AE Hotchner’s Crime: The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom – Culture


One suspects that many a hundred-year-olds undertake unusual escapades, not just since Jonas Jonasson’s novels. The fact that someone at the age of 99 writes a detective story like “The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom”, which Emil Tischbein would have turned pale after reading it, is special, however.

The crime thriller is set in St. Louis in the early 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression. The author of this story, who obviously slips into the role of his youthful hero Aaron (“almost thirteen”) with great empathy and knowledge, is the American writer and screenwriter AE Hotchner, who died in February 2020 at the age of 102. His story, published in 2018, is based on his childhood novel, King of the Hill, which Steven Soderbergh filmed in 1993. Hotchner became known, among other things, through the biographies of Ernest Hemingway and Paul Newman, with whom he was close friends.

Things get worse when the boy witnesses a robbery on a jewelry store and his father is placed in custody.

Aaron is a bright, inquisitive boy, a good student and athlete, and he is always optimistic about the future. And that despite the fact that his mother is lying in a sanatorium with tuberculosis and his father, a Polish-Jewish emigrant, lost his business in the crisis and is now struggling as a sales representative with no success. Aaron is more or less dependent on himself to survive. Things get worse when the boy witnesses a robbery on a jewelry store and his father is placed in custody. The son tries day to day to stay afloat and at the same time to clear up the background of the crime in order to get his father free. He, the first-person narrator, “detects” – as he calls it in Anja Malich’s stylish translation. That actually reminds of the Berlin milieu of Emil Tischbein and his friends around Gustav with the horn. In Hotchner’s novel, a nimble newspaper boy supports the part-time detective. Over time, a small but fine group of helpers will be grouped around the two of them.

Hotchner’s most important moral message, which is visible everywhere in the plot: If such a catastrophic situation can be overcome at all, then only with the solidarity of other people and a basic feeling of security and trust. However, the urban setting chosen by the author is much more brutal than that in Kästner’s children’s crime thriller. Shots are fired and villains fall over before the situation is cleared up. Words end up as if Gregory Peck were stepping into the action as a righteous lawyer.

Hotchner’s story about the little survival strategist is told in an old-fashioned way, with a lot of love for small details and not just in the swing of one action to the next. It is precisely because of this that the milieu takes on tangible contours, in which honest poor people, adventurers and criminals meet. The realistic black and white illustrations by Tim Köhler underline this impression. (from 12 years)

AE Hotchner: The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom. With illustrations by Tim Köhler. Translated from the English by Anja Malich. Gerstenberg Verlag, Hildesheim 2021. 252 pages, 16 euros.

.



Source link