If you are still wondering why people, for whom literature is a very serious thing to be done in silence and devotion, do not consider Sebastian Fitzek a writer, but a book showmaster, a kind of Thomas Gottschalk of the psychological thriller: Welcome to the homepage fitzek-playlist.de.
One side like Focus Online on crack. It shows a suburban street at night, Nikolassee, the expensive Berlin bacon belt. The colors are dimmed and have a gray cast, the cobblestones are damp with fog. In the background a white picket fence that is strikingly slate for the area. The fence appears in the book advertised here. It is called “playlist”. A psychological thriller. Child abduction, murders spraying buckets of arterial blood, life-beaten protagonists, the plot hits a crazy hook. So everything that makes a good Fitzek thriller, and yes, it should be said here that there is: good Fitzek thrillers and sometimes very good ones. “Playlist” just isn’t one of them.
Fitzek went on stage in a straitjacket and a Hannibal Lecter mask
In any case, in front of the property: a white van. The van is more important to the plot than the fence, so it is closer to the front of the picture. Its rear doors are open and warm golden-yellow light oozes from the hold. A promise? A trap? Is it still a van at all? Or already the gate to hell? From here on, note: Nothing is what it seems.
Right at the front of the picture is: Sebastian Fitzek. It is not part of the plot of the book.
And even in front of Fitzek, as if it was pasted directly on the screen, the visitor shouted “Breaking News”. A kind of agency ticker runs along the bottom of the screen and advertises a live stream. Above that, in the well-known Fitzek book title typography, which looks as if scratched into glass in screeching panic, the question: “Are you ready for the playlist?” And a countdown. The countdown was last Friday morning: 5 days, 11 hours, 5 minutes, 7 seconds.
The success of an author Fitzek once told a colleague a few years ago, depend largely on the unglamorous. Which means, among other things, that, in the most beautiful sense of the word, he is not too bad for anything if it only helps to get his books to the readers. He went on stage in a straitjacket and a Hannibal Lecter mask. Before that, he let it be spread that he had gone mad while writing. When his thriller “Das Paket” was due to appear, he borrowed a parcel delivery uniform, burst into his publisher’s marketing session unannounced, distributed packages containing the manuscripts for “Das Paket” and watched the assembled crew see how she excitedly unwrapped the souvenirs. Then he said he wanted to have “this experience” with the reader, please. “The package” was then of course delivered as a package.
It is working. Since Fitzek’s 2006 debut “The Therapy”, all of the 50-year-old’s books (not just the thrillers) have been bestsellers. He has been Germany’s best-selling author for five years in a row.
Almost everything “depends entirely on what you are inclined to believe”
This time Fitzek has come up with an interactive game that can also be found on the homepage – something between a late “Monkey Island” and a very early “Grand Theft Auto”. Videos mix with static search images and small animations. If you like, you can puzzle your way through parts of the plot, crack codes, decipher scraps of music. Of course, Fitzek himself appears in the videos – white shirt, dark suit, perfect private radio timbre, the hint of a shadow of a beard. No tie. “My name is Sebastian Fitzek,” he says, “and today I have a very special story for you: ‘Playlist’. With it you enter a confusing, perhaps even disturbing world. It all depends on what you are inclined to do believe”. Then he whispers the sentence that should be the essence of his new book: “15 songs make the difference between life and death.”
You don’t have to find Fitzek’s books bad to say: The staging is often even better.
Which now leads to “Playlist”, which is significantly worse than the staging. A 15-year-old has disappeared, Feline Jagow. No clues, no messages, no ransom note. Until the doorbell rings at the family door. Not at some point in the book, but in the first sentence: “Exactly at 6:42 pm, three weeks, two days and nine hours after his daughter disappeared without a trace on her way to school, the doorbell rang twice and Thomas Jagow had to find out that that human horror knows no limits. “
Thomas, Fitzek characters are more like first name characters, so step outside the door on the following pages, find a brick with a key on it, pass the white picket fence, which is strikingly crooked for the area, sees a van, opens the back door, discovers his daughter inside Hold. Then his cell phone rings.
Sebastian Fitzek: Playlist. Psychological thriller. Droemer, Munich 2021. 400 pages, 22.99 euros.
And of course, as Fitzek does in his thrillers, the ringing here has to become a cliffhanger. Before we go any further, first a couple of other characters: Alexander Zorbach, for example, first-person narrator and life-beaten investigator, whom Feline’s mother instructs to look for her daughter, but who does not have much time for it. He’s due to go to jail in a few days for killing someone he thought was a serial killer in the previous book. Not just any serial killer, but Mike “Scholle” Scholokowsky, the “devil who murdered my wife and kidnapped my son. The spawn of evil who once led me to kill an innocent man whom I thought was guilty.” Plaice itself escaped.
Alina Gregoriev too, but injured. She is “the woman I had tried in vain to contact in the last few months. Because she stayed away from me for a good reason: she did not want to die”. Alina has already investigated with Alexander in the previous book. She is blind. Was blind. After all, nothing is what it seems, which is why she has been able to see again since an operation – but only in a shadowy manner and still overwhelming her brain with stimuli. Alina has an ambigram as a tattoo: “LUCK” in one angle. “But when I hugged her from behind and looked over her shoulder, the tattoo in front of my eyes turned into the word FATE. Coincidence or destiny?“
Fitzek often asks such questions. Too often this time.
Finally, there is an institution called Ambrosia, which could be a women’s refuge, or a sect. The manager has a diplomatic passport, so the police have a hard time looking. Besides, nothing is what it seems.
After Thomas has hung up, he goes back into the house and leaves his daughter in the van. The playlist appears for this. In action – and in real life: Fitzek got 15 artists to write songs for him. Relatively a lot of very German private radio standard, yes. There are a few “The Voice of Germany” jurors and a few other people who cannot be distinguished – Johannes Oerding, Tim Bendzko, Joris. Like this. But also Beth Ditto and Kool Savas. In order for her pieces to become part of the plot, a lot has to be sung about walls, dungeons, bars, darkness and eyes. The whole thing is advertised, fiction diffuses into reality. In the press departments of the publishing house and record company they therefore speak of “real fiction thriller”, which is a bit like equating the game “sinking ships” with the sea battle of Lepanto. In fact, music and books live very side by side. Where they touch each other, it takes a lot from plausibility.
“Eyelids” is the name of the playlist. No typo. The blind Alina once called her that – for Feline. You know each other from before. Coincidence or destiny?
Or at least the point at which you have to realize that Sebastian Fitzek, the author who doesn’t want to write world literature, but good, German thrillers that are nonetheless not embarrassing, which is a lot, got lost here. That the idea of music that comes to life, that makes it from the book to the radio and from there into the charts (which you will of course succeed in doing), led him to a “Drei ???” – Drifting Scavenger Hunt. That his causalities and contexts, which have always been latently wrongly constructed, but then mostly loosely driven home with very splendidly unpretentious craftsmanship, turn out to be a bit crazy this time. Feline communicates through the playlist. Maybe. Songs make clues, clues make words, words make places. And at some point nothing really makes sense anymore.