Retracing these journeys, I have made a 15-part series for BBC Radio 4, Foreign Bodies, which uses celebrated fictional detectives — from Christie's Poirot to Nesbø's Harry Hole — to explore the history of modern Europe. Cop novels are a useful tool for such a survey because the police procedural turns on detail. Novelists working in crime-free narratives have no need (and often no wish) to specify a character's job, clothes, income or family background. But because observation and evidence are crucial to the investigation of a crime – the motive for which will often rest on who someone was or what they possessed or desired – crime writers routinely provide a mass of social detail: menus, train timetables, fashion labels, shops, newspaper stories. As a result, good crime novels become a case-file of their times. The introduction of the welfare system and unemployment benefit, for example, can be traced through the comments of posh employers in Christie's mysteries. And reporters preparing to cover the impending referendum on Scottish independence would be well advised to read Ian Rankin's DCI Rebus books, which systematically depict the country's re-examination of its identity over the last 25 years.
In Rome, Andrea Camilleri — creator of the Sicilian policeman Inspector Montalbano — pointed out to me the complete set of Maigret books on his shelves. In Berlin, one of the leading German crime-writers, Jakob Arjouni, also kept a complete Simenon close to his desk. PD James cites Simenon as a master as well, confirming a literary afterlife that perhaps validates the view of André Gide that the Belgian writer should have won the Nobel prize for literature.
Mock got up from his chair and cast his eye over the assembled men. This was what he had been missing for the past three years. Briefings, focus, pertinent questions, suggestions exchanged and spiced with political discussions. One could not discuss politics in Breslau any more. Only one set of values was permitted, and only the Austrian Corporal honoured. Mock breathed a sigh of relief. How he missed this smoke-filled world of meetings and swearing, and the quest for corpses! In distant Lwów he had found what he had longed for back in his sterile office, where he analysed information and wrote endless reports and statements.
[...]
The room was filled with the sound of chairs scraping against the floor, pages turning and cigarettes hissing as they were extinguished in the damp ashtray. Mock filled his lungs with air. This was what he missed. For the first time in his life he thought with gratitude about Kraus, who had wanted to banish him but instead had awoken in him something nobody would ever be able to eradicate: the happy excitement of an investigator who could display on his the standard the slogan investigo, ergo sum — "I detect, therefore I am."
What constitutes good style has been drummed into us to such an extent that, as good readers, we still bristle when a writer upsets those ingrained ideas. And what I see Wolf Haas doing is prying open this chasm between, on the one hand, how language behaves, and on the other, how language is enforced — and then letting his reader fall right in.
Is there anything more beautiful in life than the pure, sweet, wondrous innocence of an unblemished, open and untainted soul?
Yes... the delightful process of getting that sole so fucking filthily dirty, and soiling its purity with so much titiliating sin and hedonistic whoredom that it can scarcely remember what colour it was to begin with.
This creamy, ivory, blank canvas of a shoeling is resplendent in her off-white milky maidenhood... but not for long, the little nymph, for you will introduce her to the real world... blemishing and sullying her with every step you take.
You're about to make a grown-up of this shoe.
Four browned goose necks landed on Mock's plate. He cut this delicacy into strips and arranged them on round, crunchy slices of potato. Enclosed in a sheath of goose skin was a stuffing made from onion, liver and goose fat. Mock placed soft, braised onion rings on top of these pyramids and began a concentrated assault. He ate slowly and methodically. First he plunged his cutlery into a dish where hunks of roast pork swam in a thick sauce of flour and cream. On top of a piece of meat now speared on his fork, he balanced a mound of potato and goose. When he had devoured this complicated formation he slid a layer of fried cabbage with crackling onto his fork as if it were a shovel. The plates gradually emptied.
Mock looked up at his colleague, Herbert Domagalla, who was clattering on the platen of a Torpedo typewriter, transforming the statements given by the prostitute sitting opposite him into the rhythmic scansion of well-oiled machinery. Mock grabbed a pencil and snapped it in two. A small splinter of wood hit the prostitute on the cheek, and she glared at Mock. He was looking at her too, but he did not see her. Instead he saw himself the day before: an energetic police officer who blackmails his chief, gets carte blanche to do what he likes and then, his head brimming with ideas, follows in the murderer's footsteps with his loyal helpers from the criminal underworld. After the death of a prostitute covered in rashes, that same police officer turns into a dried-up, moaning little soul who renounces everything he is doing and at night shakes with terror at imaginary ghosts.
The troubled barman of Petruske's tavern placed a plate of thick, fried bacon slices in front of Mock. When Mock pointed to his empty tankard, the barman assumed an expression of someone greatly put upon. Mock decided to torment him even further by ordering some bread and horseradish. An existential agony swept across the barman's features.
Mock observed the effects of alcohol and anger in the eyes of the wretchedly dressed drunks crowding the tables and walls. The most genial person in the place seemed to be the blind accordionist playing a sentimental tune. Had he not been blind, he would been glaring at Mock just as amicably as the builders, carters, cabbies and bandits crammed into the bar.
Mock tore his eyes away from his brothers in alcoholic misery, and set about his food. First he decorated the slices of bacon with mounds of horseradish, then, using a knife, pressed it into a hot mush after which, with a faint sigh, he devoured the smoked and roasted meat followed by slices of dark, wholemeal bread. He washed down the strong taste of meat and horseradish with Haas beer.
Scanning the bar with bloodshot eyes, he listened to the swearing and cursing. Foremost in this were unemployed workers, embittered at the whole world. All of a sudden a butcher joined in their laments to complain about capitalist exploiters who undervalued his rare ability to decapitate a cow with one blow.
Mock had a revelation: the supper had not been unpalatable because it consisted of foul and badly prepared food, but because his mouth was acidic with the indigestion of an unfulfilled duty.
A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny. Mystery (of the cozy variety). I was drawn to this book by the Montreal backdrop.The patient Herbert Anwaldt had survived "the house of torture", as he called the psychiatric clinic on Marien-Allee in Dresden, for already five years, thanks to his imagination. Imagination was a filter for wondrous transformations; the nurses' jabs and punches became gentle caresses, the stench of faeces became the scent of a spring garden, the cries of the sick became baroque cantatas and the shabby panelling frescoes by Giotto. Imagination obeyed him. After years of practice, he had managed to tame it to such an extent that he had entirely extinguished in himself something, for example, which would otherwise not have allowed him to survive incarceration: desire for a woman's body. He did not have to "extinguish the fire in his loins" like a sage from the Old Testament — that flame had long ago gone out.
Imagination did, however, betray him when he saw small, busy insects scuttling across the room. Their yellowish-brown abdomens flitting in and out of the gaps between the floorboards, their flickering antennae sticking out form behind the washbasin, the individual specimen crawling on to his eiderdown: a pregnant female dragging a pale cocoon, or a handsome male holding its body high on quick limbs, or the helpless young tracing circles with thin feelers — all this would lead to Anwaldt's brain being shaken by an electrical charge of neurons. The whole of him would curl up painfully, flickering feelers would burrow into his skin and he would be tickled, in his imagination, by thousands of limbs. He would then fall into a fury and was a potential danger to other patients, especially since the occasion on which he had discovered that some of them were catching insects, putting them into matchboxes and hiding them in his bed. Only the smell of insecticide would calm his jittering nerves. The matter could have been dealt with by transferring the sick man to another hospital — one less infested by cockroaches — in another town, but here unanticipated, bureaucratic obstacles wold present themselves and successive heads of clinic would forsake the idea. Doctor Bennert had restricted himself to transferring Anwaldt to a private room disinfected somewhat more frequently. In periods preceding the swarming cockroaches, the patient Anwaldt would be calm and occupied himself for the most part by studying Semitic languages.
