Murderous Europe
November 2009
Hardly any literary genre has created as much of a stir in recent years as European crime fiction. The high literary quality of these works has increasingly blurred the distinction between entertaining mass-market paperbacks and so-called “serious” literature. Novels by authors such as Ian Rankin, Henning Mankell, Arne Dahl and Fred Vargas are works of outstanding literary quality. This development has been accompanied by a few of notable phenomena: the detectives are mostly anti-heroes; the stories themselves increasingly political; and in some cases, the novels contain social criticism that, cloaked in the garb of the crime fiction genre, reaches many more readers than dryly written sociological tomes are able to. To formulate this in rather pointed terms: the rapid developments that have been manifesting themselves in European societies of late are nowhere better reflected than in the crime fiction published in recent years.Moreover, there is hardly a genre better suited to shedding light into the fissures and abysses of the human psyche. Fred Vargas, France’s most important author of whodunits, expressed this very succinctly in an interview with Tobias Gohlis, in which she called her novels “tales of overcoming fear.”
On four evenings in November 2009, some of the greats of European crime fiction will read and discuss their work in the Posthof. In order to present a spectrum of authors that is as broad as possible, three experts in this field—Tobias Gohlis, Franz Schuh and Eva Rossmann—will serve as co-curators to put together this program in cooperation with the Posthof.
Location // Posthof - Zeitkultur am Hafen
Idea/Concept // Wilfried Steiner
Organizers // LIVA, Posthof and Linz09
The Curatorial Staff
Tobias Gohlis is an editor at the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit and spokesperson for ARTE TV’s KrimiWelt best-of list. He is widely regarded as the crime thriller expert in German-speaking Europe.
Franz Schuh is one of Austria's most important writers, an instructor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, critic and columnist for, among other publications, Die Zeit and Literaturen, free-lance contributor to various TV programs, and a whodunit fan with heart and soul.
Eva Rossmann is herself an author of very well-received works of detective fiction. At the core of her Mira Valensky series are pretty outward appearances and what lurks behind them.
