Introduction: "German Crime Writing"

The Frankfurt Book Fair is considered one of the most important annual events—maybe the most important—in international publishing, and the German book market is among the largest in the world. Even though a major German media company, Bertelsmann AG, owns the world's largest publisher, the Random House group, and non-German authors are readily available in German translation, few German crime writers are translated into the American market. German-language crime writing, however, is vigorous and various, with leavening from the different outlooks of Germany's internal regions; Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Liechtenstein; the minority German areas of Belgium (which has a German-speaking parliament in one region), Poland, Denmark, Italy; and several enclaves in other nations. Crime writing in the German language is vitally creative in the twenty-first century and poised to become a major influence on crime writing around the world. The following section includes four country surveys, two short stories, and a note on the remarkable BoKAS archives in Bonn. – J. Madison Davis