Switzerland’s Unquiet Dead: Guest Post by Kim Hays

My first mystery, Pesticide, was published in 2022, so I’ve only killed seven people so far. They all died in the Swiss Canton of Bern, four of them meeting their ends in the City of Bern’s medieval section or a short walk from it. These literary deaths occurred near where I live, too, making it easy to get the settings right.

My intention in this essay, however, is not to describe my fictional victims but Bern’s real dead. Since the city was founded in 1191, it has grown from less than 5,000 inhabitants to almost 150,000. That adds up to a lot of burials.

Modern Bern has three public graveyards with 130,000 grave sites. That includes individual spaces for coffins and urns, family graves, and communal burial areas. All three cemeteries are flower-filled city parks shaded by large trees, with benches and carefully tended walkways. Each grave is planted with seasonal flowers three times a year, creating myriad tiny gardens, all exquisitely maintained. 
 
Schosshalden, the largest of Bern’s three cemeteries or Friedhöfe, is a twenty-minute walk from my apartment, so I’ve spent a lot of time in it during the thirty-seven years I’ve lived in the city. I regularly climb Schosshalden’s hills and stroll its paths for exercise, experiencing it as an oasis of greenery and peace. Peace for me, that is, but not for the people buried there since most of their graves will be dug up to provide space for someone else. In a country as small and mountainous as Switzerland, there isn’t room for anyone to claim a site of eternal rest. The main exceptions are the very wealthy, who keep their plots as long as their descendants are willing to pay for them.
 
At about $350 a month for the use and tending of a burial plot, the standard period that most people’s bones or ashes are left in the ground is twenty years. When that time is up, relatives are asked if they want the gravestones. Most don’t, so the slabs are crushed and recycled as gravel. Groups of twenty-year-old graves disappear one section at a time, and the stretch of land they once filled is planted with grass until it is needed for new burials, which isn’t very long.

Family members are permitted to have their loved one’s bones or ashes exhumed, but most turn this offer down, so the remains stay in the earth. There are, in any case, fewer and fewer bones to be found since most Swiss today prefer cremation. At the Schosshalden cemetery, fifty percent of recent burials are in large communal graves. Twenty anonymous years in a community grave costs less than one year in a private grave, although you can have your name listed on a large plaque if you pay extra.

The official word for what happens to individual graves after two decades is aufgehoben. In English, it’s translated as “removed” or “canceled,” but the word literally means “lifted up.” I like to think that by the time a Schosshalden gravestone is removed, the human remains beneath it have been processed by the earth and lifted up into the cycle of nature.
 
Splintered Justice, the latest of my police procedurals featuring Bern detectives Linder and Donatelli, portrays not only the Schosshalden cemetery but a young city gardener named Zora who tends its grounds and graves. Her father, a Croatian refugee to Switzerland, hoped she’d go to university, but Zora loves her job—for now. At twenty-five, she is still figuring out who she wants to be. By the end of the book, she’s a little closer to knowing that.

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Kim Hays, a citizen of Switzerland and the United States, writes the Polizei Bern series featuring detectives Linder and Donatelli. Kim grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and studied at Harvard and Berkeley. Thirty-seven years ago, she moved to Bern, her Swiss husband’s hometown, where she worked as a freelance journalist, English teacher, and coach for expat employees 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. It was followed by Sons and Brothers (2023), A Fondness for Truth (2024), a BookLife Editor’s Pick, and now, Splintered Justice (2025).

  

Medieval Meets Modern in Switzerland: Guest Post by Kim Hays

 

When I began a series of police procedurals set in Bern, my hometown in Switzerland, I resolved to avoid writing about Swiss watches, Swiss cheese, Swiss chocolate, Swiss Army knives, and secret bank accounts. No clichés allowed. Then, in Sons and Brothers, the second book in my Polizei Bern series, I found myself giving the murder victim a bank account that his family didn’t know about and—oh, dear—an heirloom watch that plays a role in the plot. So much for resolutions.
 
Nevertheless, refraining from stereotyping Switzerland and the Swiss remains an essential goal of mine. I’ve lived in Bern with my Swiss husband for thirty-five years, so I’m familiar with all the generalizations about this country. I do indeed know many Swiss who are more reserved than the average American, and quite a few of them have a fondness for calm and order that stems primarily from a desire to avoid conflict with their neighbors and the world. But Switzerland is not a land of control freaks. Like their American counterparts, the Swiss police regularly deal with drunken violence, drug dealing, spouse battering, vandalism, rape, and arson. Houses are burgled, and late-night pedestrians are mugged. Admittedly, in this country of under nine million people, there are very few murders (one homicide per year for every 200,000 people compared with thirteen per year in the US). Gun violence, in particular, is rare—a blessing for the country, if not for writers of murder mysteries. 
 
Pesticide, my first book, begins with a rave in Bern turning into a huge riot, an actual event that I experienced. When the riot is over, a dead man is discovered—something that didn’t actually happen. Much of the book takes place in a farming village, but the story deals not with barns full of traditional Swiss dairy cows but with fields of organic vegetables. Today’s Swiss grocery shelves are as full of organic produce as they are of Swiss cheese.  My newly published second book, Sons and Brothers, also takes police detectives Linder and Donatelli away from the city to investigate their murder victim’s past in the place where he was born. It’s a community of rivers and mountains, picturesque farms, and cozy inns, not to mention a church with a white tower and a small castle. Clichéd as that sounds, it’s a reality in many Swiss villages. 
 
In these same villages, children as young as nine used to work from morning till night on those picturesque farms, sleeping in haylofts and not getting enough to eat. These “contract children” or Verdingkinder were taken away from their parents because authorities did not approve of how they were being raised and then given to farmers as free labor. This appalling government policy began in the early eighteen hundreds and only ended in the nineteen seventies; its consequences are still being dealt with today. This, too, is part of the real Switzerland that I want my stories to convey.
 
Something I love about this country and try to show in my books is how the traditional and the ultramodern exist side by side. At Bern’s core is the medieval Old City, its skyline dominated by its largest church, the fifteenth-century Münster. Outside the loop of the Aare River that encircles and defines the boundaries of the Old City is the Bern University teaching hospital. Only a twenty-minute walk from the fifteenth-century Münster, it’s filled with the latest medical technology. Tourists come from all over the world to see Bern’s Old City; sick people come from all over the world to be treated in the Insel Hospital. 
 
Another beloved example of the medieval and the modern combined are Bern’s bears, who live just across the Aare River from Nydegg, the oldest section of town. The bear is a symbol of the city and canton and can be found on Bern’s coat of arms and official flag; the first record of a live bear being brought to the city is from 1513. Once bears were kept in the center of town, but in 1857 a large pit for the city’s mascot was created next to where today’s bears are kept. 
 
The idea of keeping bears in a pit in the middle of a city sounds barbaric and, well, medieval. But today’s three brown bears, Finn and Björk and their daughter Ursina, only spend time in the pit while their living area is being cleaned and their food distributed. Otherwise, they roam around a large park full of trees along the side of a hill above the river. From the square above the bears’ modern quarters or the path below along the river, tourists can watch Finn, Björk, and Ursina swim in a pool (fed by the Aare), climb trees, or wrestle with each other. Their park includes enclosures built into the hillside where they can retreat if they don’t want to be watched and where they live during the winter. They’re under the management of the city’s zoo and receive excellent care.
 
The bear park is a typical Swiss compromise, showing that it’s possible to reshape tradition so that it meets the standards of today’s world but still warms the cockles of Swiss hearts! 
 
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Sons and Brothers, the second police procedural in Kim Hays’s Polizei Bern series, was published on April 18 by Seventh Street Books. In it, 

a cardiac surgeon in his seventies is attacked and drowned in Bern’s Aare River. The district attorney suspects the victim’s estranged son Markus, but Bern police detectives Linder and Donatelli have other ideas about the crime. 

Kim Hays is a dual Swiss/US citizen who lives in Bern with her Swiss husband. The first book in her Polizei Bern series, Pesticide, was shortlisted for a Debut Dagger Award by the Crime Writers Association, and Deborah Crombie called it “a standout debut for 2022.” For more information about Kim and Switzerland, see www.kimhaysbern.com.