Crime definitely belongs in the big city, because only there are the abysses deep enough, is life sufficiently spoiled and, on top of that, social control is largely overridden? Jacques Berndorf had a very different opinion. The writer Michael Preute published his first thriller under this pseudonym in 1989: “Eifel-Blues”.
22 further investigations followed, all between the Moselle, Rhine and the border with Belgium and Luxembourg. Berndorf wrote regional thrillers before the genre had its name, making him one of the most successful German authors. The total circulation of his books is said to be more than six million.
The main character is always a journalist named Siggi Baumeister. Like the Prussian, born in Duisburg in 1936, before he became a popular crime writer. He worked at the New Ruhr newspaper and the Rheinische Postlater for the Star, Quick and Colorful. In 1968 he was arrested in Czechoslovakia while reporting on the spot about the Red Army’s invasion.
In the mid-eighties he moved to the Eifel town of Berndorf, hence the pseudonym. The journalistic work became less, the fiction more, and at some point Preute was only Jacques Berndorf, who – as befits regional crime stories – always also provided milieu studies. From a literary point of view, he did it in a rather lackluster, linguistically typical way, but with topographical and social knowledge and not without socio-critical ambition. Siggi Baumeister solved the last case in 2013. Now its creator Michael Preute has died at the age of 85.