Marc Ritter

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Marc Ritter (born October 18, 1967 in Munich ) is a German author and internet manager. Since 1994 he has worked in various management positions for media companies, management consultancies and online services. Ritter has been writing detective novels and thrillers since 2010. He wrote a multi-award-winning non-fiction book about death.

Life

Marc Ritter was born in 1967 in the Munich-Harlaching Municipal Hospital. His parents moved to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1974 . There Marc Ritter graduated from the Werdenfels-Gymnasium in 1987. Marc Ritter is married for the second time and lives with his wife and two of his five children in Munich.

Media and Internet creation

Marc Ritter began to work as a journalist while still doing community service. He reported on politics, sport, culture and gossip from Garmisch-Partenkirchen for a local newspaper in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. From 1989 onwards, Ritter studied modern German literature, organizational psychology and political science at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . He also worked as a reporter and photographer for local newspapers of the Süddeutscher Verlag. He also worked as a still photographer for TV productions, including the BR classic Löwengrube (series) with Jörg Hube and Christine Neubauer . From 1992 he worked for a communication agency and completed a part-time further education at the Bavarian Academy for Advertising and Marketing, Munich.

In 1994, the Süddeutsche Verlag Marc Ritter for the newly founded SZ youth magazine now one. Ritter took on the tasks of marketing, sales, advertising sales, production and advertising scheduling. Here, Ritter came into contact with online media. In 1995, together with some editors, he put the Süddeutsche Zeitung's first online offer live online and sold the first internet advertising space in Germany.

In 1997 Ritter moved to Microsoft , where he was hired as business manager for the city's information portal Sidewalk. In the same year he took over the areas of marketing and business development at Microsoft's online service MSN . In 1999, Ritter moved to Yahoo Germany, where he worked as Director Business Development Partnerships.

In 2002 Marc Ritter started his own business consultancy. The company "Ritter Business Development" worked u. a. for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin . The projects included conception, partner acquisition and land use planning for the Haus der Gegenwart , which was opened jointly in 2005 by Munich's Lord Mayor Christian Ude and Bill Gates . Ritter also acted as managing director of the operating company Haus der Gegenwart non-profit GmbH for one year.

In 2005, Ritter founded the Internet portal Sportsella.com, an online service that offered sales training for employees in the sporting goods retail sector. Ritter later ceded the company to his business partner.

From 2006 on, Ritter worked for the management consultancy aquarius consulting in Munich; from 2007 for the Schörghuber group of companies , Munich, for which he managed global sponsoring and introduced data-based relationship management (" Customer Relationship Management "). After the death of the company owner Stefan Schörghuber , Ritter left the group in 2009 and worked again for aquarius consulting.

Ritter has been with Google since 2013 ; here he is working in a European management position.

writing

From 2010 Marc Ritter began to write professionally. During a sabbatical he wrote his first novel, the detective novel “Josefibichl”, which was published in October 2011 by Munich-based Piper Verlag . In the following two years, Ritter dealt almost exclusively with the writing of suspense literature. To meet the demand from publishers and readers, he introduced several crime and thriller series. As a by-product of his research, he collected material about death, which he found in the non-fiction book “Das AllerlETZ. Everything you always wanted to know about death ”(Riemann, 2014) processed.

Alpine thrillers

Garmisch crime novels from the Gonzo Hartinger series

The detective novel “Josefibichl” (Piper, 2011) introduces the local reporter Karl-Heinz “Gonzo” Hartinger, whose life commutes between Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, as the hero. The novel is a typical representative of the regional crime genre , in which, in addition to the actual criminal case, the life of a manageable sociotope , in this case the Alpine town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen , is illuminated. Other names for Ritter's crime novels are "Garmisch-Krimis" or "Alpenkrimis". In the successful series, which was continued with Volume 2 “Herrgottschrofen” in March 2013, Volume 3 “Stieranger” (March 2014) and Volume 4 “Frauenmahd” (February 2015), Ritter usually connects three to four narrative strands. It is about one (or more) murders, the background of which is usually a historical occurrence (for example in "Josefibichl" actual events from the Nazi era in Garmisch-Partenkirchen) as well as a current political development (for example the search for a nuclear repository Garbage in "Herrgottschrofen"). In the face of these - in comparison to other Alpine thrillers, extremely political - motives, the hero Karl-Heinz "Gonzo" Hartinger, local reporter, photographer and renegade, gets entangled in spectacular criminal cases - often initially as the main suspect who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hartinger's private life oscillates between the local and down-to-earth mountain farmer Kathi Mitterer, with whom he has an adolescent son, and the sophisticated and extremely self-confident Munich pathologist Dr. Dorothee Allgäuer. This constellation not only contributes to the characterization of the hero in Ritter's Garmisch crime novels, but also drives the plot forward. Another important role in the Gonzo Hartinger novels is the retired high school teacher Albert Frey, who, as a local historian, brings historical backgrounds to light. The acknowledgments in Ritter's Garmisch crime thriller indicate that Albert Frey's fictional character is based on a real former car teacher named Alois Schwarzmüller; this former teacher publishes largely unknown information from the annals of the Olympic site on the Internet.

Alpine mystery thriller

Marc Ritter started a second Alpine thriller series back in 2012 as a commissioned work for the Munich publisher Droemer Knaur. Between April and June 2012, the Droemer Knaur-Imprint neobooks.com published the digital series crime thriller “Transalp”, which was co-authored with the puzzle author CUS (puzzle author) . The original twelve episodes of the weekly e-book series were combined with puzzles that CUS contributed to the work. In addition, CUS wrote the perspective of the criminal Benno Spindler, who is being followed across the Alps by the head of the Munich target manhunt. The background to the action in "Transalp" is a handwriting of the Nibelungenlied , in which Adolf Hitler is said to have scribbled a reference to his legacy. This incident was invented by Ritter and CUS. In autumn 2015 Knaur published “Transalp” in a paperback edition.

thriller

Unlike in the two Alpine thriller tracks, in which the focus is on the local, Ritter's thrillers “Crusade” and “Bluteis” deal with large-scale terror scenarios. In technical terminology, such plots are also referred to as "high concept". However, Ritter remains true to his scenery, and the thrillers are also set in the Alps. This setting earned him the title “Dan Brown of the Alps” among readers.

In “Kreuzzug” (Droemer, March 2012) the Zugspitze is captured by terrorists. From different perspectives - that of the hero Thien Hung Baumgartner trapped in the tunnel of the Zugspitz cog railway, that of the crisis team in the Chancellery, that of the CIA agent guiding and monitoring the actions - the reader follows a fast and sometimes brutal action plot. The thriller “Bluteis” (Droemer) followed in autumn 2013, in which the arc between the glamorous tourist town of St. Moritz and land grabbing in Africa. In his thrillers, Ritter negotiates the great problems of the earth such as the exploitation of developing countries and overpopulation. In dedications and acknowledgments, he refers to the Swiss critic of capitalism Jean Ziegler and the American physicist Al Bartlett and his well-known lecture “Arithmetic, Population and Energy”. A coincidental parallelism between a fictional location in the thriller “Bluteis” and reality caused a sensation: The fictional “Luxury Hideaway Osterbach” chosen as the setting in the book, in which an elite group of politicians and business leaders invented by Ritter, meets, has big ones Similarity to the actually existing Hotel Schloss Elmau , the site of the real G7 summit in 2015. Ritter's book came onto the market in the same week that it was publicly announced that the G7 summit would be held at Schloss Elmau in 2015 .

Non-fiction

In cooperation with the art director and book designer Tom Ising, Marc Ritter wrote the non-fiction book “Das AllerlETZ. Everything you always wanted to know about death ”, published in autumn 2014 by Riemann (Verlag) / Random House . The book received awards from D&AD in London and the Art Directors Club and was selected among the 25 most beautiful German books in 2014 by the Book Art Foundation .

criticism

  • “Josefibichl is more than just a homeland thriller - almost a kind of political documentary. With a lot of wit and a subtle eye for people. ”, Süddeutsche Zeitung , December 15, 2011
  • “Ritter dissects corrupt provincialism à la Feuchtwanger .”, Alps magazine on the Alpine crime thriller Josefibichl, December 2011
  • "After reading Kreuzzug, I am certain that he is an excellent thriller writer - and that is why I am looking forward to the next work from his pen." Krimicouch.de, February 2013
  • “Marc Ritter stands out from the large number of regional Bavarian crime novels with his novel [Herrgottschrofen], because the mixture between political thriller and crime story, provincial and state capital, gives the book a special touch. In any case, Gonzo Hartinger still has plenty of potential for further highly entertaining criminal cases. ”Krimicouch.de, May 2013

plant

Books and e-books

Alpine thrillers around Karl-Heinz "Gonzo" Hartinger

Alpine mystery thriller about chief detective Anselm Plank and Stephanie Gärtner

  • 2012: Transalp, Alpine thriller, e-book series, neobooks, Munich.
  • 2015: Transalp, Alpenkrimi, paperback, Knaur, Munich. ISBN 978-3-426-51521-1

Thriller around mountain photographer Thien Hung Baumgartner and mountain hunter Markus Denninger

Non-fiction

  • 2014: The very last. Everything you always wanted to know about death. With Tom Ising. Riemann, Munich. ISBN 978-3-570-50158-0

Audio books

  • 2012: Kreuzzug, audio book download - unabridged edition, read by Detlef Bierstedt , Audible GmbH.
  • 2013: Herrgottschrofen, audio book download - abridged edition, read by Michael Schwarzmaier , audio book Hamburg.
  • 2013: Bluteis, audio book download - Unabridged edition, read by Robert Frank, Audible GmbH.
  • 2013: Transalp, audio book download - Unabridged, read by Robert Frank, Audible GmbH.
  • 2014: Stieranger, audio book download - abridged edition, read by Michael Schwarzmaier , audio media publisher.
  • 2015: Frauenmahd, audio book download - abridged edition, read by Michael Schwarzmaier , audio media publisher.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Source for the section “Media and Internet Creation”: CV on Ritter's website http://www.marcritter.de/vita
  2. ↑ Article by the German Alpine Association on Alpine crime thrillers http://www.alpenverein.de/kultur/bergliteratur/berge-im-kopf-berge-im-buch-alpenkrimis-ein-spiel-mit-ikonen-und-klischees_aid_13055.html
  3. ↑ website gap-geschichte.de of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen historian Alois Schwarzmüller http://members.gaponline.de/alois.schwarzmueller/
  4. ^ Definition of " high concept " in the English language Wikipedia
  5. ↑ Amazon review on "Bluteis", in which the term "Dan Brown of the Alps" is used http://www.amazon.de/gp/aw/cr/rR1QN2W1A0MGL6
  6. ^ Al Bartlett's talk "Arithmetic, Population and Energy" http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html
  7. ↑ picture with tz headline and author Marc Ritter http://www.marcritter.de/bücher/
  8. ↑ Stiftung Buchkunst: Prize winners 2014 http://www.stiftung-buchkunst.de/de/die-schoensten-deutschen-buecher/2014/die-schoensten-deutschen-buecher-2014.html
  9. ↑ Review of “Kreuzzug” on Krimicouch.de http://www.krimi-couch.de/krimis/marc-ritter-kreuzzug.html
  10. ↑ Review of "Herrgottschrofen" on Krimicouch.de http://www.krimi-couch.de/krimis/marc-ritter-herrgottschrofen.html
personal data
SURNAME Knight, Marc
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author and internet manager
DATE OF BIRTH October 18, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich