Murder in Gutenthal: A Schneppa Kjnals Mystery

Janis Svilpis is a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is a very whimsical mystery story. The setting is a small Mennonite
community in southern Manitoba, where the phone service is still a party
line and where secrets are difficult to keep. The protagonist, Neil
Bergan, a.k.a. Schneppa Kjnals, has taken a correspondence course from
the Hollywood School of Detection. He lives at home with his mother and
earns a living by taking care of “lost cattle, stolen grain, and
forgotten Bibles,” for which the people of Gutenthal pay him. Despite
insecurities, neuroses, and guilty little secrets, of which he has
enough for any schlemiel in fiction, he is a decent though childish man
living among decent people. The situation has tremendous potential for
sentimentality; to his credit, Wiebe exploits this potential less than
he might.

The story has just enough hard-boiled detective thriller in it to
offset the Prairie nostalgia, and just enough genuine mystery to rescue
it from Keystone Kops farce. Some hints of brutality and bureaucratic
oppression might have been intended as serious social comment. This
uneasy mixture of narrative conventions make it a very strange reading
experience—occasionally very funny, but ultimately incoherent and
unsatisfying.