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She only invited two bottles of red wine to her birthday party.
Never go backwards. If that’s some kind of life motto, the years have taken their toll on it. The deeds and misdeeds and idleness. Anna Marx is sixty-four years old. As in the Beatles song that she plays over and over again. When I’m Sixty-Four … Unmelodic sniffing in the background, but she’s already pretty drunk by then.
from: Anna Marx und der sanfte Tod
(my own translation)
no English version so far!
A Female PI in a Male Powerhouse
Anna Marx works as a journalist in the 80s and writes about any kind of receptions, balls, fashion adventures, love affairs, sprees, society gossip … She creates the cherry on the cake which is well-deserved when the readers of the newspaper have dutifully made their way through politics and economics.
Anna lives in Bonn, when Bonn was the powerhouse of the Federal Republic of Germany. At that time there was also an active Iron Curtain and a thick Berlin Wall. Bonn was the centre of politics as well as lobbying – and all types of spies’ activities. Politicians had their favorite hang-outs, journalists had their meeting points – it was mainly a male society with some women intermingling.
(Anna, a gorgeous female, big-busted with big red hair, remembers that once a senior administration official mentioned that she had a lot of Holz vor der Hütten (aka big busts) … A remark nowadays totally unthinkable in the decade of Me Too.)
Anna is single. She has a lover, but he is married and not keen to get a divorce. Anna dreams of writing articles for a nationwide news magazine about hot topics in politics … Unfortunately she sticks with gossip. As soon as she gets some information about an affair, a crime, suitable for an article for the front page, she starts snooping around. It works, but unfortunately afterwards she still remains with her desk in the society gossip section.
From time to time there are crimes typical for the background of Bonn and Anna seizes her opportunity. Also sometimes people approach her for some investigating work like tailing a wife, following the money when there might be bribery, searching the whereabouts of critical secrets … Anna uses her knowledge about the society and snoops around. Sometimes there is murder … Sometimes a good article is possible at the end … It’s the time when there were no refugee crises, no illegal immigrants, but the protection of the environment moved into public awareness as well as protest movements aigainst nuclear power plants. Anna has to deal with a intermingling of social and political actions crowned with murder.
Finally she decides to move to Berlin, the next political hotspot – and to become a private investigator.
For rather a long time there were no news about Anna Marx and her fate. Finally a novel arrived starting with her sixty-fourth birthday.
Berlin hadn’t become a success for Anna. Her PI business is low, she is financially broken, her apartment is cancelled because of redevelopment plans, which will create modern structures on old building grounds, friends vanish … when she suddenly gets an invitation from a colleague out of her Bonn days. Her colleague left journalism for a marriage and is a well-off widow now. She has some concerns about the death of her mother in a residential home for the elderly, one of the top addresses in Bonn, a luxury retirement setting.
Anna dissolves her household and after a good-bye party travels back to Bonn where she can live in a granny annexe in the mansion of her colleague. She starts investigating – and at the same time walks along Bonn a Bad Godesberg trying to find places, bars, restaurants … friends of her past. Of course now the powerhouse has moved to Berlin …
Anna is no longer the red bombshell – only the passion for good living remained. Many a friend vanished or died. The heroes of the 80s … all gone now. Berlin established a new culture not hardly comparable to the Bonn scene, this special political and economic environment, where Anna investigated secrets decades ago.
In short: Anna clarifies the mist around the residential home and what happened to the suspicious fatalities. At the same time Covid starts with the first lock-downs … her colleague flies into the sun together with a new boyfriend and Anna may stay in her home. Wait and see, thinks Anna. Her fundamental issues won’t vanish, but for the moment …
I liked the novels about Anna Marx when reading in the 80s and 90s … the last novel is as compelling, however, more from the point of view of society changes, political developments, social sensitivities.