Murder at the Castle: A Miss Merkel Mystery, by David Safier

Angela Merkel makes her fictional debut as village sleuth in this good natured cozy crime series.

Angela Merkel, ex-German Chancellor, has retired to the rural village of Klein-Freudenstadt (“little happy town”). After years of gruelling public service, she’s looking forward to creating a new life for herself with husband Achim and their little pug, Putin. As the couple make tentative steps to merge with the local community, attending wine festivals and markets, they find themselves at the centre of a murder mystery. Baron von Baugenwitz, owner of the village castle, has been found slumped over a table dead in the dungeon. Angela, who is used to solving problems, can’t resist this one, despite the need for her to keep a low profile due to her political past. As the mystery proceeds, a cast of suspects is introduced: an angry ex-wfie, an angry current wife, a surly, wise-cracking daughter, a cop, a far-right fruit seller and a tour guide. Danger is ever present, however, and Angela must evade an angry killer who knows she is on their tail.

Murder at the Castle is the first in a cozy crime series by German author David Safier. Readers may wonder how credible a fictionalised Angela Merkel would be, but Safier does an admirable job of creating a likable yet slightly offbeat ex-Chancellor. The novel is mostly an affectionate portrait of a devoted middle-aged couple, structured around a classic whodunnit. The plot is interwoven with plenty of humour, references to Merkel’s political career and some 18th century German history. All up, a warm hearted, entertaining frolic.  

Translated by Jamie Bulloch

Murder at the Castle: A Miss Merkel Mystery, by David Safier. Published by HarperCollins. $32.99

August 2025

Perfume, by Patrick Suskind

An 18th-century perfumer searches for the perfect scent - that of young virgin girl.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born unloved and unwanted into 18th-century France. His mother is executed and he is forced into dangerous and pitiless child labour. Disease almost kills him off, but he's a scrappy youth and manages to survive. The child has one skill: he is possessed of the most sensitive olfactory nerves. His ability to distinguish a wide variety of smells - from the disgusting to the delightful - puts him on track to enter the perfumer's trade. This he does with considerable success. There is one smell that obsesses him, however. The scent of young virgin girls. Early in the novel, he clobbers one unsuspecting victim, killing her in the process. This is the beginning of a quest to distill the unique smell of pubescent virgin girls. 

One wonders what sort of public greeting Perfume would get today, considering its perverse subject matter (it has sold 20 million copies worldwide.) While reading this novel, other decadent writers came to mind: the Marquis de Sade, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature and Matthew Lewis's The Monk. Patrick Suskind's writing is often witty and funny. The plotting is clever and the filthy Paris of the 18th-century is brilliantly imagined (the novel should really be called "putrescence". It's hard to figure out what the novel's theme is, however. Is it about sexual obsession? Disgust at nature's inevitable decay? Perhaps the latter. 

An enjoyable enough read, one that left me a little queasy, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to others.

Perfume, by Patrick Suskind. Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780241420294

The Confusions of Young Torless, by Robert Musil

 

The philosphical novelist Robert Musil's autobiographical first novel, published in 1906.

Torless (we are never given his first name) is an adolescent student at an Austrian boarding school. He and his classmates, Reiting and Beineberg, catch fellow student Basini stealing from one of them. Rather than report him to their teachers, they decide to take matters into their own hands. At first they bully and beat him, threatening all the while to turn him in. It's physical and psychological torture in equal measure. But then things take an even darker turn. Reiting and Beineberg start to sexually abuse him, taking him to a private den where these violations are performed in an almost ritualistic manner.

Torless knows in a vague manner what is going on. He is also attracted to Basini himself, whom he finds to be an androgynous beauty. Basini, sensing that Torless wants to abuse him like the other boys, strips off his clothes and offers himself. Torless is dazzled by Basini's flawless white skin. And so begins a strange, sadomasochistic relationship, with the passive Basini eventually confessing his love for Torless.

As Torless finds himself drawn into these events, he experiences confusion about his rational and irrational self. He performs immoral acts, but questions his culpability. He feels that he is there, but also not there, merely watching events unfold and trying to figure out what they mean. The text often has an expressionistic, Freudian feel, sinking deep into the perverse subconscious. Robert Musil describes the id, Torless's shameful desires, wrestling with the super-ego, the rational part of the mind. Some of these passages are mind bending, occupying the liminal space between being and nothingness. It is Torless's dark night of the soul, and the reader must wade through the murk, hoping to see him come out the other end.

Despite its sordid subject matter, this is a philosophical novel that wrestles with questions of right and wrong. It's a book that some might find uncomfortable in light of contemporary sexual abuse scandals, but is worth a look at for its high literary value and morally complex subject matter. 

The Confusions of Young Torless, by Robert Musil

April 2022

The Hair-Carpet Weavers, by Andreas Eschbach

An ancient peoples on a hidden planet make hair carpets, but no one seems to know why.

On a distant planet, on the outskirts of a galactic empire, a rudimentary civilisation makes intricate, hand woven carpets. The carpets are made out of human hair, the hair of the wives and daughters of the male carpet makers. It takes an entire lifetime to weave a single carpet, which is then given to the Emperor. This seemingly patriarchal society allows the husbands to have multiple wives – a head wife, and a sub wife. Daughters are welcome, but surplus sons are killed.

The distant planet is part of the Gheera province. It is thousands of years old and has been part mothballed, part forgotten by the Empire. The planets which form part of Gheera province no longer have contact with the central powers of the Empire and live in a lot of ignorance. When rumours start to spread that the Emperor has been overthrown, people are executed for uttering such heresy.

When the narrative jumps to an exploratory expedition set up by the new government, it becomes clear that the Emperor has indeed been executed by a group of rebels, who are now in charge. The exploratory spaceship is hovering over the mysterious planet and one of the crew members, Nillian, decides to descend. What he finds there shocks him. An endless stream of hair carpets are being sent to a planet that is hidden within a black hole. But no one knows why.

The Hair-Carpet Weavers is a 1995 science fiction novel by German writer Andreas Eschbach. It reads very much like a cross between Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Stansilav Lem’s Solaris. That is, the novel has Asimov’s muscular plot structure and Lem’s brilliant sense of irony and eerie atmosphere. Together they make for an utterly compelling story. One of the main themes of the book is how our habits, customs and religious beliefs are formed by hopelessly outdated historical forces. We hold prejudices and are willing to fight wars due to millennia old events. Not only that, we haven’t got a chance of breaking out of these patterns of thinking, as we have no idea of their actual starting point. The hair carpet weavers in Eschbach’s novel have created a whole political and religious system around servicing an ancient Emperor’s ridiculous whim.

A mind-blowing space opera powered by a superbly imagined plot. ​

The Hair-Carpet Weavers, by Andreas Eschbach. Penguin. $19.99

After Midnight, by Irmgard Keun

German writer Irmgard Keun published After Midnight (1937) after she’d fled Germany in 1936. Her best selling books had been banned, putting her life under risk.

It’s 1930s Germany. The drums of war are beating and Hitler is omnipotent. Everyone must be vigilant that they say the right thing and are not seen to be critical of the Nazi regime. But the times are so topsy turvy, it’s often hard to figure out what is seditious behavior and what is not. Family members are informing on each other, and an innocent remark can find you up before a court, or worse, disappeared. Trying to make her way through this increasingly mad world is Sanna, a nineteen-year-old who has moved to Frankfurt. She moves through bars and clubs with her group of friends, picking up people as they go, and listens to all sorts of raving voices about the coming war, the Nazis and the general state of the nation. Sanna is in love with Franz, and when she finds out he is in dire trouble, she makes a promise that she will help him, a promise it may be beyond her to keep.

Sanna’s story is written in the smart and energetic voice of a young woman on the go, someone who likes to socialise and have fun, but who is also alive to the many ironies of life. The first thing to strike about Keun’s prose is its contemporary feel. It’s as though a young woman of today had written it, making it easy to sympathise with Sanna’s plight, indeed, walk in her shoes. There’s also a lot of wit and sharp observations in Sanna’s narration. The witty novels of Anita Loos comes to mind, whose stories concentrated on clever girls getting ahead and seeing through the world’s hypocrisies. Here, however, the backdrop is one of looming terror and violence, giving After Midnight a feeling of mounting dread, like a nightmare.

A concise, perfectly executed short novel that has lost none of its urgency or relevance.

After Midnight, by Irmgard Keun. Penguin Modern Classics. $19.99

First published at northmelbournebooks.com.au November 2020