Friedrich Glauser

A year after his death, the 1939 film Thumbprint was released featuring Glauser's character Sergeant Studer, which became a commercial success.

The Sergeant Studer detective novels are set in the Switzerland and Europe of the 1930s, and make frequent reference to current European history, such as the Weimar Republic hyperinflation and the banking scams and scandals that marked that period.

At the pub, a rather strange White Father joins the group and tells a story of a "clairvoyant corporal" in a French Foreign Legion battalion to which the priest has been assigned who has "predicted" the murder of two Swiss women.

Upon his return to Switzerland, Studer learns of the two women's deaths and begins an investigation that will take him back through France to Algeria to find the killer.

On 18 July (year unspecified), Studer meets an elderly retiree who has returned to the small village where he was born, near Bern, after decades spent working in various parts of Asia.

Four months later, on 18 November, the retiree's prediction comes true, shortly after a seemingly unrelated, apparently natural death.