The idea that location would be important to the production and reception of crime fiction is not new. Since their earliest existence, Kriminalliteratur and Kriminalerzählungen have been bound to a certain necessity of place. In some ways, the concept is basi c, especially if one considers that one of the very functions of the wider genre is to situate a particular crime in a particular place. This often requires a detective or some investigatory figure to examine the scene of the crime (the Tatort, an element so obviously important that it became the title of one of Germany’s most successful and long-lasting television series). The setting of a mystery or crime story is often one of its primary defining characteristics: Sherlock Holmes’s London, Agatha Christie’s enclosed manor houses and train compartments, Kurt Wallander’s Scania or Sweden more generally, V. I. Warshawski’s Chicago, Inspector Morse’s Oxford. The subject of this essay, crime fiction native to and reflective of particular regions in Germany, represents in a way a hyperextension of the importance of location, in which the various settings of these stories become their creation myths or existential foundations. This essay argues that German regional crime fiction is both a modern development and simultaneously a recollection of crime fiction’s journalistic and literary beginnings. I will demonstrate that regional crime fiction has connections to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Fallgeschichten (case stories) that fascinated a developing reading public and satisfied readers’ taste for sensational details with a more local flavor. In what follows, I maintain that reader interest has helped to define the genre, and I track the literaryhistorical beginnings of this literature.

This essay will demonstrate that the regional subset of the crime-fiction genre fits in with the genre’s modern genesis. By referring to modernity, I aim to situate these developments in reading behavior among the technological, social, and class-related changes taking place especially after the early nineteenth century. Emerging from the sensational interests of a burgeoning reading public, crime narratives serve, in the sense defined above, an essentially modern function of investigation and enlightenment, a quest in which identity has been crucial. Marieke Krajenbrink and Kate M. Quinn argue that the solving of a crime, possibly the primary function of detective and crime fiction, leads ipso facto to the question of identity, which has gradually become more complex as the genre has evolved.