Free The World's Finest Mystery... by Ed Gorman

Peter Zeindler (Swiss), Jürgen Alberts, Regula Venske, et al. are remarkably silent. It seems as though the readers (and buyers) are tired of all the middle-class cozies and "diaper mysteries."
     
     
The situation is well reflected in the 2000 awards for crime fiction. The Glauser, an annual award of German-language crime-writers club Syndikat was given to Uta-Maria Heim for her novel Engelchens Ende . Syndikat represents a large number of authors, but actually very few of even national importance. Uta-Maria Heim is a good writer and not part of that network, and so it's a little sensation that someone from "outside" got last year's Glauser.
     
     
Even more significant for the change is the German Mystery Award (Deutscher Krimipreis) for 2000. While the Glauser comes with DM 10,000 (about $4,500), the Deutscher Krimipreis does not include money. But it is the award with the highest prestige— it cannot be manipulated. It has a national (meaning German-language) and an international category. The national winner for 2000 was Ulrich Ritzel's Schwemmholz (published by a tiny Swiss publisher, Libelle Verlag). In second place was Ann Chaplet's Nichts als die Wahrheit (by Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Munich, an independent mainstream publisher), and coming in third was Sam Jaun's Fliegender Sommer (by another tiny Swiss publisher, Cosmos Verlag).
     
     
Ritzel's novel is his second. He used to be a courtroom and police reporter in a small southern German town. Sam Jaun is Swiss, living partly in Berlin, who comes up with a new Swiss-countryside mystery about every seven years.
     
     
Many other authors who have been acclaimed and accepted by the readers during the last year are either complete outsiders or newcomers, like Horst Eckert, Jürg Juretzka, or Heinrich Steinfeld and Wolf Haas (both of Vienna, Austria). Munich writer Friedrich Ani's fine novel German Angst had a likewise fine success and Tobias O. Meissner published the season's most interesting novel, Todestag (by Eichborn Verlag), about a fatal assault on Chancellor Schröder. Todestag , unlike most of the present German-language fiction in general, is serious and even thrilling literature.
     
     
In short, the borderline between "genre" and "mainstream" seems to be blurred not only by the big companies' politics but also by the fact that it looks as if authors and their representatives are submitting to this trend. That could be a positive signal— but I doubt that optimism makes sense here. German mainstream literature— i.e., "high" literature— is famous (and notorious) for its general refusal to narrate reality. But that's exactly crime fiction's finest tradition— and Germany's reality offers material galore for writers to return to the pure, raw storytelling of the genre. Some of them have never lost that strain and likewise never renounced literary quality. Pieke Biermann, for instance, who brought acknowledgment of crime fiction to the literary pages with her series of novels about a Berlin homicide squad, is now working on a street-cop novel. For, in the slightly modified words of the wonderful Bob Truluck, "All in all, street level is where crime fiction belongs."
     
     
     
    The 2000 Short Story Edgar Awards
    Camille Minichino
Chair, Edgar Short Story Committee, 2000
Here's an image I can't shake: a nervous ex-con thrusts a five-inch blade into the pulsating throat of a cow, slitting it from ear to ear, and retches as blood pours out like shiny red glass, the stench of manure in the background. Clark Howard's "The Killing Floor" puts you in a slaughterhouse and keeps you there long after you've finished the story. A standout in a year of more than 500 short stories.
     
     
At first my new assignment was exciting— day after day, padded envelopes from UPS, priority U.S. mail cartons, chunky FedEx packages, all filled with FREE books and magazines, delivered to my door!
     
     
The Edgar Short Story submissions.
     
     
Then I realized I had to read