The immense popularity of crime fiction in those countries which speak German (Germany itself, Switzerland and Austria) is a phenomenon noted throughout Europe, with several writers from other countries (notably the Scandinavian territories) enjoying far greater sales in that country than, for instance, in Britain. Many German names have been given to the genre, but the one which has had the most traction is simply ‘Krimi.’ Earliest examples of the genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often utilised the ‘police report’ format which had also been popular in Britain. Subsequently, a variety of German writers in the early twentieth century began to create something like an indigenous genre including individual talents such as Karl Rosner and Baldwin Groller (the latter, in fact, an Austrian writer).
The inexplicably long shadow in German of the British crime writer Edgar Wallace (in translation) must be noted. His work has had a popularity long outlasting his readership in the UK where his crudely written crime novels are largely unread today. This has been complemented by a long-running series of film adaptations of his work by various studios, dispatched in appropriately unsubtle fashion. Many of these films present a singularly quaint, utterly unreal vision of London.
At the middle of the last century, one of the most enduring contributions to the genre was created by the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, with his excellent The Judge and his Hangman (1963) and The Pledge (1959), both of which infused the crime story with a genuine philosophical import in the manner of his plays. So too, in different fashion, did the writers Peter Handke and Heinrich Böll, adding provocative layers of social criticism.
Norbert Jacques’ series concerning the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse (one of the prototypes for Ian Fleming’s megalomaniac villains) is perhaps better known through the films directed by Fritz Lang and other less talented filmmakers but, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ‘Krimi’ genre was enjoying even greater popularity with several hundred writers listed in a variety of bibliographic sources. A stellar name in this company is Pieke Biermann, responsible for a series of adroitly-written Berlin-set police procedurals featuring Chief Inspector Karen Litze. And there’s the popular work of Charlotte Link, as well as Patrick Süskind’s cult historical novel Perfume. It has become more and more apparent in recent writing that the legacy of Germany’s wartime past is moving centre stage as a subject for many writers (a syndrome also noted in the work of several Nordic crime novelists), as is a noirish satirical infusion provided by such writers as Simon Urban in Plan D (2013) and other books. Of Urban, Harvill Secker’s senior crime editor Alison Hennessey has provided an encomium, but first I asked her about publishing crime in translation in general. ‘For me,’ she said, ‘the joys of publishing European authors in translation are the same as with publishing all authors: introducing readers to a wonderful new writer. Depending on the particular book or author, you may also be shedding light on a world or society that is relatively less well known in the UK – or using a wonderfully gripping plot to explore wider issues. I really enjoyed publishing Simon Urban’s German language thriller Plan D, for example, because it had a very clever premise – what would Germany be like if the Berlin Wall had never fallen? – but it also explored ideas of democracy and dictatorships in a way that was interesting and accessible to all.’
Speaking to the knowledgeable writer and translator Almuth Heuner about the German crime scene – and the plans for this book – was, as I expected, highly instructive.
‘I notice,’ she told me, ‘that you plan to mention Handke, Böll, Fallada and Jelinek. Fine, but I’d note that they are usually not considered as crime writers in Germany, but as “literary writers”. You wouldn’t find them in crime and mystery sections in bookshops.’
‘One novelist I’d like to extol the virtues of is Akif Pirincci who has been translated into English with at least one book, Felidae. That novel may not initially inspire, looking like a simple cat mystery, but it really is a very dark noir in the classic tradition of Hammett. And there’s Ingrid Noll, who is something of a grand old lady, but it should be noted that she started publishing novels at a later age than most. She’s very well known in Germany, and has been translated into English. Her writing is a little like Barbara Vine (but she’s a much more concise novelist). Petra Hammesfahr, also translated, writes a little like Nele Neuhaus (who I believe you interviewed onstage at Harrogate concerning her novel Snow White Must Die), and has been around much longer than Nele. Petra is very popular. And as you’re including Austria with Germany, Wolf Haas is a much-respected Austrian crime novelist, though it has to be admitted that his work is not to everyone’s taste.’
Almuth concurred with calling this section ‘Germany/Austria/Switzerland’. ‘Friedrich Dürrenmatt, another more literary writer,’ she said, ‘is less a crime writer than someone in the literary/dramatic tradition – and, of course, he is Swiss. Of course, the most prominent German-writing Swiss was Friedrich Glauser whom we consider as something like our crime/mystery patron saint (and we have named our prestigious Glauser awards in his honour). His novels are translated into English, and his reputation is assured.
‘As the book market in Germany is really the only German-speaking one that counts in all important aspects, it’s not really possible to divide the German-speaking – and writing – scene into the various countries. Roughly, Austria contributes about 5 per cent and German-speaking Switzerland about 3 per cent of all authors, books, publishers, readers. And the contribution – in monetary terms – is actually less than that percentage. Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and German-speaking Belgium are so small in terms of contributions that they are nearly non-existent in all of the categories mentioned above. And – note that I don’t say this because I’m chauvinistic – I conducted a very thorough survey two years ago, expecting to discover different figures, but the ones I found were actually even lower than I suspected.
‘It’s infuriating that so few of our really accomplished authors can be read in English translation. Under these limiting circumstances, our crime scene must look rather minor and unimpressive to the English-speaking reader, and those that are translated don’t show the variety of styles and topics and sub-genres we can lay claim to. But obviously – in the real world – there’s nothing to be done about this. The English-speaking market is so saturated, and one has to admit that Germany doesn’t look quite as sexy as Sweden or Italy. And, let’s be frank, those countries have a huge market in Germany. Germans do buy and read these foreign books. There’s no arguing with that, however proud we may be of our own writers.’
It may be a cliché to say that Nele Neuhaus stormed the bestseller charts with her crime series featuring investigative team DI Pia Kirchhoff and DS Oliver von Bodenstein, but that is exactly what she did. From the vagaries of self-publishing, she has moved on to the real thing, selling over 3 million copies in Germany alone, and she is now published in 21 countries. The first book in her sequence, Snow White Must Die (2013, Macmillan), is a tour-de-force that begins in a small German town in which a boy is accused of murdering his seductive girlfriend, the ‘Snow White’ of the title, and very dark deeds are done against the setting of beautiful German countryside. This first book has British readers keenly anticipating its successor.
The young man, Tobias, convicted for murder, does his time, but on his return to his village is something of a pariah, and his presence begins to stir up secrets from the past. But it’s clear that there are many who would prefer those secrets to stay buried. Tobias and his family are subjected to vicious attacks, and after the disinterring of a young girl’s skeleton, DI Pia Kirchhoff and DS Oliver von Bodenstein are given the task of monitoring the incendiary atmosphere in the town. It becomes clear that the mystery of the disappearance of ‘Snow White’ has tendrils that reach into the present.
Neuhaus instantly establishes her authority by taking things very much at their own pace, and the steady accretion of detail is done with quiet skill. In a translation by Steven T Murray (who, of course, rendered the vengeful activities of Lisbeth Salander into English), a powerful grip is exerted even in the teeth of a great variety of German names and characters which require close attention by the reader. The close-mouthed village clearly practises a Sicilian code of Omertà, and the relentless unpeeling of layers of deception is set against the adroit characterisation of the police and their relationships (Oliver’s marriage is under strain because of his wife’s eccentric behaviour). It’s not hard to see why Neuhaus is achieving pole position among European crime writers. While the specifically German character of the novel is undeniable, it is universal in its application, and there are occasional reminiscences of writers of other countries – Stieg Larsson, for instance, and even Ian Rankin.
Speaking to Nele Neuhaus, I discovered that the writer herself possesses an internationalist approach; although she feels at home in such quintessentially German cities as Hamburg (‘Still exciting for me!’), the influences that have shaped her are largely speaking from other countries. If the writer’s own sardonic humour – evident in any conversation with her – is perhaps less in evidence in her writing, that is because she has an ambitious approach to the crime novel. However, the seriousness of her work is never ponderous despite the Teutonic stereotypes that exist in the minds of many non-Germans. ‘I’m interested in character, first and foremost’, she told me. ‘Everything else has to be at the service of that.’
Is Jan Costin Wagner part of the Scandinavian new wave? Or a German writer who just happens to move (profitably) in this territory? In fact, the novelist, born in Langen near Frankfurt in 1972, metaphorically resides in the best of both worlds. His series featuring Finnish detective Kimmo Joentaa quickly established itself as one of the most distinctive in the field, with such intricate books as Ice Moon (2006, Vintage, translated by John Brownjohn) and the ambitious and complex Silence (2011, Vintage, translated by Anthea Bell), which was made into a film directed by Baran bo Odar and shown on BBC4 in 2013 (see below). Wagner’s grasp of the darker aspects of human psychology is unsparing, and renders his books as unsettling as they are hypnotic. While he is perfectly happy to be identified as part of the Nordic Noir wave, the writer makes no claim to a Scandinavian identity. He told me that he felt a writer should rise above limiting national characteristics and confront the real business of human nature, business that transcends national characteristics and that each author is obliged to deal with in their own way. He is similarly less interested in the locales of his books (although they are evocatively created) and feels that his real subject is the interior lives of his characters, whatever the land of their birth. Finland, however, is his chosen literary stomping ground and in such books as The Winter of the Lions (2011, Harvill Secker, translated by Anthea Bell), he is interested in the constraints of the media-savvy world we all live in today, one in which the specious morality propounded by politicians, newspaper and television pundits rules the roost. The thorny problem of a rush to judgement in so many areas is a theme he deals with rigorously in several of his novels, notably in Silence with its paedophilia motifs.
‘I’m intrigued by the way in which justice can be done,’ he told me, ‘even when the timescale involved is longer than we might like it to be. Silence, for instance, has two horrendous crimes separated by two decades, but there is a resolution of sorts. In this I am perhaps influenced by a favourite writer of mine, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, whose The Pledge deals rigorously with the consequences of a crime stretching over many years – and its delayed final resolution. I’m also fascinated by the very bleak worldview found in the novels of Patricia Highsmith.’ Wagner does not try to force the narrative development. ‘I try to allow the books to take precisely the time that is required to tell the tales’, he said, ‘the approach, in fact, of my detective Kimmo Joentaa.’ He sidesteps the conventional imperatives of the crime novel to confront the reader with a more complex experience. ‘Literature,’ he said, ‘can anatomise society. And crime fiction is able to channel the basic fears and hopes of our fraught contemporary life. I don’t trust newspapers,’ he continues, ‘and I believe that an intuitive analysis of the modern world is possible through fiction.’ His multi-country connections have allowed him to present a truly pan-European vision of society.
The writer clearly respects his readers’ intelligence particularly in the area of not providing easy (and lazy) frissons, preferring to work on the creation of an all-pervasive layer of dread. Light in a Dark House (Harvill Secker, 2013, translated by Anthea Bell) is the fourth of his Kimmo Joentaa novels, and begins with an unidentified woman in a coma being murdered, the sheets on her bed stained by her murderer’s tears. This is uncompromising, astringent crime writing of a rare order.
When Sebastian Fitzek’s novel Therapy (2008, translated by Sally-Ann Spencer) dislodged The Da Vinci Code from the number one book chart position in Germany, attention began to be paid to a writer who was clearly doing something unusual, shaking up the psychological crime genre and producing something rich and strange. Subsequent books by Fitzek, including The Eye Collector (2013, Corvus, translated by John Brownjohn), have maintained his upward trajectory. Splinter (2011) is a key Fitzek novel. Suffering agonies of guilt after an accident has brought about the death of his wife and unborn child, Marc Lucas is living in a kind of daze. He returns home one night to discover that his key no longer fits in the lock. More shockingly, his wife is alive and pregnant but says that she does not recognise him. This is the beginning of a nightmare experience for Lucas, where reality and dream merge in the most disturbing of fashions. What will be the cost – his sanity? Sebastian Fitzek here demonstrates more than a touch of the ingenious narrative skill of Harlan Coben.
Sebastian Fitzek was born in Berlin in 1971 and worked as a journalist before writing Therapy. This debut was shortlisted for the Friedrich Glauser Prize (the principal award for best German crime novel) and pleased both critics and readers alike. Eight subsequent bestsellers cemented his reputation as a star of German thriller-writing – and 2013’s The Sleepwalker was a Spiegel no.1 bestseller. Fitzek’s books have been translated into over twenty languages, have been adapted for the stage, and one of them, The Child, has been made into a film. Significantly, Fitzek is one of the (relatively) few recent German thriller writers to have been published in Britain.
The writer is particularly interested in the ways in which the trauma of crime leaves scars on the human soul, and The Eye Collector has a past-his-best policeman (turned journalist) on the trail of a truly nasty serial killer. It’s a ticking clock scenario that really does have the reader’s palms sweating. Fitzek’s work as a journalist (he is currently head of programming at Berlin’s leading radio station) has given him an unerring grasp of the way human beings behave in extremis, even those of us who would not describe ourselves as criminally inclined. Talking to him about his work, I found a disarming mix of frankness and insight. I asked if crime fiction can make serious points about modern German society.
‘Definitely!’ he replied firmly. ‘Not only can it do so, but I think that serious crime writing should do so. In fact, I’ve noticed that some authors pick provocative themes which are relevant to the society long before they are treated in any other entertainment media.
‘Take, for example, child abuse. In Germany, you can watch dozens of crime movies every day on television, many of them produced in Germany, such as those in the most popular format, Tatort, with over 10 million viewers. But the stories hardly ever engage with such difficult issues as paedophilia or modern slavery. This is a significant problem in Germany, principally due to the fact that prostitution is not illegal. It’s this fact that makes it very easy for the organised crime rings to make massive profits in this area. But, frankly, television tends to steer clear of such topics. They are often a no-go area because the editors and producers have persuaded themselves that female viewers don’t want to hear about those “hard topics”. But I’ve tried to make sure that my own crime literature deals very specifically with those themes and makes them central. It’s a writer’s duty to allow readers a view behind the curtain, particularly when some people don’t welcome such frankness. Even – dare I say it – some over-cautious publishers?’
Surely, I suggest (playing devil’s advocate), publishers know what their readers want?
‘When I pitched the story of my third book, The Child, in 2007,’ he replies, ‘my publisher was not sure if female readers would want to read about child molestation. But that is to seriously underestimate women readers. Of course they’re prepared to accept such subjects, if they realise that the writer is not interested in simply shocking the reader but is interested in providing insights into such crimes – and the way society deals with such incendiary issues. Good crime literature is fake, of course. We – the authors – make it all up. But as with every good lie, there has to be a truthful core at the centre. This core is often an unblinking description of modern society with all its perplexing problems.’
Talking about Splinter, Fitzek observed: ‘Usually, thrillers dealing with loss of memory are about a character trying to retrieve his memories. In Splinter, I took a different path by asking: what if we could erase the worst memories of our lives – forever? What would happen if we had the opportunity to induce selective amnesia? And what would happen, if – as I describe in Splinter – something went wrong during this psychiatric experiment? The idea for the book came to me after I’d had a conversation with an eccentric neurosurgeon who said to me: “Most people are looking for methods to memorise things ever faster. But a few are looking for a method to forget.” Personally, I’d be really nervous of undertaking a psychiatric experiment such as this. I’d be afraid what would happen to me would be exactly what happens to the hero of my psychothriller: that I would lose the ability to distinguish between illusion and reality and my life would – yes, splinter completely. Memories configure our identity, and we would erase them at our peril. Although, there are (of course) some experiences in my life which I would dearly like to forget…’
There are crime elements to be found in one of the most significant and highly-regarded of German novels. Berlin in 1940 is a city living in threat and terror. The various people at 55 Jablonski Strasse have different strategies for coping with the increasingly brutal Nazi rule. Frau Rosenthal suffers, her nervous disposition not suited to the times; the Persickes revel in their enthusiastic support for Hitler, browbeating those around them; the Quangels are struggling to come to terms with the death of their son; and the quietly spoken Otto decides to act against the barbarism. Primo Levi called Alone in Berlin the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis, and it is still an excoriating (if demanding) novel of weight and intelligence.
The work of the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek is marked by her political stance. Her espousal of feminism and her individual interpretation of the tenets of the Communist Party are keys to her work, and her stated target – the capitalist consumer society – aligns her work with that of the Swedes Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who shared many of her views. The preoccupations of another Swedish writer, Stieg Larsson, are echoed in Jelinek’s concern for the exploitation of women in what she (and Larsson) saw as a misogynist, phallocratic society. In Greed (2006), the protagonist is country policeman Kurt Janisch, frustrated at the lack of progress in his career. He finds himself talking to a great many women, some of them middle-aged and unfulfilled like himself, and several fall under his spell. When a murder takes place (with a body in a lake) Kurt’s already tangled life becomes even more complicated. In many ways, this is a psychological crime novel of the kind the publisher Serpent’s Tail has made very much their own, and any reader pointed to the book by the publisher’s name will not be disappointed. But as well as an unsparing analysis of the characters, there is that remarkable sense of place in which the author excels – the mountains and towns of southern Austria have rarely been so effectively conjured. And the author’s customary sociopolitical concerns are just underneath the surface.
There are few crime fiction aficionados – at least those in the know – who would deny that one of the most significant of German crime writers was a coruscating talent who died far too young. Achieving literary success at the precipitate age of 20 is not always the soundest of moves, but Jakob Arjouni parlayed it into a highly successful career, leaving behind an impressive corpus of novels at his death at the age of 48. (The similarly short-lived Stieg Larsson at least reached his half century.) These books included five quirky private eye novels which featured his Turkish detective working in Frankfurt, Kemal Kayankaya. The most notable of these was Happy Birthday, Turk!, written in 1987 and filmed in 1992, but published in English by No Exit Press in 1994. The last Arjouni, Brother Kemal, was written with the author all too aware that he was under sentence of death. That book was also published in the UK in 2013 by No Exit Press, long champions of the author’s work. While highly individual with a markedly cosmopolitan character, there are echoes in Arjouni’s work of two of his literary heroes, Georges Simenon and Raymond Chandler, but the author was able to use the classic private eye novel to examine modern German society unflinchingly. He dealt provocatively with such issues as the Balkan wars and (in One Man, One Murder, 1992/2013), sex trafficking. Other issues explored in his sometimes incendiary body of work included religious intolerance.
The last book, Brother Kemal, translated by the much-respected Anthea Bell, has Kemal protecting an author at the Frankfurt Book Fair whose death has been decreed in a fatwa. Arjouni’s own response to such theocratic brutality is made eloquently clear. Valerie de Chavannes, a financier’s daughter, summons Kemal to her villa in Frankfurt’s diplomatic quarter and commissions him to find her missing sixteen-year-old daughter Marieke. She is alleged to be with an older man who is posing as an artist. To Kayankaya, it seems like a simple case: an upper class girl with a thirst for adventure. Then another case turns up. The Maier Publishing House believes it needs to protect author Malik Rashid from attacks by religious fanatics at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Rashid has written a novel about, amongst other things, attitudes towards homosexuality in an Arabic country. Kayankaya is hired to be Rashid’s bodyguard for three days. The two cases seem to be straightforward, but together they lead to murder, rape and abduction, and Kayankaya even comes under suspicion of being a contract killer for hire.
The many translations he enjoyed in his lifetime (not to mention the variety of literary prizes) were appropriate acknowledgements of a remarkable achievement in a very short life.
When a writer dies too young one remembers conversations – never to be repeated. I learnt the following when talking to the writer around the time of the UK issue of Chez Max – and now wish I’d spent more time talking to him. I asked Arjouni about inspirations. ‘Well, frankly, I was inspired by some very diverse writers,’ he told me. ‘Dashiell Hammett, Georg Büchner, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, William Faulkner, Guy de Maupassant, Eric Ambler, Samuel Beckett. Eclectic enough for you?’ he said, smiling. However for Chez Max, he had two specific inspirations. ‘For that book, it was Mark Twain and Jim Thompson. How about that for an ill-matched duo?’
‘However, I am not a crime reader or, for that matter, a crime writer. I read books I like or love and sometimes these are crime stories. (For example, I consider Charles Willeford indispensable.) As a writer, if I think the story or a character I want to write about works best in the frame of a crime story, then this is the frame I use.’ I asked how Arjouni felt a modern writer should tackle the thorny subject of sex. ‘Hmmm… regarding sex and sexuality… I don’t know what a contemporary writer should do or should not do. But as a writer you always try to find truth, don’t you? Sometimes you find it with frankness, sometimes with discretion. I don’t think that there are any simple rules to follow… with every page, every scene you have to find the words that work for this particular page or scene. During the actual work of writing, I work only for myself, not some notional reader. Writing is, de facto, communication. First, communication with myself and then, in a less direct way, communication with the world.’
He continued: ‘Chez Max plays in the future, 2064, in Paris. The planet is divided into the first and the second world, rich and poor, separated by a wall. The first world is democratic; people ride around on bicycles and eat good food. The second world is shadier, because the story is told from the wealthy perspective, but we hear about fanaticism, civil wars, dictators, terrorism, etc. The protagonist, Max Schwarzwald, lives in Paris, owns a gourmet restaurant and works part time for a government secret service. The principle of the service is: stop the criminals before they can execute their crimes. Max’s partner in the secret service is Chen Wu, who (Max decides) is an arrogant, mean-spirited bigmouth. Max begins to suspect that Chen is helping illegal immigrants from the second world to come over the wall. Is Chen a member of a second world movement, some political underground party, perhaps even a terrorist group? So Max has to take things into his own hands… he has to save the world.’
Translated by Baida Dar, Max Landorff’s Tretjak (2013), already a bestseller in the German territories, is a tautly written psychological thriller set in Munich and around the Italian lakes. The eponymous Gabriel Tretjak is the Fixer, hired to play the part of fate in the lives of the rich and famous, to make the impossible possible. With clinical precision he rebuilds his clients’ lives, no matter how murky their pasts. But a series of grisly murders soon threatens to destroy the life Tretjak has built for himself. The body of a famous brain surgeon is discovered in a horsebox; his eyes have been gouged out. The murderer leaves behind a series of tantalising clues – clues that all point to Tretjak. As the death toll rises and police suspicions mount, it dawns on Tretjak that he must confront the psychological puzzle of his own past if he is to survive. It’s a trenchantly written piece, told in cool, disaffected style. This first novel by pseudonymous ‘Max Landorff’ is believed to be the work of the journalists and brothers Stephan and Andreas Lebert, since the novel was originally announced to the book trade under their name. The original German edition sold over 100,000 copies and spent weeks on the bestseller lists – a feat matched by its sequel, The Hour of the Fixer. The marketing campaign also meant that the book caused a stir even before its release: in an alternate reality game entitled ‘Play the player, not the cards’, the main character was brought to life, and players could enter into the world of ‘the fixer’, and become immersed in the events that developed around them, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. The campaign was so successful in building a fan base for the book that it won a silver award for marketing at the Leipzig Book Fair.
Should psychological thrillers play by the rules? Surely the best entries in the field achieve their effects by staying within certain parameters? There must be strongly developed central characters (with whom we identify), taking a journey into the darkest reaches of the human psyche, all with a persuasive leavening of psychological detail. Paulus Hochgatterer – who has a parallel career as a child therapist in Vienna – seems to have carved out a literary career by breaking (or at the very least, bending) the rules – empathy with his protagonists is kept on a tight leash. But this quaintly named author has proved with two highly distinctive books that it can be profitable to throw received wisdom out of the window.
Hochgatterer’s The Sweetness of Life (2008, translated by Jamie Bulloch) was the Austrian recipient of a European prize for literature, and marked Hochgatterer out as a writer prepared to employ unorthodox effects. With a cast of troubled individuals in a village in Austria, the author detonated a series of literary incendiary devices following the discovery by a traumatised young girl of the mutilated body of her grandfather. Detective Superintendent Ludwig Kovacs joined sensitive psychiatrist Rafael Horn to open a particularly nasty can of worms. The book encountered some criticism for its dyspeptic vision of Austrian village life, but events in the real world have proved that (if anything) Hochgatterer underplayed the horrors that can lurk beneath the placid bourgeois surfaces.
The Sweetness of Life employed a variety of perspectives and narrators in what seemed like a determined attempt to avoid linear development. The same method is employed in The Mattress House (2012), and those in tune with the author’s fragmented approach will find rich rewards. The divorced Kovacs is saddled with the well-worn accoutrements of the literary copper (including the now all too familiar difficulties of relating to a daughter), but contrasts satisfyingly with the psychiatrist Horn, who has his own problems. The Austrian retreat of Furth Am See sports a collection of damaged, mentally disturbed individuals. A young man dies after a fall from scaffolding, with foul play suspected. Then a rash of children, all bearing signs of abuse, comes to the attention of the police. The town is in turmoil, but Kovacs is unable to break through the wall of silence that the children have put up. There is a not-so-hidden agenda here: a provocative engagement with the rights and wrongs of the physical punishment of children. But Hochgatterer never forgets that his most urgent imperative is to deliver another forceful novel, moving to a gruesome conclusion. He may not care too much for careful narrative structure, but perhaps that’s just why his unsettling books read like those of no other contemporary author.
It’s always pleasurable to make a new discovery in the crime fiction field (sometimes even more so if one can share it with like-minded readers), and for many readers, Bernhard Schlink’s canny protagonist Gerhardt Self is an acquaintance they will be pleased to make. In the ingenious Self-Deception, the daughter of an important businessman has gone missing, and private detective Gerhardt Self is hired to track her down, leading him to encounter some dark doings in a secluded psychiatric hospital. Bernhard Schlink’s seen-it-all private detective is shown to best advantage in this third book in the series. Self was a public prosecutor during the Third Reich, and is now a private investigator. He is a man at ease with himself, despite being nearly seven decades old and having a pretty dyspeptic view of the world, not least because of his past. And Germany’s history – with its desperate moral convolutions – is always at the shadowed heart of the books.
I Was Jack Mortimer (as translated from the German by Ignat Avsey) is a remarkable novel by Alexander Lernet-Holenia which has proved repeatedly attractive to filmmakers. A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer’s cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer’s life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late. Twice filmed, but published belatedly in English in 2013, Holenia’s novel is a tale of misappropriated identity as intricate and sonorous as the work of Patricia Highsmith. Its not-quite-innocent protagonist is consummately characterised, although the platinum-blonde femme fatale is perhaps more generic. I Was Jack Mortimer is also a book that evokes a Vienna in transition: from the glittering capital of the old aristocratic Austro-Hungarian empire to a shadier, altogether more prosaically modern city.
I spoke to the German-born, UK-resident editor Stefanie Bierwirth, who has worked on crime titles both at Macmillan and Penguin. Surprise is a key element in the books she looks for. ‘As with everything in life’, she said, ‘I think it is incredibly important to always be stimulated by new ideas and perspectives. Particularly in crime fiction, which is an area where readers constantly hunger for moments of surprise and want to solve unique puzzles that they haven’t come across before. I’ve always felt that European crime fiction opens that canvas for crime and thriller fiction, and introduces its fans to new plots, moods and different ways of thinking. The increase in translated crime fiction and the general demand for foreign fiction – also on the big and small screen – proves that there is hunger for more all the time and discovering new novels in this area is an incredibly satisfying and stimulating process.
‘As an editor in the area of crime in translation, but also as a native German speaker, I had great pleasure in taking on the English language rights to Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case which is exactly one of those novels that is quintessentially different in so many ways. Of course, first and foremost this is a thrilling contemporary court case drama. But then on another level this novel also presents us with a very different story which I think strongly articulates the fact that we Germans are finally finding a different way of talking about our past and its legacy today. The reader, therefore, gets a richer, more complex experience.’
Jürgen Ehlers published his first crime piece Flucht (Escape) in 1992. Since then, numerous other short stories have appeared in anthologies and journals, nine of them in English. For his story Weltspartag in Hamminkeln (World Savings Day in Hamminkeln), Ehlers was awarded the Friedrich Glauser Prize in 2005. More recently, he has been tackling historical crime fiction: to date, five novels focussing on police detective Wilhelm Berger (and his family) have appeared, covering the period from 1917 to 1965. The Berger novels have been applauded as a commentary on German reality at particular periods in history. Ehlers’ dark and wry short fiction may be set against his novels, which are based on authentic crimes. The first of these novels, Mitgegangen, was shortlisted as best debut novel by the ‘Syndikat’, the German crime writers’ association. In In Deinem schönen Leibe, set in 1938, Berger and his colleagues try to crack the case of a missing girl. Has she fallen victim to a sadistic child killer? Berger is no conventional hero – he is a sceptical but basically apolitical citizen whose main concern is to protect his family. Under mounting pressure from his superiors, Berger finds it increasingly difficult to steer clear of the new political reality. State authority gains momentum, SA stormtroopers pay a visit to Berger’s house, and his Jewish daughter by marriage hides a defector from the International Brigades under his roof. Anti-Semitic hatred explodes, and Berger’s pre-Nazi middle-class world collapses around him.
The pseudonymous Jean-Luc Bannalec divides his time between his native Germany and the southern Finistère, and his books feature a detective who shares a name (but not much else) with Poe’s creation Chevalier Dupin. Bretonische Verhältnisse, the first case for Commissaire Georges Dupin, was published in German in 2012. Death in Pont-Aven is targeted at the Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri market. A bestseller in Germany, reaching number two on the Der Spiegel chart, selling over half a million copies in Europe and with a TV movie based on the book, this is a crime series to watch. Amiable and sun-drenched, the novel follows Dupin, a cantankerous, Parisian-born caffeine junkie, who is dragged from his morning croissants and coffee to the scene of a curious murder. The local village of Pont-Aven – a sleepy community by the sea where everyone knows one another and nothing much seems to happen – is in shock. The manager at the Central Hotel has come downstairs that morning to find ninety-one-year-old owner Pierre-Louis Pennec dead on the restaurant floor. Dupin and his team identify five principal suspects, including a rising political star, a longtime friend of the victim and a wealthy art historian. Further incidents – first a break-in, then another death – only compound the mystery. As Commissaire Dupin delves further and further into the lives of the victims and the suspects, he uncovers a web of secrecy and silence that belies the village’s idyllic image. The novel’s laidback, gentle appeal lies in Dupin’s quirky methods and lifestyle, which include sea air and a Montalbano-like indulgence in fine wine and cuisine.
There is a louring shadow over German crime cinema, and it is not just that of the grim days of the war. It is that of an autocratic director – one of the most influential in the history of the cinema, the brilliant (if bullying) Fritz Lang. Lang’s iconic early crime films such as M (with its star-making turn as a child murderer by Peter Lorre) and the proto-Bond-villain Dr Mabuse (a character he was to make films about for several decades – the last was The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse in 1960) were the nihilistic blueprints for the doom-laden noir of American cinema. Ironically, the efforts by Goebbels to persuade Lang to become the Reich’s film maestro precipitated the director’s move to America where his re-definition of Expressionist crime film continued with such films as the brutal classic The Big Heat. Lang’s four Mabuse films are an instructive index of crime film preoccupations over the years. The first silent Mabuse films were in the style of such outrageously eventful pulp serials as Judex and Fantomas, but by the sound era and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), Lang was reflecting (and/or defining) such edgy American themes as government corruption and conspiracy. With his revisiting of his megalomaniac character in 1960, Lang transformed the espionage thriller with The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse, channelling notions of technologically-embedded terrorism, endemic surveillance and autocratic government.
Later filmmakers such as Ulli Lommel refined and re-invented the crime genre in such films as his serial killer movie made with a Douglas Sirk sensibility, The Tenderness of Wolves, while the parameters of violence (or more precisely, menace) were pushed further by Michael Haneke’s extreme arthouse movies such as Funny Games. While Haneke is perhaps the most acclaimed German filmmaker of the early twenty-first century, his work does not represent the whole of modern German crime cinema, which also includes remarkable films such as Run, Lola, Run and The Lives of Others.
Fritz Lang’s masterpiece remains as visually startling, clammy and unsettling as ever, and Peter Lorre’s disturbing performance as a child murderer seems uncannily prescient in an age in which child abuse and molestation seem virtually quotidian. Some of the techniques forged by Lang here are still influential today. It is interesting, though, to compare the original to Joseph Losey’s re-make, with David Wayne – until recently seemingly a lost film. Perhaps its touchy subject matter was the reason for its invisibility (as with Hammer’s once-unseeable, now available Never Take Sweets from a Stranger?).
Lang’s sinister classic now looks like a blueprint for much crime and thriller cinema that followed, with its all-seeing super villain using technology and surveillance in now-familiar fashion. Since the Nazis banned the film (sensing what the director was indirectly saying about the evil of the Reich), its reputation as a classic of German cinema has been unassailable.
A young woman, the eponymous Lola, receives a phone call from her boyfriend telling her that he has left a bag containing 100,000 Deutschmarks on the subway which has been stolen by a homeless man. He has, however, to deliver the loot to ruthless criminal associates or suffer the consequences. His plan: rob a bank. Lola’s plan: find the money (in whatever way she can) in the shortest possible time. In other words: run, Lola, run. This brief, intriguing and innovative film plays with real and screen time, conflating the two. We are shown the action in three 20 minute segments, each different from its predecessor. As well as being postmodern in its examination of the very nature of film, Tom Tykwer’s film marries energy to keen intelligence.
The legacy of the past hangs heavily over The Lives of Others, an art film which enjoyed almost unprecedented (and almost populist) levels of exposure. Its seriousness of intent is signalled from the start (the film’s subject is the distortion of life brought about under the brutal Stasi police force, with its 90,000 personnel), and performances are exemplary, notably that of the late Sebastian Koch as Dreyman, an East German socialist playwright who has persuaded himself that he has made an accommodation with the inhumane regime. Dreyman is careful to grind no ideological axe, and he maintains a studied political neutrality – although the fact that he has received state honours suggests that he cannot really claim any distance from the regime. But despite the collaborationist nature of his behaviour, he is not corrupt, and performs humane acts by intervening to save dissidents, including his friend Paul, a journalist. But he is to learn that attempting to finesse a totalitarian regime can have a heavy price. While utilising the apparatus of the thriller, this is nevertheless a film which has much to say about the problems of taking a moral stance in the face of institutional evil.
The fact that Baran bo Odar’s unhurried but mesmeric film (like Jan Costin Wagner’s original novel) shares a title with one of the director Ingmar Bergman’s later classics is perhaps apposite. Like the Swedish filmmaker’s censor-baiting uncompromising study of sexual alienation, this is a film which is prepared to unspool at precisely the pace that the director intends, with everything (from acting to mise en scène) treated with a rigour rare in arthouse cinema, let alone in a crime narrative such as this. As in the novel, the squabbling investigators move ever closer to a resolution of a rape and murder stretching over decades – but the audience is party to the identity of the killers as the initial crime is the sequence that opens the film. Apart from the sheer physical beauty of the film (at odds with the dark, twisted psychology of the characters presented) we’re given the picture of a backwards-looking suburban town (the action here is transposed to Germany from the Finland of the original novel), and after the initial sexual assault and brutal killing with a rock of a young girl in a field of wheat, we are taken on a journey as disturbing as it is mystifying. If, perhaps, a particularly important plot twist is a touch unlikely, it is so authoritatively handled here that few will have cause to complain. Particularly vividly drawn is the sociopathic, barely-functioning hero, devastated by the death of his wife, who is nevertheless able to put clues together in the face of the intransigence of his colleagues. In terms of its structure, the film (looked at today) strikingly anticipates some of the Danish crime thrillers which were to follow.