Romy Hausmann on How a Sausage Seller made Her become a Crime Writer

 

When I started writing in 2009, I never thought that one day I would end up as a thriller writer. I rarely read thrillers myself and when I did, I couldn’t understand what attracted people to this genre. For me, blood and any form of slaughter were not exciting, just disgusting I have to admit though, there wasn’t a lot that I knew of the genre and probably lumped all novels together. There were no corpses in my early stories; it was never about physical survival for my main characters. Instead, I wrote about young women trying to find their place in life. Like the story of the sausage seller Lisa, who escapes from her small village to a big city because she believes she will find a better life there – but, of course, she is wrong. I assumed that I had written a coming of age story, full of absurdities and crude humour. Although there was also a bit of suffering as the shadow of her mother’s suicide still lay upon Lisa. I used this element more like a literary tool to show that no place in the world will ever make you happy as long as you don't face your own inner demons. Still, if I had been asked what genre this story fits into, I would have immediately said: It's mostly a comedy. 

In fact, this book was released – and it was a big flop. I got four or five rather mixed reviews and that only because I gave the book away in various book groups. Funnily enough, in the end I actually became a thriller writer because of a rather disastrous review. It said: “Dear Romy, next time please write about what you probably understand more of: mass murderers, psychopaths or little boys who drown newborn cats – but don't disguise this psychological nightmare with a cute cover and sell it as a funny novel”.

You could say that I hadn't even noticed what kind of story I had apparently written and how it had affected my handful of readers (poor them!).

Well, I still don't think that I write about mass murderers and I would never let a kitten drown. But eventually I did find my literary home in psychological thriller writing. I believe that it is not only blood or scary creaking stairs that make a thriller captivating for us readers, but the emotions of the main characters that we cannot escape. Deep down, we all long for the same things: security, love, attention. And it is also the same thing that we fear: loss in any form. The loss of a loved one, the loss of the life we know, the loss of control. I did a lot of research on the human psyche, especially anxiety, and found out that in psychology, a distinction is made between fear as a state and fear as a trait. While the fear of a state is a temporary emotion resulting from a real danger (like creaking stairs), the trait anxiety leads to situations being assessed as dangerous even without an acute threat. So, in a figurative sense, I still write about the Lisas of this world, normal people with fears that have consolidated through their personal life experiences and that have developed their character. And then I create an external threat that confronts them with these very fears. But – just like us real people – the characters try to evade this confrontation. Either they try to repress it or eliminate it as quickly as possible and by all means necessary. Both ways are risky, and so the characters become the greatest danger to themselves. 

You will see what I mean by this in my debut thriller Dear Child. Yes, there is a crime, there are corpses, a cracking skull and a little blood. But above all, there are main characters who want to protect themselves from loss – the loss of their family, of their view of the world and of their own identity. 

And that's exactly what I learned to love about the thriller genre. It's a genre with so many possibilities. It is so much more than superficial horror. There is room for psychological studies and great emotions. It can reflect our society and make us not only bite our nails but also think. Who would have ever thought that a sausage seller made me realise that?

Sleepless by Romy Hausmann (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

It's over, my angel. Today I'm going to die. Just like her. He's won. It's been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she's wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven - free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja's boss - kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can't seem to be able to refuse. The two women make for a remote house in the woods, the perfect place to bury a body. But their plan quickly falls apart and Nadja finds herself outplayed, a pawn in a bizarre game in which she is both the perfect victim and the perfect murderer...

Oliver Bottini and the Black Forest Investigations

Foreign crime has never had it so good. Whether it be the popular television series that have proliferated on our screens this decade, or novels in translation, some of which have topped the bestseller lists, we appear to have developed an appetite for foreign crime fiction that shows no sign of being sated.

More generally, crime fiction is evolving to the extent that it can no longer be contained within the narrow confines of genre-writing. Well aware of the widespread appeal of crime, many canny writers are adopting the genre as a framework within which to explore social, cultural and political issues. The result is sophisticated, nuanced writing with psychological depth and literary polish.  

Enter Oliver Bottini and his series of six Black Forest Investigations, the first of which, Zen and the Art of Murder, is published in January by MacLehose Press. Bottini’s debut novel was both a commercial and critical success, selling more than 125,000 copies and winning the 2005 Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Fiction Award). The author acknowledges a considerable debt to the late Henning Mankell, without whom the later success of other Scandinavian writers such as Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø may well have never materialised.

At the heart of the Black Forest Investigations is the detective Louise Bonì. Although the novels employ a third-person narrative, it soon becomes apparent that we are seeing the world chiefly through Louise’s eyes and spending a fair amount of time inside her head. The cards are heavily stacked against Louise, who seems to be in a permanent state of conflict. She is battling not only the criminal elements in and around Freiburg, but also the macho culture of the police force, nebulous conspiracies and cover-ups in other government agencies further up the hierarchy, and not least her own demons, especially her struggle with alcohol.

Louise Bonì joins a growing band of strong, idiosyncratic female detectives both on the page and the screen. Fans of the BBC’s compelling police drama, Happy Valley, will find similarities between Louise and that series’ feisty protagonist, Catherine Cawood. What is more, in both Happy Valley and the Black Forest Investigations, the focus is as much on the everyday lives of the superbly drawn characters that inhabit these milieus as it is on the crime action.

Another point in common between Happy Valley and the Louise Bonì series is the stark contrast between an idyllic rural hinterland and the terrible things that happen there. Provincial crime fiction is very popular in Germany and there is even a publishing house which specialises in this genre. The potential for such books to slip into parochialism is of course high, but Oliver Bottini never risks straying down this route. The setting may be painted with an attention to detail that would suggest the hand of a local boy at work, but the author himself grew up in Munich and has lived for almost ten years in Berlin. The issues that thread through the Black Forest Investigations, which include neo-Nazism, people trafficking, organised crime and corruption, are big national and international topics.

Zen and the Art of Murder opens with a Buddhist monk wandering inexplicably through the snowy landscape of the Black Forest. Is he lost? Is he running away from something? Where is he heading and where has he come from? The villagers of Liebau are certainly uneasy at the sight of this apparition from the Orient sitting on the steps of their church, and are relieved when the monk moves on. Louise Bonì, in tandem with a couple of local officers, is tasked with discovering what is happening, even though no crime seems to have been committed. But there must be more to this monk than first meets the eye. Thus begins the series of Black Forest Investigations, poised to captivate an English-speaking readership as it has done a German-speaking one.

Zen and the Art of Murder: A Black Forest Investigation I by Oliver Bottini, translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, published in hardback on 11 January at £16.99.

Louise Boni, maverick chief inspector with the Black Forest crime squad, is struggling with her demons. Divorced at forty-two, she is haunted by the shadows of the past.  Dreading yet another a dreary winter weekend alone, she receives a call from the departmental chief which signals the strangest assignment of her career – to trail a Japanese monk wandering through the snowy wasteland to the east of Freiburg, dressed only in sandals and a cowl. She sets off reluctantly, and by the time she catches up with him, she discovers that he is injured, and fearfully fleeing some unknown evil. When her own team comes under fire, the investigation takes on a terrifying dimension, uncovering a hideous ring of child traffickers. The repercussions of their crimes will change the course of her own life.

----

Oliver Bottini was born in 1965. Four of his novels, including Zen and the Art of Murder and A Summer of Murder of the Black Forest Investigations, have been awarded the Deutscher Krimipreis, Germany’s most prestigious award for crime writing. In addition his novels have been awarded the Stuttgarter Krimipreis and the Berliner Krimipreis. He lives in Berlin. www.bottini.de.  

Jamie Bulloch is the translator of Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back, Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, Kingdom of Twilight by Steven Uhly, and novels by F.C. Delius, Jörg Fauser, Martin Suter, Katharina Hagena and Daniel Glattauer.

Nele Neuhaus is In Good Company

Nele Neuhaus is one of Germany's most widely read crime authors. She was born in Muenster / Westphalia and raised in Paderborn.  She has been living in the Taunus region since her childhood and has been writing just as long.  

  

Ever since my childhood, I’ve loved dreaming up stories and writing them down. At first I used to do this with a fountain pen in my school books; later my parents gave me a typewriter. I’ve written and dreamt about writing books my whole life. 

It would have sounded crazy if I’d told my parents that I wanted to become an author after finishing my A-Levels. So I looked for a job and began to study law. Then I met my husband – reading wasn’t his cup of tea and he had even less enthusiasm for writing. Nonetheless I never let myself be put off and worked away on my first manuscript in every free moment that I had for over eight years.  “Below Sharks” is over 1000 pages long and is set in New York.  I was absolutely convinced that I had written a bestseller, but publishers thought otherwise. I got rejection after rejection. But I was in good company in that respect – even J.K. Rowling didn’t find a publisher for Harry Potter in the beginning.

So I looked for other options and came across the concept of ‘printing on demand’. I had 500 copies of book printed through one provider and immediately began marketing it: I designed my own website, sent off copies of my book here and there on Amazon, but the bookshops didn’t want to sell my book. The office in my ex-husband’s meat factory turned out to be a wonderful sales opportunity with the customers there becoming the first to read my book. My second book (“An Unpopular Woman”) was a crime novel which is set in the region where I come from.

After a couple of good articles in the papers, word got out that there was a crime novel set in Taunus. Suddenly the bookshops were ordering from me. In the mornings, I would work at the company, in the afternoons I would deliver the books that I was storing in my garage. At the same time, I was continuing to write my next book – despite the protestations of my ex-husband.

The third book (“Murder’s Friends”) had a first run of 5000 copies and then the company’s drivers had to pitch in and deliver the book on their rounds. One day in January 2008, a rep from the Ullstein Publishing House was in a bookshop in Koenigstein when the owner gave her a copy of “Murder’s Friends” and told her that the book had sold better than the latest Harry Potter in the run-up to Christmas. The rep took the book with her and gave it to an editor at the publishing house. Then came the day in February 2008 when everything changed for me: the editor emailed me to ask whether I would be interested in writing for Ullstein Publishing House! Naturally I didn’t hesitate for long and wrote “Deep Wound”, the third in the series about detectives Oliver von Bodenstein and Pia Kirchhoff, which subsequently soared up the bestseller lists. My big breakthrough didn’t arrive for another year until “Snow White Must Die”. Since then I have sold over 4 million books  in over 20 countries, which have also been turned into films. My biggest dream has come true because I believed in myself and didn’t let myself be put off by rejection and failure. Sometimes I have to laugh when I think about how it all began. Back then my books fitted in my garage, today I have to rent out a whole warehouse! 

Snow White Must Die -

On a rainy November day police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: A woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to a small village, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer.

On a September evening eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace. In a trial based only on circumstantial evidence, twenty-year-old Tobias Sartorius, Rita Cramer’s son, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff discover that Tobias, after serving his sentence, has now returned to his home town. Did the attack on his mother have something to do with his return?

In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. When another young girl disappears, the events of the past seem to be repeating themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a race against time, because for the villagers it is soon clear who the perpetrator is—and this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.

More information about Nele Neuhaus can be found on her website and on Facebook  She can also be found on Twitter @NeleNeuhaus