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Many things seem to just happen to Simone Buchholz: That she landed in Hamburg from Würzburg in 1996 - after a failed love.
Or that after an internship at the women's magazine “Allegra” she got a traineeship at the Henri Nannen School because her boss said that otherwise she would always remain the underpaid intern.
She started writing detective novels because she didn't want to spend her working day at editorial conferences and was fed up with the “women's magazine sound” (Buchholz).
And the heroine Chastity Riley was born when she happened to hear of similar fates in her Bavarian homeland.
Now the tenth and final case of the bulky, creaky prosecutor Riley has appeared.
"River Clyde" is his name, and apart from stupid real estate snobbies, initiated fires and a few murders in Hamburg, Riley is on the trail of her own family secrets in Scotland.
It's not a classic crime thriller, but rather a crisis novel, the portrait of a damaged soul, a Hamburg-Scottish road movie in book form.
Buchholz plays with clichés and the expectations of their readership
"I find crime thrillers in which a woman becomes the pitiful victim of a sick perpetrator and a male inspector, no matter how broken he is, boring", says Buchholz on a walk through the desolate St. Pauli.
In her novels, the author investigates in the souls and prefers to do so in St. Pauli, where she has lived for 20 years.
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Buchholz wants to tell a complex story, currently that of her hard-drinking, broken heroine Riley, whose already not exactly straightforward life was completely out of joint in the previous volume “Hotel Cartegna”.
Her fatherly friend Faller is dead, there was a huge explosion with many disabled people in Riley's troop - physically and mentally.
She has quit duty and is spending her days under a rhododendron in Wohlers Park.
She also has sex with her ex-colleague Stepanovic.
It is these wonderfully bizarre and deeply sad moments in Buchholz 'novels that make them so unique.
After the fire of a whole street in St. Pauli, Stepanovic and Calabretta half-heartedly shadow two real estate dealers while drinking beer on their Harvestehude balcony, but especially after the demolished Riley.
She is now in Glasgow because she received a message about an inheritance.
There she falls even deeper into lethargic melancholy and swaps the Kiezkaschemmen for run-down pubs.
She lets herself be driven through gloomy and mostly rain-soaked streets to always different dives, has short and yet honest sex adventures.
In the inherited house right next to a British nuclear weapons bunker, she meets an old ghost with whom she drinks one or two whiskey.
Buchholz plays with clichés and the expectations of their readership.
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Sometimes the sounds of Johnny Cash set the tone, sometimes the gentle current of the eponymous River Clyde.
"For me, music means a feeling of wellbeing," says Buchholz.
Her father, a simple worker, sang in an opera choir as a young man.
Classical radio concerts and the cracking record with Beethoven's “Fidelio” were among the Sundays of her childhood.
Her aunt, to whom she fled in Hamburg at the time, loved Elvis.
Buchholz herself often listens to the same song over headphones while she is writing.
With “River Clyde” it was “Travelin 'Man” by Hamburg country vagabond Digger Barnes.
Buchholz added the Weltschmerz song to her novel.
The "Travelin 'Man" - or rather the woman - is Riley, the prosecutor of Scottish and American ancestry.
“Scotland got me in the early 2000s when I was there on a research trip,” says the now 49-year-old.
The Scots with their underdog image, she says, are the better Brits, more honest, more open and with a completely different sense of humor.
They need it too, she says, especially the men.
"They know that they are not too good-looking, so humor is their currency," says Buchholz.
So in this Scotland Riley finds something like redemption.
Simone Buchholz: "River Clyde", Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 230 pages, 15.95 euros
Source: Suhrkamp
When the author began working on and with Riley more than 13 years ago, the character of the prosecutor was obvious to her.
"She is the mistress of the process, just without a gun, that's why she needs this revolver troop of police around her." The GIs who in were stationed in their homeland in the 1970s and 1980s.
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"Soldiers were transferred there if they had impregnated a German," she says.
She sat in a class with children who had never met their fathers.
That was normal, but there was something disreputable and traumatizing for the children.
“I've always found these fates exciting.” All she had to do was wrap them up in a story.
Why Buchholz would no longer write “Revolverherz” like that
She found the crime genre at least as exciting, although she was concerned with the originally American hard-boiled sound.
"At that time I thought that this tone and these stories would also work in a major German city." So she already set her first Riley novel "Revolverherz" (2008) in Hamburg on St. Pauli.
But, she admits, it was based on the classic pattern at the time: a serial killer badly hurts night club dancers and drapes their corpses on the banks of the Elbe.
Buchholz is currently revising his first novels.
“It's digging into one's own inability,” she says, referring primarily to the language.
But she wouldn't write history like this either today.
"Over the years I found it more and more exciting to deal with other stories on the fringes of society." So it is only logical that Riley has to solve her own case in the new work.
"I have now repaired it", is what Buchholz says.
She does not rule out a continuation.
"Riley didn't die, he just finished the story first." Now is time for something new.
Buchholz is working on an “ensemble novel,” as she calls it.
He plays on a ship, it's about crumbling realities, and zombies also occur.
“It tells of a fragile world in which we find ourselves right now.” Buchholz turns the things that happen around them into crazy, depressing and clever stories.