Cherrypicker | Literature
A missing person

The setting for Friedrich Ani’s latest novel may be Munich, but this is not the Munich of the rich and beautiful. A murder case is also unravelled, though not solved.

Six years on, Friedrich Ani has once again sent his best-known private investigator out onto the streets of Munich. He has won the German Crime Fiction Award for two of his now over 20 Tabor Süden novels.

Why is Ani’s character so popular? Perhaps it’s because he is so approachable. The new novel, Lichtjahre im Dunkel (Light Years in the Dark), begins with Tabor Süden seeing himself in the mirror one morning and noting with some surprise that he has aged. That will not surprise fans of Friedrich Ani given that his first Tabor Süden novel, Die Erfindung des Abschieds (The Invention of Saying Goodbye), was published back in 1998. Though the human brain may be fully aware of the inevitable chronological sequence of life, our sense of how much time has passed is very much a matter of individual perception – and this applies to Süden just as much as to anyone else. The time we have lived through does not necessarily correspond to our experience of time. In any case, Süden finds the old face that greets him in the mirror “curious. It was only yesterday that I smoked my first cigarette with Martin, my friend from school”.

Tabor Süden is also so popular because he says so little. Unlike the ubiquitous chatterboxes and braggers, he is so taciturn that others feel forced to speak to fill the gap, as silence is so hard to bear. It may be that Süden is becoming more and more taciturn as he grows older – in this novel at least one has the impression that he speaks even less than in the earlier ones.

People become visible when they disappear

Right at the start of the book, Süden’s silence loosens the tongue of Viola Ahorn, who has engaged the private detective because her husband Leo has been missing for some time. The disappearance of people is a major theme of Ani’s novels. In a 3sat interview he said: “Some people only become visible when they disappear.” A disappearance is by no means the same thing as a person who is missing. When Süden describes her absent husband as “missing”, the latter’s wife is confused – after all, one cannot really say that “a woman who with deep-seated contempt is plunging headlong into yet another relentless night” would actually miss someone.

During the course of the novel, Tabor Süden himself disappears from the plot, appearing only on the fringes and at the end. Süden “frames” the story so to speak, enabling Ani to provide space for other characters instead.

The plot is set – as is always with case with Ani – in a petit bourgeois, crime-ridden and precarious milieu in the outskirts of Munich. The place is teeming with down-and-outs who spend their time fruitlessly pondering the reasons for their failure and their possible chances of beginning afresh –hordes of the mentally and physically damaged. Leo Ahorn, the stationery shop owner who has disappeared, has become bogged down by his business, by alcohol and by his life, gets on people’s nerves by badgering them to lend him money and spends his free time at his local pub, the “Blaues Eck”. His wife Viola waits several days before taking any action in response to his disappearance. She doesn’t think much of her husband in any case.

Death can be comforted by no one

Soon after, Leo’s body is discovered in the boot of a brothel owner’s car. A neighbour, likewise a regular at the “Blaues Eck”, comes into focus, as does a half-brother from Berlin he was previously unaware of who abruptly appears and also works in the red-light district. The corpse brings the police onto the scene – along with Chief Superintendent Fariza Nasri, whom Ani fans will know from his 2021 novel Letzte Ehre (Last Respects).  Whether the explanation that is ultimately presented really means that the case has been solved remains unclear. Why should there not be some mysteries that cannot be unravelled when trying to solve a crime?

Ani’s novels are never crime fiction in the conventional sense, and Lichtjahre im Dunkeln is no exception. Literary critics often attempt to use the somewhat clumsy term “literary crime fiction” to explain the lack of tension typically associated with crime novels, as if tension and literary quality were mutually exclusive. That said, Ani genuinely doesn’t write thrillers; his novels are captivating because of the way he portrays his characters and reveals their inner lives, and above all thanks to his descriptions of specific social milieus. His books incorporate elements not only of crime and social novels, but also of existentialist literature. Süden, Superintendent Nasri and Ani himself all dedicate their lives to the “eternal cycle of damaged souls”.

At the end of the novel, Ani doffs his cap to one of his literary role models, the Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti, who appears as a neighbour of Tabor Süden and makes the latter realize: “Death … can be comforted by no one.”