Crime column "Stripe Shot": steel and theft

Even those who can still remember Nicholas Ray's film In A Lonely Place, in which Humphrey Bogart has one of his strongest performances, will recognize little in the novel on which the 1950 film is based.

The two screenwriters had reworked the book by

, which had been published three years earlier, very thoroughly and ideologically very carefully because the scenario seemed so dark and morally questionable that it was too hard even for a hardened film noir.

Now you can finally read this great novel by an almost forgotten American Noir pioneer again, after the translation published by Union-Verlag in 1999 was out of print for a long time.

Peter Korte

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

• Follow I follow

"A Lonely Place"

(Atrium, 272 p., £22) is the story of a former fighter pilot who becomes a serial killer in Los Angeles after World War II.

Dixon Steele, in whose name steel and theft go hand in hand, lives in the day, he takes his uncle's little check, he has success with women and is at the same time misogynistic: "They were all the same.

Cheaters, liars, whores.”

He wants to earn big money without work, feels declassed, has been neglected, enslaved after the equality and freedom as a soldier in the war in the cramped post-war world and his masculinity injured.

In the league of Hammett and Chandler

Dorothy B. Hughes (1904-1993), who was particularly productive in the 1940s, is a gifted storyteller.

She has an ear for dialogue, an eye for post-war California, and a feel for the rhythm of sentences.

And she shows with inimitable precision how this Steele gets lost deeper and deeper in the labyrinth of his paranoia.

That his best friend and war comrade is Brub Detective, who investigates in the murder series that Brub's wife Steele is starting to see through, is further evidence of Hughes' command of the narrative.

A crime novel set in the league of Chandler, Hammett and Cain.

One can doubt that the GDR, in contrast to the capitalist West, was a setting for good crime novels.

But maybe that's too hasty and knee-jerk - or derived from the "Polizeiruf 110" series, whose cases could never seriously compete with those in "Tatort".

opens up considerable potential in his four-volume series, written long after the demise of the GDR.

Criminal potential of the GDR

In

(Rowohlt, 368 p., born, 22 euros) one encounters Oberleutant Otto Castorp for the third time.

He was transferred from Jena to Berlin. It is the year 1987. Ronald Reagan is within sight of the Wall and calls on the acting General Secretary of the CPSU, audible to the East: “Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Castorp and his colleagues are in the midst of the turmoil near the wall.

They reach out when the uniformed need support.

But they have other concerns.

Two bodies: a musician from the West, a cafeteria worker from the East, found a few feet apart.

The plot of the novel, in which family and contemporary history are interwoven, jumps between East and West.

There is the jazz musician Billy, who comes from South Africa, lives in Berlin and occasionally does courier work for the ANC, the African National Congress, one of the liberation movements supported by East Germany.

In addition to Castorp, who is particularly interesting because of his mediocrity, who is fairly loyal to the party line but is bored at the concert by Miriam Makeba at the Berlin 750th anniversary celebrations, the Stasi secretary Erika Fichte, who is assigned by her boss, is secretly investigating the disappearance of that comrade to investigate, who coordinated the arms deliveries to Angola and South Africa.

The front lines are quite confusing.

Max Annas' sober, protocol-like style is exactly the right form for this.

In this way, he manages to unfold a complex case in a sovereign manner and at the same time to tell a piece of the history of mentality in a country whose inhabitants were only dimly aware of the looming end of their world.

We are already looking forward to the end of Annas' series.