The French editors
of ’Europolar were pointedly asking if,
in the case of German crime novels, the prejudice of their futility
because of low criticism of their society, held to investigation
(except for a few exceptions). So, I went to my favorite crime
fiction bookstore, Hamnett, and bought one of the new arivals,
a book whose
author I was unfamiliar with and whose cover was appealing: The
Silent Forest (Der
Wald ist Schweigen)
by Gisa Klönne.
In
this novel are three very different female characters. They investigate
the discovery of the body of an unknown, pecked
at by crows, found
by a mushroom hunting old couple in a hunting stand of the Bergisch
Land forest. There is Judith Krieger, the heavy smoking Commisioner,
for ever
exhausted and whose fighting spirit only truly awakens when,
due to her own mistake, her career is finally put in geopardy
by her
detested young competitor. There are also Diana Westermann, the
mysterious forest ranger who just came back from a job in Africa
who has to
stand up for women’s role in a male dominated profession and
there is Laura, the introverted young lady who was stuck in an Ashram
in this forest by her self-rightous bourgeois parents, to pratice
yoga and meditation as means to forget her much older lover. Then,
another cadaver is discovered in the crater left by the explosion
of a left over bomb from WW2, all this happening next to what the
author ironically calls the Esoteric Institute.
And all this
is in fact well captivating and well written. The structure also
is spotless.
It is laid out as a close-room story despite the fact that
the action is outdoors, and borrowing heavily from the classic
whodunnit scheme
with unpredictable rebounds so that the reader alway looks
at the wrong suspect. This demonstrates that Gisa Klönne knows her
job well. And we expected that from her since after all she participates
to conferences where she teaches writing. But here we would look
in vain for the rolliking joie-de-vivre, the taste for humor and
burlesque as described so well by Jean Marc Laherrère in his
two strong recommendations to a German editor, in the present issue
of Europolar, of two crime novels, one French (Hannelore Caye’s
Toiles de maître) and one Vietnamese
(Tran-Nhut: L’esprit
de la renarde).
Let us not even
speak here about any type of reflexion upon society or the contextual
environment,
in short about any
element that would have pushed beyond the quaint handcrafted
part played
by the fascinating plot and the interesting characters, and
that would have muted or eliminated the futility prejudice.
When you
read this crime story you get inevitably in front of your
eyes the film
adaptation as it will happen on German television as seen
many times before : even if there is some action it will always
retain a rough
and laborious tinge and if someone makes a joke, it will
be
only as counterpoint to a type of morosity that, disguised
as gravity,
is only there to hide that dramas thus laid out are nothing
but the boring display of a lonely world spinning on itself.
But nonetheles
The Silent Forest (Der
Wald ist Schweigen)
is a good story with noticable characters and an exiting plot and
is a fun read. Unfortunately nothing more.
