Since I was asked to be a judge for the first Petrona Award for Scandinavian crime fiction, I’ve had closer contact with three of my fellow enthusiasts for European and international crime fiction. Perhaps it was the fact that I was dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s on the last book I did, Nordic Noir, that prompted the persuasive Karen Meek to get me on board. Or perhaps the fact that my multi-country Scandinavian trips to interview as many important Nordic crime writers as I could positioned me favourably in her eyes. I know she is a fan of a previous book I did on the subject, Death in a Cold Climate, and particularly of the latter’s very translator-friendly-stance! But I was happy to take part for a variety of reasons. One was my memory of Maxine Clarke, the remarkable young woman (who wrote as ‘Petrona’) after whom the award was named. Maxine died far too young, and the award, leaving aside its value in recognising the best work in translated crime fiction, is a very suitable tribute. And then there was the Karen Meek factor: her work hosting the site Euro Crime is a notable, continuing achievement, and it provides a resource that is second to none for details, reviews and bibliographies of Scandinavian crime authors. And my other judges (apart from Karen) had equal gravitas: Sarah Ward of the authoritative Crimepieces and Kat Hall who writes about European crime writers for Mrs Peabody Investigates and specialises in German crime fiction. Between the four of us, we might modestly claim to have a finger on the pulse of Euro noir, so I asked my fellow judges which authors and books under consideration for this study had impressed them.
The Euro Crime website has reached its tenth anniversary, and one of the main drives behind its establishment was to provide the original reading order for those authors who were being published in translation ‘out of order’, most notably at the time Henning Mankell. Three of my favourite European writers have also ‘suffered’ this fate, the Norwegians Karin Fossum and Jo Nesbo and France’s Fred Vargas. Karin Fossum’s series detective Inspector Sejer appears to varying degrees in her ten-book series and the books are never about him so it matters less what order they are read in. Her gripping English language introduction in 2002, Don’t Look Back, the second book in the series is a more traditional crime novel than most of her other titles which tend to feature normal people trapped into doing something abnormal, and is one of my favourite books along with her Calling Out For You. The publishers of Jo Nesbo released book five (2005) then three (2006) in the now hugely popular Harry Hole series hoping to grip readers with an inventive serial killer plot in The Devil’s Star, but inadvertently spoiling an emotionally shocking event in the more historically laden The Redbreast.
Arguably my favourite author in translation is Fred Vargas with her series featuring Paris based Commissaire Adamsberg and his collection of police detectives, all with their own unique skills. Vargas’s writing is quirky beyond belief and her plots often feature seemingly otherworldly elements such as vampires or werewolves but with a rational explanation in the end. The author that most closely resembles her, I think, is Christopher Fowler with his Bryant & May series. Though I love the Commissaire Adamsberg series my favourite Vargas is The Three Evangelists which features a trio of three historians and an ex-policeman living in a large house with the latter having the top floor as he’s ‘present day’ whilst the three other floors are occupied by descending time periods. The story starts with the three historians being paid to dig up a tree which has mysteriously appeared in their neighbour’s front garden overnight.
Close at Vargas’s heels for my favourite author is Italy’s Andrea Camilleri who has had the luxury of being translated by the same translator (Stephen Sartarelli) and in the correct order and at a rate of two per year. To read Camilleri’s irascible Sicilian Inspector Montalbano is to love him. Montalbano is a knight in this modern-day world, righting wrongs, fighting injustices but with more than an eye on a good meal and often on a beautiful woman. Camilleri recently won the CWA’s International Dagger for The Potter’s Field. Another favourite of mine in the series is August Heat. Though all four authors write about a policeman, their series could not be more different from each other.
German-language crime fiction is a treasure-trove of delights, but doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves in the English-speaking world. For example, how often do we hear about Adolph Müllner’s 1828 detective story ‘The Caliber’, published over a decade before Poe’s Dupin stories that supposedly invented the genre? Then there’s the case of Hans Fallada’s 1947 crime novel Alone in Berlin, a searing portrayal of the Nazi regime that was only ‘discovered’ by the English-speaking world when translated in 2009. Greater recognition has been accorded to the two ‘fathers’ of German-language crime down the years: Friedrich Glauser, often referred to as the ‘Swiss Simenon’ (although he was born in Vienna), who wrote his ‘Sergeant Studer’ novels in the 1930s, and Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt, author of The Pledge, whose 1950s ‘Inspector Bärlach’ series is still greatly admired today. Both authors used the crime novel to critique society, and to probe ethical and existential questions in the turbulent years before and after the Second World War.
A number of excellent crime writers have followed in their footsteps, producing a wide range of detective novels, police procedurals, psychological thrillers, historical crime… and, of course, German noir. Many, such as the ones below, are also available in English translation. Petra Hammesfahr, Ingrid Noll and Andrea Maria Schenkel are three outstanding contemporary German women crime writers. Hammesfahr is best known for her psychological thrillers, such as 1999’s The Sinner, which explores the motivation for an apparently random murder, while Noll’s wickedly satirical novels, such as 1994’s The Pharmacist, dissect bourgeois, small-town life from a criminal perspective. Schenkel’s The Murder Farm is a chilling, multi-layered exploration of a family massacre, which won the Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Novel Prize) in 2007.
Jakob Arjouni’s ‘Kemal Kayankaya’ series, written between 1985 and 2012, surveys Frankfurt’s urban criminality through the jaundiced eyes of a Turkish-German private investigator, and uses wisecracking noir humour to challenge the stereotypes held by Germans about Turks in a clever and groundbreaking way. More recently, Jan Costin Wagner’s ‘Kimmo Joentaa’ police procedurals (begun in 2003) have tapped into a melancholic Scandinavian crime tradition: set in Finland, they offer a sensitive portrayal of an investigator who solves cases while wrestling with intense personal grief.
Germany’s dark twentieth-century history provides another rich area of exploration for its crime writers. Christian von Ditfurth and Ferdinand von Schirach explore the legacy of the Nazi past via investigative figures who are historians or lawyers in A Paragon of Virtue (2004) and The Collini Case (2012). Meanwhile, Simon Urban’s Plan D (2011) paints a noir portrait of a 2011 Berlin in which the Wall never fell. All of these works are informed by in-depth historical research and use the crime novel as a means of presenting complex historical, legal and moral issues to their readers.
As even this very brief survey shows, German-language crime fiction is vibrant, imaginative and incredibly diverse. There’s an enormous amount on offer for all crime fans to enjoy – viel Spaß!
(Katharina Hall is Associate Professor of German at Swansea University and runs the crime fiction blog ‘Mrs. Peabody Investigates’. She is currently editing a volume entitled Crime Fiction in German to be published by the University of Wales Press.)
Like my fellow Petrona judge Karen Meek, I think I’d pick Fred Vargas, revered in France for her quirky cast of characters, including the charismatic Commissaire Adamsberg. Her work has now attracted a loyal following with the exemplary English translations she’s been receiving. The Chalk Circle Man is one of her most individual books. For more noirish writing, I’d choose Antonin Varenne’s strongly-written Bed of Nails, which exposes the underbelly of Parisian society, while Philippe Georget’s Summertime All the Cats are Bored honourably continues the tradition of Georges Simenon’s police procedural.
Greece’s social problems are ably represented by Petros Markaris and Sergios Gakas, both of whom are at pains to show how corruption in the country’s elite has had a devastating effect on the lives of ordinary people. Gakas’s Ashes is a smorgasbord of corruption and violence, while Makaris’s Che Committed Suicide coolly documents the start of the country’s problems in the run-up to the 2004 Greek Olympics.