Robert Brack

Robert Brack (born May 4, 1959 in Fulda ; actually Ronald Gutberlet ) is a German crime writer . Since 1999 he has also been writing historical crime novels under the pseudonym Virginia Doyle .

Brack has lived in Hamburg since 1981 . After studying sociology , he began to work as a freelance writer. In the literary section of the daily newspaper he had a monthly column (“black taz”). In addition, he occasionally translates detective novels and short stories from English / American (including Janwillem van de Wetering , Robert B. Parker and Jerry Oster ), most recently in 2009 “Der Effekt” (“Without Warning”) by John Birmingham . Brack has been a member of the PEN Center Germany since 2017 .

Publications

In 1988 he published his first own crime thriller, “Blauer Mohn”. This was followed by a series of novels from 1989, the focus of which is the journalist Tolonen ("Bill with a Stranger", "Heavy Caliber" and "Psychofever"). Since the mid-1990s, his novels have thematically revolved around the upheavals in the European power structure after the fall of the Berlin Wall (“Das Gangsterbüro”, 1995; “Nachtkommando”, 1997). In 2008, And the Sea gave his Toten again a novel about the search for clues of an English inspector in Hamburg in 1932, which is based on a real event - the unsolved suicide of two policewomen whose bodies were driven on the beach in Pellworm in 1931 . In 2012 he published Under the Shadow of Death, a novel that deals with the Reichstag fire and the person Marinus van der Lubbe .

Since 2003 another series has been created, this time around the young detective Lenina Rabe; these novels (previously published: "Lenina fights", "Haie zu Fischstäbchen" and "Snow White's Coffin") are mainly set in Brack's current residence, Altona, and deal with the network of relationships between politics and business.

Since 1999 he has been writing detective novels under the pseudonym Virginia Doyle, which date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2005 he published a crime thriller under his real name ("The Murders of Mary Stuart").

Awards

For "The Girl with the Flashlight" (1992) Brack received the Marlowe of the Raymond Chandler Society ; he was awarded this prize again for the story "The Easter Bunny Weekend", which appeared in an anthology in 1996. He also received the German Crime Prize in 1996 for “Das Gangsterbüro” .

Bibliography as Robert Brack

Detective novels

• 1988 Blauer Mohn (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1988 The Trail of the Raven (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1989 Invoice with a stranger (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1990 The Seventh Hell (with an afterword by Helmut Ziegler; Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1991 Heavy caliber (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1992 The girl with the flashlight (Edition Nautilus)
• 1993 Psychofever (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1995 The Gangster Office (Edition Nautilus)
• 1997 Nachtkommando (Nautilus Edition)
• 2003 Lenina fights (Edition Nautilus)
• 2005 Sharks to Fish Fingers (Edition Nautilus)
• 2005 Störtebeker's Treasure (Bastei Lübbe Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 2007 Snow White's Coffin (Edition Nautilus)
• 2008 And the sea gave back its dead (Edition Nautilus)
• 2010 Bloody Sunday (Edition Nautilus)
• 2012 Under the Shadow of Death (Edition Nautilus)

Stories in separate editions

• 1998 The Gourmet Murders (Black Booklet 7, Verlag Hamburger Abendblatt)
• 1999 The blood-red Chevrolet (Schwarze Hefte 16, Verlag Hamburger Abendblatt)
• 2000 Death Drops (Schwarze Hefte 26, Verlag Hamburger Abendblatt)
• 2001 Fire Night (Schwarze Hefte 30, Verlag Hamburger Abendblatt)
• 2001 Das Fenster zum Fleet (as Ronald Gutberlet with Robert Brack as protagonist, Europa Verlag)
• 2002 Blood Court in Altona (Schwarze Hefte 42, Verlag Hamburger Abendblatt)
• 2006 Cold Departure (caliber .64, Edition Nautilus)

Bibliography as Virginia Doyle

Novels

• 1999 The Black Nun (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1999 Cruise of No Return (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 1999 The Blood of the Sicilian (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 2000 Death in a single horse (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 2000 The Castle of the Vultures (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 2000 The poisonous heart (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 2002 The Death Ship from Altona (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag)
• 2004 The red cat (Heyne Verlag)
• 2005 The Striped Monkey (Heyne Verlag)
• 2006 The Black Snake (Heyne Verlag)
• 2008 The Curse of the Beautiful Island (Heyne Verlag)
• 2010 The honor of Nicolosi (Heyne Verlag)

Stories in separate editions

• 2003 Murder in the Star Club (Schwarze Hefte, Verlag Hamburger Abendblatt)

Bibliography as Ronald Gutberlet

• 2005 The Murders of Mary Stuart (Europa Verlag)

Web links

• Literature by and about Robert Brack in the catalog of the German National Library
• Page about the author
• Other publications than Brack
• Further publications as Doyle