Kim Hays--Life in a Tower

DEBORAH CROMBIE: There is nothing I love more than a good police procedural, especially one with an appealing detective duo. Add a fascinating place--in this case the city of Bern, Switzerland-- and I am way over in the fan camp! I've read Kim Hays' Linder and Donatelli books from the very first and I await each new installment eagerly. I think you'll be as intrigued as I was by this newest addition to the series--and by Bern's Munster!

Life in a Tower

Kim Hays

 

When Peter and I arrived in Bern one week after our wedding in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, we moved into a recently renovated attic apartment. We were in our early thirties, so we didn’t mind climbing the stairs to our place on the fourth floor. Eventually, when I was 38 and carrying our six-month-old son and his baby paraphernalia up and down those stairs (and his laundry to and from the washing machine in the basement), we moved to a second-floor apartment not far away, and we’re still there. Today, we only have 28 steps to climb from the street to the door of our apartment. Those stairs keep us fit.

Now, imagine living in an apartment that requires a climb of 254 steps from street level to your apartment door.

Not one family, but many, did this for almost two hundred years, which is how long there were couples and their children living in the 330-foot tower of Bern’s largest Gothic church, the Münster. The first family moved there in 1826, when the tower apartment had no running water. The last family, a couple without children, moved out in 2007. By then, the apartment had a living room, bedroom, tiny kitchen, even tinier office, and a full bathroom with a washing machine. A corridor ran down the middle of the living space, and its ceiling was open to the room above, which was the size of the whole apartment and had a sixteenth-century vaulted ceiling. A spiral staircase in one corner of the apartment led to the beautiful room upstairs, where generations of apartment families hung their laundry to dry.

Who lived there all those years? Watchers—who had nothing to do with Swiss watches.

I’ll explain.

Bern was founded in 1191 by the Duke of Zähringen, who built a castle on a hill above the Aare River that encircles the city. The duke’s guards were Bern’s security force. When the Duke's family line died out in 1218, his castle was destroyed, and a church was built in its place. I don’t know that guards were set in the church’s bell tower to keep watch over the city and the boats on the river, but I feel sure they were.

Bern’s tradition of watchers from on high assumed special importance after 1405, the year of the Great Fire, when most of the city’s buildings, almost all made of wood, burned to the ground. Bern was slowly rebuilt of stone in the traditional half-timbered, medieval style, but fire remained a tremendous danger. The building of the Münster began in 1421, and by 1519, there is a record of Hochwächter or “high watchmen” working in shifts in the church’s tower, looking out over the town for any sign of trouble. There was a fire bell they could ring if they saw flames, and other Münster bells sent out different messages, warning the city of floods or attacks or calling the people to assemble.

In the nineteenth century, the men paid to watch the city day and night were allowed to move their families into the tower. By the twentieth century, women could also be guards; the most famous was Frau Kormann. As wife, mother, and widow from 1909 to 1966, she sold tickets to tourists who wanted to see the view from the tower and kept an eye on the city.

The high place from which the earliest watchmen observed was not the 330-foot tower of today, with its elegant stone filagree tip. Bern built its Münster slowly, with numerous pauses after 1421 to raise building funds or deal with crises like the Reformation and the Plague. It wasn’t until the late fifteen hundreds that the city finally hired someone to finish the tower. The builder and his workers were preparing the blocks of stone that would become the rest of the late Gothic church when the builder died, and the additional 178 feet of tower, which included a second, much smaller viewing balcony 90 stairs above the first, were not added until 1893, following the old plans.

Pursuing a plot for my fourth Linder and Donatelli mystery, I started researching the Berner Münster. I didn’t know then what I would write about; I just followed my interest in the church, which had been undergoing renovations during the three decades I’d lived in Bern (and back to the 1950s, I later learned). I read about the history of the tower apartment and talked to the last woman to live there. I spoke with current and former tower ticket sellers, volunteers in the church shop, the sexton, and a former pastor. I learned more about what had been done to replace or preserve the building’s 600-year-old vaulted ceilings and sandstone walls, and I spent time with the glass artist responsible for repairing the fifteenth-century stained glass windows.

Out of this research came Splintered Justice, which features not only Linder and Donatelli, my two police detectives, and many new people but also Bern’s magnificent Münster. I hope what I’ve told you about the church has made you eager to read more about it.

Or maybe you'll come and see it someday!

Do any of you have a favorite church, castle, park, town square, or other landmark in your hometown or elsewhere else?

DEBS: Isn't that all just fascinating? I had to look up photos of the Munster as I was reading. Golly, those tower dwellers must have been fit!!

Here's more about SPLINTERED JUSTICE:

How does a victim get justice when there’s no obvious crime?

Swiss homicide detective Giuliana Linder of the Bern Police and her junior colleague Renzo Donatelli are facing cases that may not be what they appear. Renzo is near the Bern cathedral when a young man repairing a medieval window is hurt falling from a scaffold—a fall deliberately caused by a teenage boy.

 

Finding evidence that the boy’s attack is linked to his mother’s suicide fifteen years earlier, Renzo decides to reexamine the woman’s death, hoping the investigation will help him get promoted.

 

Although she’s busy researching a woman who has poisoned her elderly husband, Giuliana can’t help getting involved in Renzo’s case. Their investigations prove more disruptive than they expected—and so do their feelings for each other.

   

Kim Hays, a citizen of both Switzerland and the United States, has written four books in the Polizei Bern series featuring Swiss homicide detectives Linder and Donatelli. Hays grew up in San Juan and Vancouver and studied at Harvard and UC Berkeley. Thirty-six years ago, she moved to Bern, her Swiss husband’s hometown, where she worked as a cross-cultural coach for expats at multinational companies before becoming a mystery writer. The first Linder and Donatelli book, Pesticide (2022), was a finalist for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger Award and the Silver Falchion Award for Best Mystery. Pesticide was followed by Sons and Brothers (2023), and A Fondness for Truth (2024), which was a BookLife Editor’s Pick. The fourth in the series, Splintered Justice, will be out in April 2025.

DEBS: Kim is on holiday in Romania so will be 7 hours later than EST. She will reply to comments but begs your patience!