The idea that location would be important to the production and reception of crime fiction is not new.¹ Since their earliest existence,KriminalliteraturandKriminalerzählungenhave been bound to a certain necessity of place.² In some ways, the concept is basic, especially if one considers that one of the very functions of the wider genre is to situate a particular crime in a particular place. This often requires a detective or some investigatory figure to examine the scene of the crime (theTatort, an element so obviously important that it became the title of one of Germany’s most successful and...

The opening sequence to a recent episode of a German television crime series presents the audience with a panning shot of a bustling market square. The camera captures small and large booths, tents, and cars scattered about the square. Tourists and flâneurs, intermingled with women in headscarves, populate the location. Superimposed text informs the viewer, “Marrakesch, Marokko,” followed by a tracking shot into the arcades of the city’s souks, or outdoor marketplaces. The camera follows a young man in his mid-to-late twenties, moving deeper into the heart of the city. His demeanor indicates that he fears detection. After repeatedly checking...

Like most people, former police inspector Simon Brenner has some skeletons in his closet. Readers of the Austrian novelist Wolf Haas’s (1960–) Brenner mysteries, however, are unaware of the detective’s youthful transgression until the sixth novel in the series,Das ewige Leben.¹ The revelation of the detective’s crime in the “last” mystery (Haas intended to end the series but wrote one more Brenner novel six years later) coincides with a number of important disclosures. The first is thatDas ewige Lebenfinally reveals the identity of the narrator of Haas’s novels. It is also the first of the Brenner...

In 1994 Karl-Markus Gauss proclaimed that since 1980 every second Austrian novel masquerades as aKrimi.¹ Indeed, crime fiction dominates current bestseller lists in Austria as it does throughout the Germanand English-speaking world.² A distinguishing feature of many bestselling Austrian texts is their regional focus. In theseRegionalkrimis(regional, or provincial crime novels), the protagonists investigate crimes in rural Austria, which requires them to explore the area’s culture along with the crime. Accordingly, the detectives’ narratives emphasize both the ongoing case and distinctive features of the regional landscape, cultural traditions, and residents. These descriptions notably reference familiar stereotypes and clichés...

Crime fiction provides entertainment by focusing on the darkest sides of reality, such as violence, murder, and injustice, and the genre is often seen as the escapist genre par excellence. In the eyes of some of its theoreticians, crime fiction’s appeal exists precisely in its capacity both to expose evil and to present the triumph of its counterpole: innocence and justice. W. H. Auden, a great “addict” of crime fiction himself, once stated: “The interest in the detective story is the dialectic of innocence and guilt.”¹ “The magic formula,” notes Auden, “is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt;...

Tucked away on a hill in the picturesque heart of the Swabian Alps in southern Germany is the baroque castle Grafeneck. Once a summer hunting residence of the dukes of Württemberg, the castle has been a home for people with disabilities since the late 1920s, run by the Lutheran Samaritan Foundation. More than one hundred residents live there currently; it is a lively community, aBegegnungsstätte(meeting-place), as the Samaritan Foundation calls it, which works toward the social integration of people with disabilities. Every Sunday Grafeneck hosts a café where residents and visitors can enjoy coffee and cake; annual concerts...

The time is 1957; the city is Leipzig, German Democratic Republic (GDR). A successful author has been arrested for an alleged attempt to overthrow the government. In the fashion of a show trial, the writer is tried, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in prison. Prohibited from writing anything during his imprisonment, the author longs for the day of his release when he can begin writing again. But the authorities have other things in mind. Worried that the writer’s loyal readers would become suspicious because of his seven-year absence, the authorities encourage the writer to adopt a pseudonym upon his...

In Eva Rossmann’s detective novel,Freudsche Verbrechen(Freudian Crimes), the unconscious—or what we don’t know we don’t know—intrudes unexpectedly upon everyday reality.¹ As Mira Valensky, freelance “Lifestyle Journalistin” (5) and amateur sleuth, investigates the murder of a young woman in Vienna’s Freud Museum, she uncovers connections between this contemporary crime and the theft of Jewish property after theAnschlussin 1938. The past, like the unconscious, is not only symbolically present in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, but literally present in the contemporary reality of the novel—that is, Vienna in the late 1990s—nearly one hundred years after...

Ever since antiquity, the western world has conceptualized the human body as being naturally either male or female, rendering as deviant those humans whose bodies display characteristics of both sexes. Today, the medical terms intersexuality¹ or DSD (Disorders of Sex Development)² encompass a wide range of what is considered an aberration of embryonic sex development.³ Some of these conditions manifest themselves in a discrepancy between the genetic code, the gonadal tissue, and the phenotype of a human being. Other forms of intersexuality lead to an ambiguous phenotype of the external genitalia. Since the 1950s, intersexed children have been subject to...

Feminist authors of crime fiction take several approaches to politicizing and queering the genre: recasting the traditionally male detective as a woman and assigning her agency in a male-dominated environment; stressing the implications of gender and sexuality in the crime and its investigation; and vesting the sleuth with sexual subject status.¹ Contemporary German writers Thea Dorn and Christine Lehmann combine these approaches, adapting and subverting the crime genre in novels that emphasize the interplay among literary conventions, reader expectations, and constructions of gender and sexuality. In so doing, these authors inflect their writing with critiques of stereotypes, discrimination, and privilege....

Culinary mysteries are one of the most flourishing subgenres of crime fiction today. As J. Madison Davis contends, “the world of haute cuisine provides lots of opportunities for odd, colorful characters obsessed with perfecting their work.”¹ It is therefore not surprising that culinary mysteries have enjoyed wide popularity and commercial success both in the United States and in Europe.² The Austrian capital Vienna even features a special bookstore for mysteries and culinary arts: Thrill and Chill: Spezialbuchhandlung für Krimi und Kulinarik.³

One of the most compelling series of culinary mysteries, written by Eva Rossmann, takes place in Vienna. The protagonist...