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The most intense step a person can take

Hammett
Crime bookshop in Berlin,
Kreuzberg area

Alexander Ruoff
Translation: Ruth Hemus

Editor's preface:

By the time a crime novel finally finds its way into the hands of the reader, it has already endured a long journey, from as far back as its origins in the author's imagination. Alongside the publisher and its readers, the creative efforts of the typesetters and designers, and the reviews in appropriate magazines, the bookseller too represents an important stage in its passage. The bookshop is to the crime novel what the turntable is to the music track, or the serving platter to the new dish. The crime bookseller makes personal recommendations to the reader: here is the point at which the book can be picked up for the first time and judged.

This article opens a new series in europolar which will visit crime bookshops in Europe. Just like the europolar series on European crime magazines, it should succeed in showcasing one more aspect of the lively international crime fiction scene.

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Having fought one's way along Bergmannstraße, in the more trendy part of the Kreuzberg area of Berlin, where pleasure-seeking young people and tourists populate the Indian and Pakistani restaurants, Sushi-Bars and Espresso Lounges, one arrives at the more peaceful Marheinekplatz, a square featuring the guesthouse where Jean-Bernard Pouy and Frédéric H. Fajardie stayed, when they came to give readings of their work. To the right, the little street Friesenstraße rises in one of those few slopes that Berliners, as braggingly as ever, like to call hills. Between the Otherland bookshop, which specialises in science fiction and fantasy, and the Rolls Reisen travel agent is the crime bookshop Hammett. Polly, the Alsatian mix bitch and shop's little mascot, dozes contentedly in front of the entrance, under the neon-lit orange revolver, and lets passers-by step over her. It is shortly before closing time and Christian Koch, the shop's owner, is starting to clear away the table of special offers into the store. He has two rooms at his disposal. The first houses new arrivals and classics, of which he always has around 4,500 in stock, and which are clearly sorted and shelved. The smaller room is given over to the second-hand department with its 2,500 volumes.

A woman rushes breathlessly into the shop and, quite clearly in a hurry, asks for a crime thriller set in France. Christian puts his pile of books to one side and asks patiently who it is for, how old the recipient is, what she normally reads, what job she does. Then he takes three books from the shelf, gives explanations about their content and authors, advises against one and recommends another. Delighted and somewhat surprised, the woman leaves the shop holding a book. Christian watches her go, satisfied, ‘A lot of people are a bit anxious about going into a specialist bookshop. They expect arrogant sales assistants, whose only fun consists in showing that you are clueless.' Christian and his colleagues frown upon such conceit, which they have experienced all too often in record shops or specialist video rental shops: ‘We advise the lover of feline detective fiction in the same friendly way as the hard-baked Hardboiled fan'. They also happily accept recommendations from customers and sometimes advise against titles that would not be to their customers' tastes. ‘That engenders trust of course, and people like to come into our shop, because they know they can talk to us.'

Service matters above all else in Hammett, which was founded in 1995 and which Christian enthusiastically took over in August 1999. He came across the bookshop by chance, back when a girlfriend was running it. The trigger was a Kinky Friedman exhibition. If his enthusiasm for crime fiction was rather lukewarm before that encounter, he now says that one only has to read crime novels to become acquainted with the whole range of human behaviour and to learn something about social circumstances: ‘You can often learn more from the average, regular novel than from any weighty academic tome.'

Das schöne Antiquariat provides an extra service. Anyone looking for a specific edition of an out-of-print book can enter the relevant dates into the search fields and, when the Hammett team have tracked down the desired book, they immediately get in touch – ‘without any obligation of course', Christian emphasises.

Hammett organises around four to six readings a year by selected authors, and sometimes in collaboration with other bookshops, such as the reading by the author Gisa Klönne in Autumn 2006, organised together with the Miss Marple bookshop located in the fashionable Charlottenburg area of Berlin.

Christian and his team are especially proud of one facility: that is the list of new publications on the shop's home page, which is updated monthly, (and which has already been featured in issue 3 of eu ropolar ). He and his colleagues sift though all German-language publication announcements, so that it probably represents the only complete overview of German-publications of this genre. Many of the books are even reviewed and evaluated by the team. This service, the extent of which could not quite have been predicted when it began, has been continued by Christian because he wants it to be fully exploited, ‘even and especially by the competition', he adds.

In addition to the list, which is archived, there are readings of current vogues and trends: ‘Once, a murder was enough to catch the reader's attention, but before long it had to be particularly gruesome. Then, even that was not enough and so sex came into it, and then a psychopath, and now it has gone so far that two psychopaths are required. The plot has to become more and more grisly.' Christian is deeply sceptical about this ‘higher-quicker-further' principle. Not only because of the observation that publishers commission writers with specific tasks, so as not to miss the boat, but above all because in his view a good crime novel is not distinguished by being increasingly gruesome but rather by its reflection of social circumstances and its interest in the human soul: ‘To commit a crime is the most intense step a person can take – it is quite different from going to work. It is behaviour that breaks out of the everyday, whether motivated by jealousy or resentment, or a desire to change the world.' A good crime novel is one that makes the motives that cause people to undertake extraordinary behaviour more comprehensible.

Christian is not worried about the future, because the good thing about crime novels is that one can still sell them at the age of eighty. ‘What's more, 20 percent of all books sold are crime books', he says, ‘in fact even more in Germany'. That should prove sufficient for him and for the other crime genre bookshops, which all have links on the homepage. But one fact remains, which he can not quite explain, and that is the lack of secondary literature, or technical examinations of the crime novel, especially in the German-speaking context. ‘The crime novel is the only genre in literature that is constantly growing. There have to be people amongst these readers, too, who are interested in it academically.'

His hopes for the future: ‘A sun awning, even now, in the autumn, that would be good', says Christian, glancing at Polly, who is still dozing on the step, and at the clouds, which are slowly gathering over the Kreuzberg.

 

Hammett Crime Bookshop

Friesenstraße 27
10965 Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 691 58 34
Fax: +49 30 693 35 65
e-mail: hammett@hammet-krimis.de

Opening Hours:
Monday-Friday 10am-8pm
Saturday 9am-4pm

Further information at:
www.hammet-krimis.de