arthritis pain is described is so well. Especially the relief he gets from hot baths. And the way he works through the pain. Somehow his pain makes him more relatable.
Also, the way the Commissaris’ arthritis pain is described is so well. Especially the relief he gets from hot baths. And the way he works through the pain. Somehow his pain makes him more relatable.
September 27, 2024
Lifeless and unthrilling. All the mystery solving occurs in explanation, rather than through scenes, dialogue, and action. If some of the characters pass as interesting or unusual for a murder mystery, maybe that's why I don't generally read murder mysteries.
October 17, 2024
This is the 17th "Amsterdam cops" book I've read, and I think it's one of the two or three best in the series.
That said, I can also why it might not be everyone's "thing." It helps if you're into Zen, and Amsterdam, and twentieth century European male social bonding.
That said, I can also why it might not be everyone's "thing." It helps if you're into Zen, and Amsterdam, and twentieth century European male social bonding.
December 10, 2025
Loved it. Chewed through the book on a frenzy. Great characters, fun story, interesting details. Possibly one of the better books in the series. Glad to be rereading these after so many years. They are quite fun
May 31, 2017
One of his best!
August 23, 2017
Strange in a US context to have everyone refer to a character as "the baboon." Not unpleasant. I could imagine reading more in this series but am not dying to.
May 19, 2018
As expected an entertaining read, and as usual just somewhat odd.
September 22, 2018
I liked this. Atmospheric and interesting with humour and good characters. Part of a series featuring a detective pair, I would recommend this and will keep an eye out for more
July 16, 2020
Read in 1978. The police in Amsterdam investigate a woman's murder whose ex boyfriend was called The Baboon.
Want to read
March 23, 2024recommended by Jon Katz (Bedlam Farm)
August 13, 2025
Very static, lots of philosophical pondering and prattle, not enough, ya know, story. Usually I love all this, but I struggled through this one; it was boring.
September 19, 2008
I've read most of the Amsterdam Cops Series and liked all of them. Some are better than others, but the series as a whole is the best I've ever read. Existentialist cops solving murders by wit, dialogue and brute force. Very good stuff for all of us closet orientalists. Oh dear! I've just outed myself (from behind a beautiful rice paper screen painted in black brushstrokes with images of peacocks and turtles).
January 19, 2012
No matter how inessential the happening, van de Wetering always sees something existential through the eyes of de Gier and Grijpstra and , of course, the Commissaris. Here a other is killed and her lovers are the suspects. But the view of the police is decidedly skewed and comes through in the end. This is turning into one "one of the most well written, unusual and entertaining series" of some time to quote Armchair Detective and I heartily agree!
November 17, 2013
Perhaps my favorite of the Grijpstra and de Gier books so far. The commisari is central and it is good that he is central. And the mystery itself is thoughtful and the characters intriguing. You think things are tied up but then there is an additional and reasonable twist that makes perfect sense. But still the mystery itself is not the central reason to be pursuing this series - it is the dialogue, the character's thoughts, the pace, and the setting. A delight.
April 29, 2011
Great fun - a fairly short and simple little story with Grijpstra and de Gier back on the job. Mr. van de Wetering does not disappoint the reader - his little jabs at life, police work, etc. are there - you just have to watch for them.
August 1, 2009
Existential police with lots to think about and wry humor. I've read all i can find at the libraries as well as his Buddhist writings.
October 15, 2012
I wanted to try another author at SOHO books but didn't care much for this one. Maybe it was the translation but the story ust seemed disconnected
April 1, 2013
One of the earlier Van de Wetering -- always a nice experience. This one was particularly intriguing with some colorful characters and a wily old commissioner. A fun read.
September 4, 2013
an especially engaging policier.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews