LITERARY CRITICISM 33

TLS SEPTEMBER 2 2016

apocrypha. Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, who firstappeared in 1841 in “The Murders in the RueMorgue”, is commonly hailed as the firstdetective hero. An eccentric and reclusivelover of enigmas and conundrums, Dupin“glories . . . in that moral activity which disen-tangles”, as his devoted companion and thenarrator of his three published adventuresdescribes him. Conan Doyle graciouslyacknowledged Dupin’s pre-eminence in thegenre, describing Poe in 1920 as “the origina-tor of the detective story”. Yet it is clear fromTannert’s research that the genre of detectivefiction is also rooted in early stories such asMüllner’s and Otto Ludwig’s Der Todte vonSt.-Annas Kapelle (1839; The Dead Man ofSt. Anne’s Chapel), described as “an earlyexample of the courtroom drama”. As towhy detective fiction had such a “rich andearly growth” in German-speaking countries,Tannert highlights the region’s wide variety ofpolitical entities, as well as legal and investiga-tive structures, during the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.

Switzerland was the country in whichConan Doyle tried to kill off his most famouscharacter, having grown bored of his investi-gations. After Sherlock Holmes plunged tohis death with Professor Moriarty at theReichenbach Falls, the author was abused byheart-broken fans. One outraged lady wroteto him, addressing him as “you beast”, whileanother attacked him with her handbag.Eventually Conan Doyle was forced to relentand bring Holmes back from the dead. In his

Swiss feelings of vulnerability to Nazi infil-tration”. As Hall points out, crime fictionflourished even under the National Socialists.Some 3,000 novels with total print runs ofmore than one million copies were publishedfrom 1933 to 1945.

Inspired by German-language works suchas Alfred Döblin’s remarkable modernistnovel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and for-eign novels, including the Martin Beck seriesby the Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and PerWahlöö in the 1960s, the Soziokrimi (socialcrime novel) took a critical stance towardscontemporary society by depicting crime notas an individual act but as the result of socialcircumstances. However, on the other side ofthe Wall, crime fiction authors in the GermanDemocratic Republic were faced with the notinconsiderable problem of how to write at allin a society in which crime had been officiallyeradicated, without appearing to attack thestate. Perhaps partly for this reason, all novelshad to receive the imprimatur of the statefrom 1963.

The first Kommissarin (female policeinspector) in German-language crime fictionappeared in 1973, in Richard Hey’s Ein Mordam Lietzensee (Murder at Lake Lietzen). AsFaye Stewart ably demonstrates in her essay,the Soziokrimi was a forerunner of the Frau-enkrimi, which emerged in the 1980s. Itsfemale sleuths exposed the inequalities andhypocrisies of patriarchal, heterosexualsociety while “exploring the rights of andprotection for children, minorities and other

marginalized groups”. In her piece on Aus-trian crime fiction, Marieke Krajenbrink alsohighlights the contribution of female writers,including Auguste Groner (1850–1929), whowas responsible for “the first police detectiveseries in German-language crime fiction”.Krajenbrink explores the role crime fictionplays in the work of the Nobel Prize-winningauthor Elfriede Jelinek, a keen reader of thegenre since her youth: “Jelinek injects a newtone of radical feminist criticism to the crimegenre”.

Today, the genre is flourishing with some600 published German-language authors ofcrime fiction. As Julia Augart’s essay on theAfrika-Krimi shows, it is both diverse andoutward-looking. The fall of the Berlin Walland the reunification of Germany have ledto a boom in Verarbeitungskrimis, crimenarratives that explore modern Germany’straumatic history. They include VolkerKutscher’s Gereon Rath series, which hassold 650,000 copies in Germany alone. In heressay on the historical crime novel, KatharinaHall focuses on Hans Fallada’s Jeder stirbtfür sich allein (1947; Alone in Berlin) andSimon Urban’s alternative history Plan D(2011), both of which use the genre as ameans to expose “the state’s capacity forcriminality” and to raise challenging ques-tions about “the elusive nature of justice”.Such novels amply demonstrate the richnessand maturity of the genre, one that can nolonger be dismissed as mere Unterhaltungs-literatur, or popular fiction.

essay, Martin Rosenstock uncovers a rich tra-dition of crime writing in Switzerland. Fried-rich Glauser’s five novels from the 1930sabout the Swiss detective Jakob Studer – “aman whose life may be buffeted by adversesurroundings, yet is never derailed” – wereinspired by Georges Simenon’s InspectorMaigret series, currently being republishedby Penguin Classics in a series of sparklingnew translations. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’sInspector Bärlach novels from the 1950s are“morality tales set against the backdrop of

Der Chinese by Friedrich Glauser, Morgarten Verlag edition, 1939;

cover design by H. Schaad