William Adamson
Review on: Horst Eckert, Die Zwillingsfalle ("Twin Trap")
Horst Eckert is a phenomenon. He is a German crime writer on a par with the best crime writers in America or Britain, the homes of crime writing. This is not to belittle German crime writing per se; there are a great many good writers of crime fiction who deserve a wider audience and there are a great many crime writers in English who are considerably worse than many in Germany who do not enjoy the same exposure to an international reading public. This lack of exposure is due to limitations imposed - in a global sense - by the German language. The problem is the imparity between German authors translated into English and British and American authors translated into german - which leads me to the point that German reading audiences perhaps read more crime fiction in translation thanks to the self-perpetuating myth that because the authors are American or British, they have to be better than the home grown variety. Eckert explodes the myth. He is one of the leading men in the genre in Germany and can hold his own against the best that any other nation in the world can throw at him.
Why?
There are number of reasons. He has pace, he can tell a good story, his plots are meticulously worked out, his characters are real people, totally realistic and convincing in their weaknesses and strengths, his prose style lucid and his dialogues tough and natural. His novels belong to the police procedural school of crime writing. His setting is Düsseldorf, the capital city of the Federal State of North Rhine Westphalia. His characters are the men and women of the Festung, or the "fortress", as the police headquarters are called. Eckert is multi-dimensional in his use of protagonists. The main figures of one novel are not necessarily involved directly in another, and if they are, then often merely in subsidiary roles. And thus the reader´s perspective changes with every story, as does his perception of the characters who, due to the multi-dimensional view point, appear in a different light in each of the novels - all of which provide them with a depth and roundness frequently missing with other writers of this type of fiction.
And what of Zwillingsfalle, or "Twin Trap", for the sake of an English title (I´m sure there might be better). Horst Eckert again, as in all his novels, presents us with the tense and exciting world of police work in the city of Düsseldorf. His protagonists are three dimensional "round" characters, psychologically interesting for their hopes, fears and the often darker side of their lives. The plot and pace are breathtaking and Eckert is a master at spinning webs of intrigue, self-interest and deception that eventually merge into the always unexpected but always convincing and totally logical finale.
There are three main characters in Zwillingsfalle: Ela Bach ambitious head of a special unit with her sights set on higher things, Leo Köster, in the throes of divorce and transferred out of his department after having shot one of his own colleagues during a police operation, and Martin Zander, who heads a police task force. All three have little to do with each other but are thrown together when six people are found murdered in the sauna of a fitness centre. Köster dicovers the murders and who has known one of the victims. Zander, whose partner in the police task force as well as in the more illegal side of his operations was also in the sauna. And Ela Bach, in charge of the investigation to find the killers. Each of the three has an interest in the murders and persues his or her own, often conflicting lines of enquiry with fascinating results.
The themes of Zwillingsfalle are corruption and the double standards of power on both a political and economic level and Eckert handles his subject scilfully. His strengths lie in his descriptive power, his dialogues and his ability to tell a good story. It´s a shame that not more readers have access to it. Any English language publisher of crime fiction would be doing themselves a great favour by translating and publishing Zwillingsfalle - and, of course, all the other novels in Horst Eckert´s accomplished series.
From: Raymond Chandler Yearbook No. 4, published by Verlag Karl Stutz, Passau, 2001
William Adamson is the president of the Raymond Chandler Society in Ulm.
Read what the rest of Germany´s reviewers write about Horst Eckert
"Any English language publisher of crime fiction would be doing themselves a great favour by translating and publishing Zwillingsfalle - and, of course, all the other novels in Horst Eckert´s accomplished series (...) He is a German crime writer on a par with the best crime writers in America or Britain"
(William Adamson)