Hamburg Noir
Highway 99 Press
November 2020
280 pages
978-3-9822665-0-3
978-3-9822665-2-7
Be careful what you wish for.
When Homicide Detective Thomas Ritter transfers to Hamburg, he has no idea he has stepped into the biggest police scandal in the city's history. No one told Ritter that his new partner, Motz Beck, is a moody biker with family ties to local mob boss Willi Kaiser, who controls the red-light district. Or that Kaiser is fighting a hostile takeover from the head of the Albanian mafia, the silent real estate partner of a prominent senator. After Hamburg's top cop is found dead in a Kaiser whorehouse, Ritter and Beck conclude that the only people they trust less than each other are their bosses in City Hall.
“Fans of noir fiction will revel in this twisty story of tough cops, brutal gangsters and other denizens of Hamburg’s underworld.”
“Any reader who loves a hardboiled mystery and a tenacious sleuth will be quickly drawn in by this subtle but savage work of crime fiction.”
“The absorbing story will keep readers guessing until the final pages.”
Prologue
Undercover
Fool for Love
Fight Club
Breakfast of Champions
Pay Dirt
Human Qualities
Thin File
Day Shift
Loose Cannon
Old Friends
Pasha Import/Export
Candid Camera
Bad Teacher
Yellow Card
The Bunker
We Have a Problem
Team Building
Pre-Med
Next of Kin
Good Cop, Bad Cop
Strong Horse
Hippocratic Oath
Be Obvious
Involuntary Manslaughter
Behler See
Panic Button
New Arrival
Kicking Ass
Private Investigations
The Shadow
Private Office
U-Haft
Nunnery
Big Board
Sparta
The Third Man
Gamblers Anonymous
The Cage
Black Hand
Ibiza
Monopoly Money
Camp Marmal
Red Light
Itsy Bitsy Spider
Extreme Prejudice
Rat Squad
Welcome to Hamburg
Epilogue
List of characters
List of terms
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Lars felt the giant shadow before he saw it looming behind him in the bulletproof glass.
“Game time is over,” the giant said.
Lars spun around and looked up into two steel eyes embedded in a beefy skull under a single eyebrow. “What the fuck?” he said. Hasani’s enforcer didn’t normally work indoors.
“He wants to see you.”
Lars smelled garlic. “Let me cash in my chips.” He turned back to the window. The cashier was nowhere to be seen.
“Now,” the giant said.
Lars shifted his weight, keeping his phone hand out of view. His thumb felt around desperately for the SOS button. Holding it down for three seconds activated a GPS alert. Officer in trouble.
“Let’s go,” the giant said.
The button vibrated confirmation.
Lars nodded and put the phone away. Then he pivoted, took a half-step, and put his full weight into the kick.
The giant’s eyes went wide. He went down clutching his groin.
At the blackjack table, bettors looked at them with open mouths. The chef de table was frozen mid-motion, a card in his hand.
Lars slammed into the emergency exit and flew down the steps, using the railing like a sled, bumping into walls at each turn. A herd of buffalos pounded the stairways above his head. Round and round they went. Third floor, second floor, first floor, lobby.
As Lars crashed out of the stairwell, he saw a guard at the front desk talking into his sleeve and staring right at him. Lars flashed his P6 and cleared the turnstile in one fluid motion. Then he blasted through the double glass doors and raced to his Harley. It took him two frantic attempts to jump-start the beast. As it fishtailed out onto the street, he felt rain in his hair.
He made a hard right through a red at Alsterglacis. A double-articulated bus packed with commuters skidded sideways across the intersection. Up ahead was a sea of cars on Kennedybrücke.
A black van crashed through the brush of Gustav Mahler Park and accelerated into his path, its battering ram nearly grazing his right leg.
Lars gunned the chopper onto the frontage road below the bridge and through the underpass. He made a hard left onto Lombardbrücke, somehow bouncing onto the sidewalk without hitting the steel railing.
Needles of rain pelted his face as he weaved in and out of bike paths and around posts. The Alster River flew by on his right, and he kept pace with the InterCity train to his left. A kid waved at him from one of the windows.
Halfway across the bridge, the headlights were gone from his mirror. He almost laughed. Oversized black vans with snatch teams didn’t fit on sidewalks.
He slowed the chopper as the path curved into a wooded area. Wet oak leaves slapped his face as broken cement rattled his spine. The chopper made a looping left at Ferdinandstor and followed the path under a second low bridge. The InterCity screeched above.
A wall of light blinded Lars. He screamed as the railing shattered his knee, flipping the chopper sideways and slamming him into an I-beam. He clawed rusty iron on his way down.
The headlights backed up through the moving spokes of his front wheel. As the van gurgled away, everything went black.
* * *
Lars woke up to a nightmare. He was buried under tons of black oily water, trying to reach the surface. He screamed and screamed, but nothing came out.
“Goddamn it, Lars, wake up!” someone said from far away. A beefy hand slapped his face.
Lars screamed bubbles at the familiar voice. It was Motz! He got the SOS.
“Lars! Don’t you die on me!”
Die? Nobody was going to die, Lars thought. Except maybe Hasani. His badass buddy Motz would rip the Albanian apart at the joints. Lars laughed more bubbles.
“You’re back!” Motz yelled. “You scared the shit out of me, you bastard.”
“Ma—” Lars said.
“Yeah, it’s me, partner,” Motz said. “We’ll get you out of here.”
Lars shook himself free of the mask. “Mar-mal!” he screamed. Hasani’s real shipment was coming from Mazar-i-Sharif.
“What?” Motz yelled back.
Lars coughed up something thick and warm.
“Stay with me, Lars!”
“An—” He couldn’t get it all the way out.
“Save your breath, Lars!”
“An–ton!” Lars screamed, spitting out all that slimy warmth. His teeth began to chatter. Damn, was it cold out there.
“Antonov?”
Lars smiled and let go. Motz got it. Hasani was shipping under a Russian flag. They would catch him red-handed this time.
Delicious warmth filled Lars’ mouth. No more of that chattering bullshit, he thought.
“Lars!” Motz yelled. “Stay with me! You hear me, Lars? I mean it, Goddamn it! Lars, you fucking stay with me!”
Lars chewed the thick warmth. Twenty bites before you swallow, like Grandpa Hanson always said.
Motz was drifting up and away. Lars wondered what he was doing up there in all that water. When Motz opened his mouth, he made a woah-woah-woah sound. Then he was just a swaying light that got further and further away. Then he was gone.
A warm wave brushed Lars’ cheek with a gentle whoosh. He snuggled into the delicious dream. He was almost home.
“Writing One-Way Ticket”
by Peter Sarda
CWA Readers News
February 2025
"When I build something, I build it to last.”
To demonstrate his point, the carpenter in blue coveralls 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.