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Thirty years ago, the crime novel began a surprising revival in all the Germanspeaking countries of Europe. What started as the regional crime story in Germany and spread to Austria in recent years has heralded the rebirth of a sentimental local genre known as the Heimatroman (homeland novel). In Austria, nearly every second novel can be advertised as a crime novel. Yet the rules of the genre are often ambitiously broken, varied, or satirized. Austrian readers love the combination of crime, local color, and a detailed representation of the social situation. This synthesis of elements isn't new, but after the Second World War and ten years of occupation, Austria needed time to rediscover its own literary roots and to exploit the typical Austrian gift of treating death artistically.
Still, Austria's fascination with crime fiction has a long history. In Auguste Groner (1850- 1929), Austria brought forth one of the first internationally known women crime writers. Groner, the "mother" of all Austrian women crime writers, began to write crime stories around 1890 and invented the figure Josef Müller, the first serial police detective in German crime literature. Groner's novels were translated, and Josef Müller became internationally famous, but the First World War plunged the author into obscurity. Ironically, Groner's contributions to crime fiction have been much more widely acknowledged in the United States than in Europe. In 1992 the American Germanist Mary Tannert wrote a doctoral dissertation on Groner that remains the only in-depth study in any language of Groner's crime fiction.
Today, there is an organization for Austrian writers of crime fiction (www.krimiautoren.at), and, of the seventy-five member authors, fortythree are women! But since most reviews and literary supplements in many parts of Europe still ignore the mass of women writers, I have decided to report on the most interesting and promising women crime writers in Austria- those who have already proved the quality of their work and are known in all three Germanspeaking countries.
In the 1970s, only one woman was able to succeed in the Austrian market. Helga Anderle has written more than six hundred short crime stories for German and Austrian newspapers and journals and served as a pathfinder for those just beginning to learn the rules of the genre. Anderle creates...