And I must now confess : I wasn’t expecting this from a German crime story and even less from my boss. Black humor that would shame the English, if one could pick them out through the fog, a cynical analysis of politics and society that turns some French crime stories into softies and finally a despair that leaves German Angst as filled with optimism, and all this in a light style, as if my boss had spent the whole of last year on vacation by the Mediterranean shore. Or maybe in China, where one can certainly find the appropriate hallucinogenic drugs that would help him sneak a mafioso panda into the heavily guarded Berlin « Zoo » in order to re-socialize it. But no luck here : the panda is kidnapped by the vegetarian radical terrorist organization « Red Beats Faction ». Tired with its insignificant manure and cockroach attacks against Bade’s top butchers and delicatessens, the organization forcefully moves the panda in another society altogether. With this blackmail not only does the group wants to advocate vegeterianism and fight beef ‘destroyers’, but it also hopes to free all the re-socialization animals from the Berlin Friedrichsfelde zoo.

The inquiry falls naturally to Pachulke & Zabriskie, a couple of rather badly matched investigators. The soft natured Pachulke is secretly in love with an opera singer and has only one obsession : give a name to the little round paper bits coming out of a paper puncher. On the contrary, Zabriskie likes Whisky Straight and looks for reasonable alternatives to spending her nights alone. Meanwhile the retired planes of an old and airline that served Zurich, are now taking of relentlessly from Tempelhof. But their destination has changed. In fact the acting mayor, who is also a senator in charge of town planning, an enterprising and appreciated man, who has with him a faithfull Secretary of State named Prunk and also Blaschko von Goltz, the head of the Everything’s Comitee who has a servant lick his feet everyday, has developped a project which would allow the town not only to wipe out its debts in 321 years but also to reach full employment. The scheme would allows bored upstarts to train as pilots to crash later into the emblems of the city. This would give employment first to the « men of the ruins » but also to those in the construction sector working at rebuilding where there is nothing left. Just like the after the war boom.

In this scheme the new prosperity also allows the most indigent to get their chance : they become « information boards » and stationed at street corners, tell streetnames ; they also act as waiters and receptionists at the cocktail partys staged by the Everything’s Comitee, the town’s political decision maker group. And whoever can brilliantly pass the adequate training can also go and scream about the detailled history of the pulverised monuments and museums. The fact that, in this town, people die on a rolling basis appears completely normal.

But let’s go back to the Panda. Does it succeeds in evading the claws of the « Red Beats Faction » group ? Can Pachulke & Zabriskie solve the puzzle ? Or was the matter altogether different ? Why did the fork specialist die ? And who threw the zoo director to the pirhanas pool dressed in his secretary’s husband’s red swimsuit ?

Here are the questions that one reading of this book will answer. That some facets of the action may not be followed coherently until the end, that some characters may be lost, though introduced with force details, that some secondary actions, not key to the overall intrigue, would be particularly developped, all this is of no importance. But it only serves to show that in this book there are ideas for four others.I’m not saying this because I’m surprised by the first novel from a German author, but also because the author is my boss in everyday life. And when he writes a crime story he pays less attention to his subordinates.

	European crime fiction in the crosshairs

	n°1 May-June 2005