BOOK INFO
1. The prequel to The Basel Killings published by BLP in July 2021, winner of the Friedrich Glauser Prize, Germany’s most prestigious crime fiction award. Other winners have included Bernhard Schlink and Martin Suter.
2. Part of a highly acclaimed 10 book series featuring Basel police inspector Peter Hunkeler, a character with legendary status in crime fiction written in German.
3. This is a thriller driven by a chase like Hank and Jacob in A Simple Plan by Scott Smith or even Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. Unusually, and refreshingly, no one gets killed.
THE STORY:
A Lebanese man carrying diamonds in his bag is on the train from Frankfurt to Basel, a drug mule on the return journey. At the Basel train station Inspector Hunkeler is waiting for him after a tipoff from the German police. The courier manages to flush the stones away in the station WC. Erdogan, a young Turkish sewage worker, finds the diamonds in the pipes under the station. To him they mean wealth and the small hotel he always wanted to buy near his hometown. To his older Swiss girl-friend Erika, the stones signify the end of their life together. She knows that Erdogan has a wife and children in Turkey. For the courier, finding the stones is a matter of life and death. His employers are on their way to “tidy things up”. For Hunkeler the stones are the only way to get to the people behind the drug trade. They turn out to include not only the bottom feeding drug gangs, but bankers and politicians very high up the Basel food chain.
The Frankfurt– Basel Intercity – a sleek, streamlined train – was crossing the Upper-Rhine plain. It was the middle of February, there were fingers of snow along the bare branches of the vines going up the slope to the east. A picture-postcard landscape dotted with crows and villages with pointed gables.
Guy Kayat, a thirty-five-year-old Lebanese in a camel- hair coat, was standing at the corridor window, the empty compartment with his reserved seat behind him; on the floor beside him was his black travel bag of African antelope leather. To steady himself he had his left hand on the lower window frame, a cigarette in his right hand. He was tired from his early-morning flight from Nicosia to Frankfurt. It had been pleasantly warm in Nicosia , the sky blue, but now the world outside was grey and cold. How could people live in that unpleasant climate, he wondered, why didn’t they emigrate? For him it was no problem, he was only intending to spend a few days in Basel, he was travelling on business.
The train thundered into a tunnel and Kayat leaned back, away from the noise of the wheels. He dropped his cigarette and trod it out. Nervously he looked up and down the empty corridor: there was no one to be seen. He checked his tie, the knot was perfectly in place. Everything was as it should be, and there would be no problems with the rest of the journey.
As the train came out into the light again and the clat- ter of the wheels stopped, two men dressed in discreet grey appeared at the far end of the corridor. Kayat could see at once that they were officials. One of them opened the door of the first compartment and went in. The other gave Kayat what seemed to be a bored glance. and
Kayat’s mouth went dry . It was a familiar feeling and he knew that now he had to stay calmly by the window and wait for what was to come . It was quite normal for Swiss customs officials to check travellers to Basel, he was ready for that. Keep calm, give them a friendly smile and don’t turn a hair – that, after all, was his profession.
Kayat took another cigarette out of the packet and lit it. His right hand with the lighter was trembling, his armpits had started sweating. What was all this? Why was he losing his nerve?
He inhaled deeply, then turned his head to the left, towards the men. One was clearly still in the compartment, the other standing there, legs apart, in the corridor, holding a thick, black book he’d taken out of the briefcase on the floor by his feet. He leafed through it slowly until he came to the right page, then took a pencil out of his breast pocket and made a note in it. Putting the pencil away again, he closed the book and looked along the corridor, narrowing his eyes as if something had caught his attention.
Kayat knew that, as an Arab, he stood out in this country. He was aware of how people looked at him when he walked round Frankfurt, that flash of unconscious hatred covered up at once with an insincere smile. The fact was that people were racist, here and elsewhere, even though They were racist because they felt insecure in their different -coloured skin and therefore saw everything foreign as a threat. It wasn’t that bad. And if you behaved correctly and always had enough money on you, then you were treated correctly, even as an Arab.
THE AUTHOR AND THE TRANSLATOR
Hansj örg Schneider, born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1938, worked as a teacher, and journalist. He is one of the most performed playwrights in the German language but is best known for his Inspector Hunkeler crime novels. Schneider has received numerous awards, among them the prestigious Friedrich Glauser Prize for The Basel Killings. He lives and writes in Basel.
Mike Mitchell lives in Scotland and has published over eighty translations from German and French, including all the Friedrich Glauser Sergeant Studer novels and Gustav Meyrink's five novels. His translation of Rosendorfer's ‘Letters Back to Ancient China’won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize.
PUB DATE: January 13, 2022
MARKET: Crime Fiction
BINDING: Paperback
PRICE: £ 8.99
BIC CODE: FA/ FF
ISBN: 978-1913394-622
TERRITORY: UK & Commonwealth, Europe.
SIZE:B • 208 pages
PURCHASE LINK....
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