Thomas Raab (writer, 1970)

Thomas Raab, 2016

Thomas Raab (* 1970 in Vienna ) is an Austrian writer, screenwriter and musician. He was best known for his detective novels about the restorer Willibald Adrian Metzger ("the butcher").

Life

Thomas Raab began at an early age with self-composed and written songs as a German-speaking songwriter and worked at the same time as a pianist.

In the mid-1990s he completed a degree in mathematics and sports science and then taught at a Viennese grammar school.

In 2000 he released the CD Zeitlos , followed seven years later by the second album Confession . His decoupling Time to Move was played by several Austrian radio stations. His second album was released in Germany in early 2008.

In 2006 Raab wrote a short story about a man who stumbled over a corpse without any literary ambition. From this developed his first crime novel with the protagonist Willibald Adrian Metzger, which in the following years was followed by a series of publications about the restorer Metzger. In 2009 he switched from Leykam Buchverlag in Graz , where his first two books were published, to Piper Verlag in Munich , which enabled him to spread more widely on the German-speaking book market, so that he subsequently made a living from writing and ended his job as a teacher could.

In 2015, the butcher's crime novels The Butcher Must Detention (Volume 1) and The Butcher Goes Strange (Volume 3) as The Butcher and the Dead in the Haifischbecken (film title) and The Butcher Must Detention as part of a two-part television series on ORF and ARD broadcast. The title role was played by Robert Palfrader .

In the same year Raab succeeded with his novel S † ill. Chronicle of a murderer (the t is represented by the symbol † ) apart from the Metzger series, a highly regarded novel that has already been translated into several languages.

With Hannelore Huber, called the "Huberin", Raab designed the protagonist of a new crime series in 2018 under the title Frau Huber determined . In the first novel, Walter muss weg , the sprightly widow from the idyllic village of Glaubenthal explores the recent, not unwelcome death of her husband.

Thomas Raab lives and works as a writer, screenwriter and musician in Vienna. He is married to the actress Simone Heher .

The butcher series

Willibald Adrian Metzger, the protagonist of Raab's crime novels, is a restorer of old pieces of furniture who always happens to be entangled in a criminal case and sometimes, as in the first novel The Butcher Must Be Detained , literally trips over a corpse. His professional, precise look, his patience and persistence allow him to solve cases that he encounters involuntarily and often unwillingly. His method is carefully looking and listening, and he always follows his intuition. The starting point is often the direct private environment of the butcher, his apartment or his workshop, whereby the places of action are deliberately not located in reality.

Raab took the initials of the name Willibald Adrian Metzger from those of his famous compatriot Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart . The butcher is an eccentric and loner who has fallen out of time, in the first novel in his mid-forties and overweight, who enjoys withdrawing from the world at work or in his apartment without a television, mobile phone or daily newspaper, drinking red wine and being quiet to have. His human weaknesses and his social outsider role offer the reader opportunities for identification and make him a classic antihero . Thomas Raab emphasizes that “every person is a hero and an antihero in his or her life. [...] I don't want to write a hero either. I just want it to be human in my books. "

From the first novel, his partner becomes the Croatian Danjela Djurkovic. After 25 years, the inexperienced butcher meets his childhood sweetheart again only to fall in love with her again. Danjela also does not correspond to the classic social ideal of beauty. She is overweight and speaks with an accent, two qualities that the butcher is particularly fond of right now. Danjela is completely opposite to her partner's personality in many ways: she is loving, communicative and uncomplicated. Their influence breaks the social isolation of the butcher and he becomes a family man. Her role in the criminal cases goes beyond the classic Watson sidekick . Often their curiosity becomes the mainspring of the investigation. Other recurring figures in the butcher's small circle of friends are the caretaker Petar Wollnar, the policeman Eduard Pospischill, his wife Trixi and Metzger's half-sister Sophie Widhalm.

Characteristic of Raab's novels is his style, which is strongly influenced by Austrian German and the spoken language . The sentence structure is paratactic , with the multitude of parentheses , contracted sentences and lists still creating a complex sentence structure. Through the use of numerous rhetorical figures , Raab gives his texts their own wit, such as the Traductio , the repetition of the same word in different meanings (such as “postpone” in the sense of “ chasing after” and “being offended”), or the Similitudo , des Comparison that reveals unexpected similarities or differences. The narrator is authorial , the story conveys despite present from a later date, used analepses and prolepses and descriptive breaks for rambling bays and overvoltage. According to Elmar Krekeler, Thomas Raab chats the reader in his butcher novels "on a fairly high literary level about the mind", which has to do in particular with the multitude of false floors in the stories.

Awards

• Young Talent Award of the Hanns Seidel Foundation (D, 2000)
• Won the Pop-Musik-Förderpreis Projekt Pop (Austria, 2002).
• Award of the song Sunrise in the context of the Hit Search competition of the Austrian Composers Association (Austria, 2004)
• Winner of the book favorite 2011 - Detective stories & thriller category with The Butcher Brings the Devil
• Winner of the Leo Perutz Prize for Crime Literature 2013 with The Butcher Comes to Paradise
• Austrian Crime Award 2017

Discography

Albums

• Timeless (2000)
• Confession (2008)

Singles

• Jumps in Concrete (2007)
• Time to Move (2007)
• Sunrise (2008)

Works

• The butcher has to detain . Leykam, Graz 2007, ISBN 978-3-7011-7577-2
• The butcher sees red . Leykam, Graz 2008, ISBN 978-3-7011-7619-9
• The butcher is cheating . Piper, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-4920-5308-2
• The butcher brings the devil . Piper, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-492-05419-5
• The butcher breaks the ice . Piper, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-492-05473-7
• The butcher comes to paradise . Kriminalroman, Droemer, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-426-19955-8 ; as audio book : read by Matthias Lühn, abridged version, 6 CDs, from Abod, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-95471-136-9 .
• S † ill [ Still ]. Chronicle of a murderer . Thriller, Droemer, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-426-19956-5 ; as DAISY audio book : read by Frank Arnold , DAISY-MP3-CD, 9 hours, 7 minutes, Argon, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-8398-5233-0 .
• The butcher . Detective novel, Droemer, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-426-28136-9 .
• Walter has to go: Ms. Huber is investigating. The first case , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2018, ISBN 978-3-462-05095-0 .
• The butcher doesn't fall far from the tree . Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck-Vienna 2019.
• Helga cleans up: Ms. Huber is investigating. The second case , Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2020, ISBN 978-3-462-05314-2

literature

• Andrea Rouha: Butcher and Murder. An analysis of the butcher's hexalogy by Thomas Raab . Diploma thesis at the University of Vienna , April 2014. ( PDF file)

Web links

Commons : Thomas Raab  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Thomas Raab in the catalog of the German National Library
• Official website of Thomas Raab

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Günther Wildner: Biography Thomas Raab , Wildner Music
2. ^ Annekatrin Liebisch. Thomas Raab - Confession ( Memento of the original dated February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Stimme.de 
3. ↑ Andrea Rouha: Metzger und Mord , pp. 47–50.
4. ↑ Mirjam Marits: The butcher is going, the Huber is coming . In: Die Presse from September 8, 2018.
5. ↑ Andrea Rouha: Metzger und Mord , pp. 83-88.
6. ↑ Andrea Rouha: Metzger und Mord , pp. 65–70, quotation p. 70.
7. ↑ Andrea Rouha: Metzger und Mord , pp. 71–83.
8. ↑ Andrea Rouha: Metzger und Mord , pp. 90-109.
9. ↑ Elmar Krekeler: Thomas Raab lets the butcher loose on the critics . In: Die Welt from August 19, 2016.
10. ↑ Project Pop! .
11. ↑ Die Buchlieblinge 2011 ( Memento of the original from February 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , buchliebling.at 
12. ↑ Thomas Raab receives Leo Perutz Prize , derstandard.at
13. ↑ orf.at: Krimipreis goes to Thomas Raab . Article dated October 10, 2017, accessed October 10, 2017.