Crime and Guilt

Provocative, shocking and brilliant, these stories may change the way you judge the world.

A strange and scary fictionalised casebook

What makes these tales stand out are not the extremes of their protagonists but the narrator's voice: resistant to melodrama, dryly funny...never less than humane. If Crime shows the arbitrary nature of justice, it also backs the underdogs

A wonderful debut, gripping from the very first page and not a word out of place

The stories von Schirach tells here are compelling in their own right but he elevates them to something greater with his calm, precise narration. These are like 20 or more mini episodes of The Killing (acutally, they would make for an amazing television series). They are masterpieces in miniature. I cannot recommend them highly enough

Schirach is a defence lawyer in his native Germany, and these tales of individual crimes read almost like a real-life case-by-case study

My book of the year: a dazzling double-bill exploring unusual criminal cases… hypnotic, heartbreaking prose

Crime is a curiously beguiling collection of short stories

Ferdinand von Schirach was born in Munich in 1964 and is one of Germany's most prominent defence lawyers. Verbrechen (Crime) became an instant bestseller in Germany when it was launched in 2009.

Meet Fahner, the retired small-town doctor who resorts to the garden axe when his patience with his cruel wife runs out. 
 
Meet Patrick, so entranced by the sight of his sleeping girlfriend that he cuts a small piece out of her back, just to see what she tastes like. 
 
Meet the silent assassin who calmly despatches two Neo-Nazi thugs on a railway platform. 
 
A nameless lawyer invites us to read an extraordinary dossier of violent and unspeakable acts. All the crimes have one thing in common: the guilty have never been convicted in a court of law. But however heinous the crime, the narrator shows how the human circumstances behind events can tell a different story.

Guilt

The chilling new international bestseller from Ferdinand von Schirach, author of Crime

Masterful storytelling... Guilt is a significant book

This devastating dossier of savage stories takes us to the crimes that never reach the newspapers: small-town atrocities where the mundane lurches into the macabre and ordinary people find themselves at the heart of horrific crimes, all the more compelling on account of their truth. 
 
Opening with an attack on a waitress by a band of musicians in a beer tent, we are led through the rituals of the Illuminati by a violent schoolboy sect, and invited to look into a briefcase full of photographs of mutilated corpses. There is the saga of a bungled drug heist involving a stolen car and 
a dog full of laxatives; the jealous husband who almost bludgeons his wife's lover to death; and the final chilling story of an eccentric madman who cleverly turns the tables on his own defence lawyer... 
 
Ferdinand von Schirach enacts this very same reversal on us: to read his disturbing accounts, told in cool, exacting prose, is to lose one's innocence and come to the frightening conclusion that, in some cases, guilty parties can be exonerated and perpetrators are often indictable by their guilt long before they are by the law.

Ferdinand von Schirach was born in Munich in 1964 and is one of Germany's most prominent defence lawyers. His first collection of stories, Verbrechen (Crime), became an instant bestseller in Germany when it was launched in 2009 and was published in over thirty territories around the world. 
 
Carol Brown Janeway's translations include Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, Jan Philipp Reemtsa's In the Cellar, Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Lost, Zvi Kolitz's Yosl Rakover Talks to God, Benjamin Lebert's Crazy, Sándor Márai's Embers, Yasmina Reza's Desolation, Margriet de Moor's The Storm, and Daniel Kehlmann's Fame and Measuring the World.

This devastating dossier of savage stories takes us to the crimes that never reach the newspapers: small-town atrocities where the mundane lurches into the macabre and ordinary people find themselves at the heart of horrific crimes, all the more compelling on account of their truth. 
 
Opening with an attack on a waitress by a band of musicians in a beer tent, we are led through the rituals of the Illuminati by a violent schoolboy sect, and invited to look into a briefcase full of photographs of mutilated corpses. There is the saga of a bungled drug heist involving a stolen car and a dog full of laxatives; the jealous husband who almost bludgeons his wife's lover to death; and the final chilling story of an eccentric madman who cleverly turns the tables on his own defence lawyer... 
 
Ferdinand von Schirach enacts this very same reversal on us: to read his disturbing accounts, told in cool, exacting prose, is to lose one's innocence and come to the frightening conclusion that, in some cases, guilty parties can be exonerated and perpetrators are often indictable by their guilt long before they are by the law.

Crime

Provocative, shocking and brilliant, Crime may change the way you judge the world.

The most significant debut by a German writer in the last ten years. An absolute masterpiece

Ferdinand von Schirach was born in Munich in 1964 and is one of Germany's most prominent defence lawyers. Verbrechen (Crime) became an instant bestseller in Germany when it was launched in 2009. It is to be published in over thirty territories around the world, and is being made into a film. Von Schirach's new besteller, Schuld (Sin) is forthcoming in translation from Chatto &amp; Windus.

Meet Fahner, the retired small-town doctor who resorts to the garden axe when his patience with his cruel wife runs out. 
 
Or Patrick, so entranced by the sight of his sleeping girlfriend that he cuts a small piece out of her back, just to see what she tastes like. 
 
Or the silent assassin who calmly despatches two Neo-Nazi thugs on a railway platform. 
 
A nameless lawyer invites us to read an extraordinary dossier of violent and unspeakable acts. All the crimes have one thing in common: the guilty are never convicted in a court of law. But however heinous the crime, the narrator shows how the human circumstances behind events can tell a different story. 
 
Ferdinand von Schirach, himself a criminal lawyer, unveils a terrifying world where criminals elude justice, and the apparent innocents are perhaps the most dangerous of all. 'Guilt,' writes von Schirach, 'always presents a bit of a problem.' In this nuanced and telling collection, guilt is indeed never as clear cut as the crime.

Ferdinand von Schirach

A murder trial full of political explosiveness: thrilling, clever, staggering

Ferdinand von Schirach brilliantly draws you under his spell

A murder. A murderer. No motive. 
 
Fabrizio Collini is a hard working, quiet and respectable man. Until the day he visits one of Berlin's most luxurious hotels and kills an innocent man in cold blood. 
 
Young attorney Caspar Leinen takes the case. Getting Collini a not-guilty verdict would make his name. But far too late he discovers that he knows Collini's victim. 
 
Leinen is caught in a professional and personal dilemma. Collini admits the murder but won't say why he did it, forcing Leinen to defend a man who won't defend himself. 
 
And worse, a close friend, and relation of the victim, insists that he give up the case. 
 
His reputation, his career and this friendship are all at risk. 
 
But then he makes a discovery that goes way beyond his own concerns and exposes a terrible and deadly truth at the heart of German justice . . .

Ferdinand von Schirach

Praise for The Collini Case

A magnificent storyteller

A murder trial full of political explosiveness: thrilling, clever, staggering

Terrific

A magnificent storyteller

A murder trial full of political explosiveness: thrilling, clever, staggering

Terrific

A magnificent storyteller

A murder trial full of political explosiveness: thrilling, clever, staggering

Terrific

Books by Ferdinand von Schirach

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