Very influenced by the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon plus teaching modern history, back in 1995 I decided to write a series of crime novels set in 1920s Germany. Not only was it a period that I knew a lot about, but it seemed that it offered ample opportunities for crimes given the political and economic turbulence and the availability of guns as a result of the First World War. Berlin would have been a logical location but I realised that as Munich had suffered less as a result of the Second World War, finding out what it looked like in the 1920s would be rather easier. I was very fortunate to be given a tourist guide to the city published in that period.
You have to remember that back in 1995 the public did not have the internet. Email tended to be restricted to academia. Libraries had moved to computer-based lists of their books, but you still had to go and find the physical book and read it. Having moved to London in 1994, I was in a better position to access a variety of libraries. I had a GCSE in German that I had got three years earlier when unemployed, so with the aid of a large German dictionary I was able to get material from German-language texts too. Friends also lent me books, notably about the German Army in the First World War. I assembled a huge file of notes (which I still have) including hand copied and photocopied maps and long lists of names from the era.
I was determined that my detective would be in contrast to so many would be a family man rather than a loner. I also felt it was appropriate for him to be a serious Catholic and knew this would impinge on how he went about his work. Him having a family also allowed me to bring in connections to different elements of society through his wife and children. He was to maintain a positive outlook, though given the context it is unsurprising that he becomes cynical. I revisited the idea of a positive detective in 'Death in Amiens' (2016) which drew heavily on my very depressed time I spent in that town and the police detective was an intentional counterpoint to my perspective on the place.
Otto Braucher started out as Otto Beckmann, using the name of a German family I had known in West Germany in the 1980s. It was also supposed to reference the artist of the inter-war Weimar Germany era, Max Beckmann (1884-1950). However, then in 1996 there was the UK TV crime series 'Beck' and in 1997, the Swedish police series also called 'Beck', began. The German series, 'Beckmann' which began in 1999, was a chat show, but still I felt the name was getting too much usage. So, looking for an alternative name, I switched to 'Braucher' which I saw used in the USA but had a German ring to it and as a German friend said to me, it had an analogous meaning which might seem useful/appropriate.
Anyway, through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, I was writing these stories, 15,000-20,000 words, so novellas very influenced by Simenon. I did not have an idea of publishing them and any hopes seemed dashed when I encountered the first three Bernie Gunther novels of Philip Kerr published 1989-1991. Though set in Berlin, I felt I was be seen to be aping his novels. However, especially in the covers of these first three (there was a shift in style when he revived the series in 2006), which echoed the Penguin crime novel editions of the 1960s, I had to go with that green urban style myself. Of course, since then we have seen numerous crime novels set in the Weimar Germany era, the most successful being the Gereon Rath novels of Volker Kutscher, published since 2007. Berlin has primarily remained the focus, but Rory Clements has now left crime in 16th Century England for 1930s Munich with 'Munich Wolf' (2024).
Self-publishing ebooks did not really become a thing until the 2010s. My wife, a published author, suggested I got into it and having already produced 12 Braucher stories and even faked up some covers for them (pretending that Penguin had taken me up), these seemed sensible ones to start with. My original idea had been 3 x 6-story anthologies and I launched 'Braucher's Solution' and 'Braucher's Inheritance' on this basis. However, in the mid-2010s, there was a real fade for short and episodic ebook fiction, stories people could complete in a single train journey, so I disaggregated the stories and launched them as stand-alone novellas. I was rather uncomfortable selling them in that way, but it seemed to work. I continued writing more finally reaching 17 novellas in total.
In 2015 I finally got around to completing the full-length Braucher prequel novel, set in 1922, 'Munich White' which I had started at the same time as the novellas back in 1995 but had run out of steam. Having worked more with Braucher and his setting, but the 2010s I was ready to come back and complete the novel. Having three story threads that occasionally bisected was probably rather over-ambitious but we can put that down to the confidence of my youth back then. There have long been plans for 'Munich Brown' set during Munich's Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, but, despite lots of ideas for what might happen in it and some of the roots of these being laid in the Braucher novellas, I have been unable to come up with a satisfactory structure whether the three-story strand or a focus just on Braucher. This is often a challenge with historical novels, having an appropriate set of characters able to witness what you need them to witness without them teleporting all over the place or having to employ a whole platoon of characters as I ended up doing for 'Scavenged Days' (2018) and some would argue, unsuccessfully.
Now the fad of the 2010s for short or episodic ebooks seems to have died, indeed ebooks themselves seem to be waning, I still felt uncomfortable when speaking about my books having to say, 'well, of course, 17 of those crime novels are just novellas, not full-length [read 'proper'] novels.' Thus, I decided to reassemble the novellas back into the three anthologies I had originally envisaged. I was short the 18th story to complete the third anthology. For a long time I had intended to write 'Braucher and the Circle' which would be around spiritualism something which was extremely popular in Britain and Germany in the post-First World War period - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was very into it. However, again despite coming at it from different angles I could not get a satisfactory structure. Thus, I decided to swap it with 'Braucher and the Expectation' which I had intended to be set in 1924, but seemed to work instead in October 1923, rounding out the third anthology. I decided to title that anthology 'Braucher's Value' referencing the hyperinflation of mid to late 1923 that is in the background and influenced a lot of what happened at the time in Germany.
Of course, reaggregating the novellas I took the opportunity to check and revise the writing. I realised how far my writing has come since 2012, let alone 1995 and I feel these revised editions are more lucid than the approach I had back then. In addition, it is so much easier to get hold of detailed information about the era especially on political groups and the law. Accessing maps and images is also incredibly easy certainly compared to having to read through scores of books. This has allowed me to expand and indeed correct some of the details that I featured, notably on the A.G.V.K. political grouping which is mentioned in all three anthologies. Details of when certainly newspapers, cars and weapons were available is also so much easier, indeed I can access German newspapers of the time from the comfort of my own desk at home, something that would have seemed very futuristic back in 1995.
Thus, while I have always been proud of my Braucher stories, I do feel these three re-released anthologies do show the stories at their best and the 'train spotters' of historical novels might be more satisfied that anything even mildly anachronistic has been corrected. While the competition is much stiffer now than thirty, let alone thirteen years ago, I do hope that even a few readers enjoy the Braucher books, cheaper and more accessible than before, simply with fewer of those green-tinted photograph covers that myself and others have long enjoyed.
