Hamburg Noir
News
The following “writing of” articles by Peter Sarda were featured in CWA Readers News, published by the Crime Writers’ Association.
ONE-WAY TICKET
Hamburg Noir 1
"When I build something, I build it to last.”
To demonstrate his point, the carpenter in blue overalls climbs onto the St. Andreas cross he has just mounted to the wall of an S&M dungeon and tries -- unsuccessfully -- to shake it.
Below him, the stout, middle-aged madam in frosted hair, salon tan, and half glasses beams. “You’re the best,” she says.
As I watched this exchange in a Spiegel TV documentary about a whorehouse in Hamburg’s legendary St. Pauli district, I knew I had struck gold. The scene captured the working-class ethic on the wrong side of the rugged harbour town that I now called home. This was, after all, a place where prostitutes had their own union representation and pension plan.
My salt-of-the-earth impression was reinforced by locals who insisted that St. Pauli was a village for misfits like themselves. “All trouble comes from the outside,” they insisted. They were referring to the violence on the streets -- and persistent rumours that it was being stoked by an unholy alliance of “respectable” businessmen, organised crime families, and the usual suspects in City Hall. The alleged goal was to make a killing by gentrifying St. Pauli with dirty mob money laundered by bad banks.
This storyline sounded familiar. Before moving to Hamburg from California, I had cut my teeth on the hardboiled pulp classics of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Jim Thompson. My love of these stories became an addiction when I discovered them on the silver screen in art deco theaters across Los Angeles and at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which showed newly restored noir films every week, with live commentary from historians. I learned that the Golden Age of Hollywood was largely the product of American pulp writers who got their start in Black Mask magazine during the Great Depression and filmmakers who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
With this in mind, I decided to write hardboiled detective novels set in my new hometown. The result is the Hamburg Noir series, which follows a less-than-kosher police squad through murder investigations, all based in St. Pauli.
The first book of the series, One-Way Ticket, tells the story of a troubled homicide detective who has just transferred to Hamburg, giving readers a look at the city through the eyes of an outsider. It features the usual noir anti-heroes -- cops, criminals, and people who are both -- who struggle with their inner demons.
The biggest surprise for me was the love affair between a domina and her ex-con girlfriend, which appeared out of nowhere, took on a life of its own, and ended up driving the rest of the story.
BAD COP
Hamburg Noir 2
A corrupt vice cop walks into a crowded bar, slams the business end of his service weapon onto the thigh of a dealer sitting in back, steals his drugs, and walks back out, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
This true story jumped out at me as I read Meine Davidwache, the memoir of Waldemar (“Red Fox”) Paulsen, a former plainclothes cop in the colorful -- and dangerous -- St. Pauli district of Hamburg. A decade later, I used the scene to open Bad Cop, a novel about a burned-out narcotics agent on a murder spree.
The protagonist, Kriminalhauptkommissar Wolf, is loosely based on the cheerfully homicidal sheriffs in Jim Thompson’s pulp classic, Pop. 1280, and his semi-autobiographical novel, Bad Boy. Unlike these two characters, however, Wolf is not a sadist who kills for pleasure but a good cop who has seen one too many bad guys get away with murder. Morally, he is closer to Detective Jim Ryan in Nicolas Ray’s classic noir film On Dangerous Ground. Ryan ritualistically reprimands his victims before beating them: “Why do you make me do it? You know I’m gonna make you talk.” In the end, he finds redemption through a beautiful blind woman, whose brother he could not save. Wolf is not so lucky.
To add a layer of guilty pleasure to Bad Cop, I decided to let readers -- but not Wolf’s police colleagues -- in on his vigilante secret from the get-go, giving them a front-row seat as he hunts his prey. This forbidden knowledge becomes more pronounced and perverse after Wolf is assigned as an organized crime expert to the homicide squad that is investigating the series of murders he himself is committing. As the bodies pile up, the detectives working alongside him begin to suspect what readers already know -- or think they know. At the end of the story, these roles are reversed when the detectives uncover evidence that points away from their initial profile of a corrupt drug addict working for the other side and toward something much more human and sympathetic.
On a personal note, the little girl, Sarah, who plays “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on her violin in the prologue, is modelled after ... me. At age nine, I was forced to take violin lessons, imitating Suzuki Method Listen and Play recordings while other kids got to play football outside my bedroom window. Like Sarah, my violin -- for reasons that were never explained to me -- had a lion’s head (with an extremely long, curled tongue) instead of a scroll. I can still smell the resin on the horsehair bow I used to scratch across the strings.
EDDA GREEN
Hamburg Noir 3
Covert “police stations” operated by China’s Ministry of Public Security are uncovered in Germany. Despite security concerns and union protests, a Shanghai-based company is allowed to buy almost a third of Container Terminal Tollerort in Hamburg Harbor. Meanwhile, Dutch teenagers swarm the terminal at night in search of a missing shipment of cocaine.
These three news stories form the backstory of Edda Green, the third book in my Hamburg Noir series.
To avoid writing an overtly political novel, I needed a strong, colorful protagonist who didn’t trust politicians of any stripe. A former bomb disposal expert who’d lost a hand to an IED and gained a taste for oxycodone and extreme violence seemed to fit the bill. Of course, she had to have a hook instead of an artificial hand.
After finishing a detailed outline, I walked up to my oak workbench and started writing. That’s when the trouble started. The moment my fingers hit the keys, Edda was off and running, completely ignoring me and my big plans. I had no choice but to chase after her with my keyboard. It was exhilarating -- and exhausting. Three weeks later, I had a rough draft.
My first surprise was Edda’s soft side. After being sprung from prison just days into a long stretch for aggravated assault, she’s supposed to infiltrate the revolutionary cell behind the May Day riots in Hamburg. But, as she enters their command centre, a century-old theater they’ve occupied for decades, she’s love-struck by a cute little hacker named Indigo, whose dirty dreadlocks are matched by attitude a mile wide.
The two end up cuddled in a blanket on the flat roof of the former theater, talking the night away about their less-than-ideal childhoods. While Indigo holds Edda’s non-existent right hand, massaging the fingers one by one, she sings the hypnotic stanzas of a nursery rhyme with her hoarse voice. Edda drifts away with the words: “Thank you, monkey baby.”
My second and even bigger surprise was Indigo herself. She plays a minor role in the first two books of the series. This time around, she takes off. As Edda puts it: “Her baby blues were all grown up now.” But nothing prepared me for the end of the story, where Indigo shows herself to be the real heavy.
Some authors have a song in their head when they write. That was definitely the case with Edda. I listened to “Pinky’s Blues,” Sue Foley’s tribute to her Telecaster electric guitar, Pinky, a constant companion for over three decades. (“I’ve used her on every gig,” she says. Her.) Whenever I hear the workman-like solo, I think of Edda.