Cologne, or to the purists Köln, fourth biggest city in Germany, the largest in North Rhine-Westphalia, with just over a million inhabitants. Elements of Roman rule, then the combined tribes of the Franks before the Saxons pushed down from the south. A city of glorious Medieval architecture…and some crime stories too….
Let’s start with the Medieval period. Cologne resident and writer Frank Schätzing’s Death and the Devil (2010) takes place in 1290 when the distinctive (and of course still dominating the city) Cologne Cathedral, the most ambitious building in all Christendom, is under construction. In its shadow seethes a society in ferment: traumatized Crusaders returning from the Holy Land, religious tensions poised to explode into violence, a burgeoning merchant class that despises the old aristocracy and is determined to seize power.
Jacob the Fox, a flame-haired petty thief, witnesses a murder—the cathedral’s architect, pushed to his death from the scaffold by a black-clad assassin. The fallout from the murder will almost tear the city apart.
A Golden Age great visited the Rhineland and Cologne for Castle Skull (1931). John Dickson Carr sets this classic mystery takes place on the banks of the Rhine, where detective Henri Bencolin (a recurring character for Dickson Carr) investigates a gruesome death at a dramatic, spooky castle.
The city took a battering in World War Two from Allied bombing raids—a city that comes to life in Sam Eastland’s The Elegant Lie (2019). It’s 1949 and In the bombed-out ruins of Cologne, black marketeer Hanno Dasch is king. A fact that has not escaped the attention of Allied Intelligence examining the corruption of post-war Germany, still looking for old Nazis and facing a new threat from Stalin’s KGB.
American Army officer, Nathan Carter, is recruited to approach Dasch and to ingratiate himself with promises of stolen army supplies. And so he enters the labyrinthine world of post-war Cologne as a race begins between the Russian and American spy agencies.
A few books that start in Cologne:
- Patrick Suskind’s enormous best seller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2010) is mostly set in eighteenth-century France but starts in Cologne and is the tale of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the world’s most gifted scent creator, who disappears. Throughout Cologne remains a key location for the protagonist’s olfactory obsession.
- And let us not forget that Volker Kutscher’s Babylon Berlin books series starts in Cologne in 1929 with Babylon Berlin (2016). Before Berlin Detective Inspector Rath, was a successful career officer in the Cologne Homicide Division before a shooting incident in which he was disgraced and transferred to Berlin.
- R.B. Schow’s The Devil In Cologne: A Vigilante Justice Thriller: 4 (2022) takes recurring hero Atlas Hargrove, Former SWAT commander, now roaming around Europe from uncovering a nefarious underground network in one of Cologne that makes people disappear. So begins a chase across Europe. Other Atlas Hargrove titles take him to Odessa, Prague, Mexico and South Africa.
- And fans of Patricia Highsmith and Ripley will remember that, while mostly set in France, Ripley Underground (1970) briefly visits Cologne.
Every so often in Crime and the City I feel compelled to mention a writer who unfortunately hasn’t been translated into English but, and in this case if you can read German, is super important to the city’s crime writing. In Cologne that’s Gisa Klönne, a German former journalist and crime writer, the author of a number of bestselling, award-winning and critically acclaimed novels featuring superintendents Krieger and Korzilius.
Yet tragically Klönne’s Cologne set Krieger and Manni Korzilius novels remains only in German. Two of her books Under the Ice (2017) and Homecoming (2024) are in English but take place in Canada, Australia and London missing Cologne.
Also, if you can read German, do look out for the Cologne-set crime novels of Selim Özdogan & Katinka Buddenkotte and Rhineland author Hans Werner Kettenbach.
However, in English you can read Kettenbach’s The Stronger Sex (2011) where young lawyer Alex defends an industrialist Herbert Klofft in a case for wrongful dismissal being brought against him by his former employee and mistress. She is thirty-four, he seventy-eight, a despot, now wheelchair bound and dying of cancer. Alex must deal with a hopeless case, his growing empathy with a repulsive client and his sexual attraction to Klofft’s elderly wife.
And finally Cologne writer Melanie Raabe, who is a former journalist lives in Cologne, and writes novels that are guaranteed to, well…weird you out might be the best way of putting it. They’re not necessarily set in Cologne but as a local author she’s well worth mentioning. Her debut novel, The Trap (2015), was published in more than twenty countries and became an international bestseller. It was followed by The Stranger Upstairs (2016), The Shadow (2018) and The Woods (2019).
The Trap is a compelling premise—twelve years ago, Linda’s sister Anna was murdered. Her killer was never caught, but Linda saw him. Now, all these years on, she’s just seen him again. On TV. In The Stranger Upstairs a woman’s husband comes home after a trip, except she doesn’t recognize the man who walks back into the house and continues life as if they have known each other for years.
The Shadow is also a strange premise—a homeless person tells a passing woman “On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm. Of your own free will. And for a good reason.” She shrugs this off as a mere coincidence, however, until shortly afterwards she meets a man called Arthur Grimm. The Woods remains to be translated.
So a very mixed bag of inspiration, history, and genres from Cologne and the surrounding Rhineland. Hopefully there’s something there to inspire you to stay in, pour a glass of Riesling and read a crime novel!
