Read Online The World's Finest Mystery... by Ed Gorman - Free Book Online Page B

annual mystery conference, taking place in Toronto each June. This year's guest of honor was L. R. Wright, while special guests were Howard Engel and Caroline Roe (Medora Sale) and McClelland and Stewart editor Dinah Forbes.
     
     
     
    World Mystery Report: Germany
    Thomas Woertche
The year 2000 saw a radical change concerning the German mystery market that affected most German authors of the genre. The German crime-fiction/suspense market is strongly dominated by foreign authors, especially Americans. But that is true for all of Europe; even the British complain about "U.S. steamrolling." Compared to Britain, however, Germany has always suffered an enormous contradiction (due to the nearly complete lack of crime-fiction tradition) between quantity and quality, i.e., the large number of crime writers and their books and the tiny number of those among them who have international reputations.
     
     
What happened last year, thanks to the general and international "concentration on the book market," is that most of the big publishing companies closed down their traditional and established crime lines. Classics like rororo Thriller (Rowohlt Publishers' famous "black line") vanished as well as the not-less-famous Gelbe Reihe ("yellow line") of Ullstein Publishers, the Goldmann Krimis, the Heyne Krimis (of, respectively, Goldmann, a division of Bertelsmann, and Heyne Publishers). That means that a lot of authors of solidly woven "pret-a-porter" novels lost their publishing grounds. They had to seek asylum with either print-on-demand alternatives— and that kind of publisher, like Verlag der Criminale, popped up almost immediately— or with small publishing houses. Some of the latter, like Grafit Verlag in Dortmund or the rather recently founded Militzke Verlag in Leipzig, did have some reputation before, mostly as a forum for regional to national literature. For them it was, of course, also a chance to broaden their programs. Edition Trèves in Trier got more sophisticated, and Emons Verlag in Cologne even includes fashionable period pieces now, from medieval times to eighteenth-century backgrounds.
     
     
With big companies closing down crime-fiction lines, the readers and aficionados of crime fiction of course do not vanish. And the big publishers do indeed take care of them by displaying global blockbusters such as Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, Mary Higgins Clark, Elizabeth George et al. Again, this is true for Europe as a whole, but there are differences. Swedish best-seller Henning Mankell for example is top-selling in Germany too, whereas American Donna Leon, with her Venice-based novels, is a German top-seller only.
     
     
The most interesting side effect stemming from the big companies genre-list shutdown has been mostly ignored in public debate. Mystery novels, suspense, crime fiction, these subgenres of fiction, are no longer labeled as such in the big companies' catalogs. It's "integrated," and that means "lost," in their mainstream lines. The label now is simply "novel." The result: the term "genre" is back where it used to be until two decades ago— equal to bad, low stuff.
     
     
However, there are promising counterwaves. The small Distel-Verlag in Heilbronn, for instance, recently started a completely new line, specializing in classic and new French writers, cooperating with the famous "Serie noir" of Paris publisher Gallimard. Unionsverlag in Zürich, Switzerland, started its "UT metro" line in spring 2000, presenting suspense fiction not from the usual sources— Anglo-Saxon fields like the U.S. or the U.K.— but from literally all over the world: Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, and Europe (including Turkey).
     
     
The consequences of these changes are enormous for most of the German-writing and German-speaking authors. Last decade's "scene kings and queens" —made not primarily by broad audiences but by opinion leaders of the very scene itself— like Ingrid Noll, Doris Gercke, Sabine Deitmer,