By all accounts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s memoir, Freedom, published this year, says little about who she really is beyond the brilliant politician who led Germany during the chaos of the last twenty years between 2005 and 2021. He would have adopted, he writes, the British royal family’s saying “Never explain, never complain”.
The gap, however, is more than made up for in German author David Safier’s absurdist crime series in which Merkel finds a post-retirement fix as a detective. Published in Germany since 2021 and revised after its popularity in the West, the English translation of the first of four books in the series, Murder at the Castle, has just been released. Retired in the village of Kleinfreudenstadt-on-Dumpfsee in the north of Berlin, where she spends her time apart from baking, and choosing which color blazer to wear, Merkel’s life takes an interesting turn when she gets the chance to play. the assassination of the local nobleman Baron von Baugenwitz.
Accompanied by her husband, Achim, a quantum chemist as Merkel’s real partner, the pug Putin (who was adopted and named after his human came to the meeting with a large dog because he knew about his cynophobia) and the watchman Mike, this is Merkel’s. a chance to test his problem-solving skills in a new test. The mystery of the locked door – the baron is found in his wine cellar, poisoned – is cozy, which is to say, not an edge-of-the-seat thriller. But what makes it even more fun is reading Safier’s quirky one-liners, rendered by Jamie Bulloch in a powerful translation. The acerbic little girl “sounded as enthusiastic as David Cameron when they discussed free movement of people in the European Union”; an act of abandonment by her husband it is dismissed as follows: “…when a man smiles condescendingly, it was usually a sign that he was doing something. If he had a euro for every smile of a caring man, he sometimes thought, he would be able to fund the clean energy transition on his own.”; A particularly boring moment in a local drama for students is used by the thought, “Compared to six hours of Peking opera with Xi Jinping, everything else is a piece of cake.”.
This is Richard Osman’s place, made with equal parts chutzpah and warm-hearted compassion. One can look forward to what’s next in the series.
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