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Lebanese dealers engage in a wild shootout with police officers in the Eros Center.
Cops steal money and heroin, ostensibly to do their jobs better.
A young girl dreams of rough sex with an older cop and the dream doesn't stop there.
A windy film producer in trouble for getting involved with a clan and going to a sex worker to relieve pressure.
A journalist who has asked too many uncomfortable questions becomes an involuntary leading actor in a gay porn film.
Welcome to Berlin, welcome to Clemens Murath's Hardboiled Wonderland.
Where tough guys are still allowed to do tough things.
As if we were back in the action cinema of the eighties.
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Crime writer Murath: Keep up the pace all the time
Photo: Erik Weiss / Random House
Murath, who has lived in Berlin by choice for around 30 years, usually writes scripts, not novels.
His specialty are television crime novels, and his long list is mainly the type of books that anyone who wants to make a reasonable living from his job has to write: from "Istanbul Commissariat" to "Helen Dorn" to "The Criminalist".
Fortunately, his debut novel »Der Lebanese« has little to do with these often overly sedate and interchangeable series products.
Which in turn has a lot to do with the fact that Murath himself would probably not be a fan of his films.
Instead, he orients himself as a writer, he says when asked, more on American models - and names James Ellroy, Don Winslow and Elmore Leonard, a trio that has significantly shaped the hardboiled crime thriller in recent decades.
The name Elmore Leonard in particular makes you sit up and take notice, because this is the key to understanding »The Lebanese«.
The German thriller writer Horst Eckert once said of the author of novels such as “Out of Sight” or “Get Shorty”, who died in 2013, that he would write “lightly and maliciously, perfectly and with a brutal balance”.
And Murath approaches his story and his characters in a very similar way - so that with all the testosterone and the blasting and the rumbling, a slight distancing can always be felt.
The eighties are dead and gone, films like "Lethal Weapon - Two Steel-Hard Professionals" or "Die Hard" have long been ripe for a museum.
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Title: The Lebanese: Detective Novel
Publisher: Heyne Verlag
Number of pages: 480
Author: Murath, Clemens
Buy for € 16.00
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03/01/2021 6:02 p.m.
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Even if Frank Bosman may not have noticed that yet.
He is the antihero of "Der Lebanese", a super tough investigator at the LKA in Berlin, who literally walks over corpses to get to his goal.
And that is the capture of the brothers Arslan and Tarik Aziz, who are in charge in the capital when it comes to drugs, prostitution and gambling.
Anyone who has seen the series "4 Blocks" knows roughly what makes the two clan heads tick.
The older one, Arslan, wants - at least since "The Godfather" dream of almost all not only fictional big criminals - to invest the drug money in legal business, the younger one, Tarik, is wild and impetuous like Al Pacino in "Scarface", likes easy girls, fast ones Money, even faster cars.
And German-language gangsta rap, of course.
"Consideration is a clear competitive disadvantage"
But unlike »4 Blocks«, where clan life takes center stage and is sometimes bluntly glorified, Murath deals with his initial situation in a more refined way, draping a number of other characters and plots around the macho guys on both sides of the law.
The most sophisticated of these tells of the kidnapping of the film producer mentioned at the beginning, which went wrong in more ways than one can imagine.
Unless you know Elmore Leonard's novel "The Switch", which in Germany - stupid, but not inappropriate - was called "Who put whom on the cross?"
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So Murath learned from the best, and he is an extremely docile student.
With »Der Lebanese« he has succeeded in creating a crime thriller that keeps the pace high and still takes enough time to give his characters space to develop.
Ambivalent characters are those who are neither judged nor condemned in the novel, but are simply shown in their daily struggles: for justice or wealth, power or sex.
Murath does not introduce a narrator as a moral authority, because you have to be able to afford morality, as Bosman's friend Achim, the social worker, explains: “Noble behavior is a privilege of the wealthy.
If you had to think about how best to get through it every day, then priorities change.
Consideration is a clear competitive disadvantage. "
With all the speed and severity, all the wit and all the sophistication with which Murath conducts his multi-figured ensemble: With more than 470 pages, the book is considerably longer than it should be.
Murath should have parted with a number of sentences, a few scenes and entire storylines.
And sometimes he explains a little too much and linguistically digs too deep into the cliché box.
People smile "nasty", "literally smell anger", knock "satisfied" on tables, spit "contemptuously" on the floor.
Typical mistakes of a first-time author, which in the end remain rather small, because the strengths of the novel far outweigh them: "Der Lebanese" is one of the most promising German-language crime debuts in years.
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