I think it’s fair to say that, in general, Hamburg is a rather underrated German city. Berlin and Munich get the crowds, Frankfurt the money, and Hamburg gets a bit overlooked. But not by crime fans as Hamburg has a long history of being, shall we say, a bit sleazy? It’s a port city (always a good start for a sleazy and criminally minded town) of about two million people. On the Elbe, close to the North Sea it’s a city of canals and bridges and, of course, the famous Reeperbahn of dubious entertainment options in the city’s St. Pauli district. So what’s on the Hamburg crime shelf then?
Let’s start with the (in English at least) fairly recently rediscovered Hans Fallada. Fallada was the pen name of Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, who wrote in a hyper-realist style about the Germany of Weimar and the Nazis. Social misfits and political outsiders (like himself) litter his work, which perhaps has helped him find a new audience in English translation in recent years as we search for different, largely untold stories. Fallada himself was quite extraordinary in many respects – killing his best friend in a duel, spending time in a mental institution, an alcoholic and morphine addict he was jailed several times for embezzlement. Finding work as a journalist and then success as a novelist, he managed to partially stabilise his life but then was always on the wrong side of the Nazis. His mental health spiralled out of control, he went in and out of asylums, but he kept writing.
His Hamburg-set novel is Once a Jailbird, published in German in 1934 (and titled as Who Once Eats Out of the Tin Bowl in some editions). Willi Kufult is a model prisoner – keeping his cell clean and dreaming of the day of his release. Out of jail he moves to Hamburg, intent on making a new life, starting a new family maybe. But gradually he becomes sucked back into a world of drink, desperation, deceit, and, with one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making. Like Fallada’s better known novels – Alone in Berlin and The Drinker – Once a Jailbird is not I’m afraid an uplifting or redemptive novel. It’s noir at its rawest taking the reader through the seedy 1930s criminal underworld of shabby lives and casual, brutal violence in Hamburg. As with much of Fallada’s writing it leaves you rather exhausted at the end and somewhat devoid of hope for humanity. But it is a crucial part of Fallada’s oeuvre, a vital snapshot of outsider and underbelly life in 1930s/1940s Germany.
Several writers look back to wartime and just post-war Hamburg for inspiration. John Law’s The Hamburg Dossier (2007) is set in the early days of the British occupation of Germany after the War, amid that familiar world of the Black Market (think Greene’s The Third Man in Vienna or Joseph Kanon’s The Good German in Berlin). Sergeant Harry Penrose of the RAF Special Investigation Branch is looking into a series of murders in the notorious St Pauli area. He has a tentative co-operation of the Hamburg Polizei. But they never make the case. Later, as a serving detective with London’s Metropolitan Police, Penrose returns to Hamburg solve the case.
Also set in the ruins of post-war Hamburg is Cay Rademacher’s Inspector Frank Stave series. Rademacher is from northern Germany (the series is translated from German) and so set his trilogy featuring “Oberinspektor” Stave in British-occupied Hamburg. The first book in the series, The Murderer in the Ruins (2015), starts in 1947 – the coldest winter on record for Hamburg, bombed out, impoverished, and defeated. Frank Stave is a career policeman with a tragedy in his past, a son still missing after the end of the war and tasked with solving what appears to be a serial killer case in the rubble and ad-hoc huts and bunkers the populace has fashioned for shelter. In book two, The Wolf Children (2015), Stave discovers the corpse of a boy in the destroyed shipyards of Hamburg. The hunt for the killer leads him into the world of “wolf children” – orphaned kids who have fled from the Occupied Eastern Territories and are now united in gangs. And finally The Forger (2018) it is 1948 and Frank Stave has transferred from the murder commission to the office combatting the black market. “Trummerfrau”, the name for those women who cleared the rubble from Hamburg’s bombed streets, discover works of art from the Weimar period – right next to a unidentified corpse. For fans of Rademacher there is a new series inspired by the author’s move from Germany to France. Capitaine Roger Blanc of the French Gendarmerie is a “flic” from Paris, who was sent against his will to Southern France. The series starts with Murderous Mistrial (2017).
And now some more contemporary Hamburg-set crime. Simone Buchholz is the author of the Chastity Riley series. Buchholz is from Hanau in Germany, though trained to be a journalist at the prestigious Henri-Nannen-School in Hamburg. These days she is often referred to as a “Queen of Krimi” (as the Germans called crime novels). In the first Chastity Riley novel, The Acapulco (2023), Riley, who is Hamburg’s most hard-bitten state prosecutor, is chasing a serial killer on the loose in Hamburg, targeting dancers from The Acapulco, a club in the city’s red-light district, taking their scalps as gruesome trophies and replacing them with plastic wigs. Riley’s Hamburg is definitely seedy, foggy and sleazy. In Blue Night (2018) Riley pursues an Albanian mafia kingpin through the city. In Hotel Cartagena (2021) Riley is among those taken hostage at a smart hotel in the redeveloped Hamburg docks. Also among the hostages is Konrad Hoogsmart, the hotel’s owner, who is being targeted by a young man whose life and family have been destroyed by Hoogsmart’s actions. In Mexico Street (2022) Riley is called to a ghetto of high-rise blocks in the north of the city where a Fiat car has been torched. Inside is the body of Nouri Saroukhan, the prodigal son of a Bremen-based crime clan. In River Clyde (2022) Riley takes a break from Hamburg for Scotland but is soon pulled back to northern Germany in a case that seems to link Glasgow and Hamburg. (NB: though it’s not overly important there is some confusion about which order the series runs in between the German editions and English translations).
I must mention Peter Sarda’s Hamburg Noir series – not least because Peter very kindly helped me navigate the world of Hamburg-set crime writing. Sarda is a Californian living and working in Hamburg where he sets his series featuring Homicide Detective Thomas Ritter. Ritter isn’t much liked in the department while his new partner, Motz Beck, is a moody biker with family ties to mob boss Willi Kaiser, who owns most of the brothels in town. Mix in a gang war with heroin importer Sulejman Hasani, some dodgy politicians in the Hamburg Senate and Ritter has case nobody else would want in One-Way Ticket (2020). Still Hamburg homicide Detectives Ritter and Beck return in Bad Cop (2022) to face the city’s Albanian mafia. First an Albanian courier is gunned to death at the edge of Hamburg Harbor. Then a Hells Angel gets the same treatment on the Alster River. Ritter and Beck are forced to work with an organized crime expert – but his allegiances are far from clear.
And also bang up to date is Dan Fesperman’s Cover Wife (2021). Fesperman is a quite prolific author of novels set in Berlin and Sarajevo but here the author plumps for Hamburg. CIA agent Claire Saylor’s career has stalled. So when she’s told she’ll be going undercover in Hamburg to pose as the wife of an academic who has published a controversial interpretation of the Quran’s promise to martyrs, she assumes the job is a punishment. Her team leader is Paul Bridger, another Agency maverick and she will partner with Mahmoud, a recent Moroccan émigré to Hamburg
Talking of émigrés to Hamburg let’s finally note John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man (2008). Le Carré pops up in so many of our Crime and the City columns (Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, Panama etc) and deserves a place here too. A young Chechen arrives illegally in Hamburg, seemingly a destitute refugee, he claims to be entitled to a fortune held in a private German bank. It is of course classic post-Cold War le Carré, adapted into a great movie and perhaps, in a way, one of the author’s most personal novels. It was, after all, the city of Hamburg, was once posted as a British intelligence services agent while the literature, art and music of north Germany were as dear to le Carré as they are to his most famous creation George Smiley.
Hamburg is now often thought of as being defined by its contemporary criminal gangs, the Reeperbahn, Pauli, but it was also a crucial city in World War Two and its immediate aftermath, and authors over the decades have mined all those histories to give Hamburg a decent shelf of crime writing.
