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Crime and Guilt [Paperback]

Ferdinand von Schirach (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Book Description

Publication Date: 1 Mar 2012

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.

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Crime and Guilt + The Collini Case
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Product details

  • Paperback: 432 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage (1 Mar 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0099549271
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099549277
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.7 x 19.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 92,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Ferdinand von Schirach
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Product Description

Review

Small literary gems (The Times )

Mesmerizing (New York Times )

A strange and scary fictionalised casebook (Boyd Tonkin Independent, Books of the Year )

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 (Adrian Turpin Financial Times )

A wonderful debut, gripping from the very first page and not a word out of place (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung )

Book Description

Provocative, shocking and brilliant, these stories may change the way you judge the world.
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Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
13 reviews
4.5 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Follow The Money Or Follow The Sperm.. 14 Mar 2011
By prisrob TOP 500 REVIEWER VINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover
Assistant District Attorney Schmidt in one of the stories in Ferdinand von Schirach's novel,'Crime' made a statement that connects all of the stories of murder, mayhem and lust, "Follow the money or follow the sperm. Every murder comes down to one or the other."

Ferdinand von Schirach is a criminal defense lawyer in Berlin, Germany. He has defended the famous and infamous, and here he tells some of their stories. His uncle was a judge and a soldier in World War II. His grandfather was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. There is a history here, and the stories von Schirach tells all come from the heart and most involve guilt of some sort. There are eleven stories, all different and all are mesmerizing in their own right.

'Self Defense' may be my favorite story. A man at a train station defends himself from two criminals, the fact that he does not say a word at any time, to anyone, raises the level. The District Attorney and the Defense Attorney vie against each other, and the man continues to remain silent. How do you defend a man who does not speak, it can be done. 'The Thorn' may be the most unusual of stories, a museum guard patrols and guards the same room for some twenty odd years. He comes slightly unhinged, and his journey is one to behold. 'Tanata's Tea Bowl' may be one of the most gruesome crimes, but the story underneath is the reality. The other eight stories are as fascinating.

The characters are rich and full of life. Their stories are told by the author and narrator, but the words come from the characters. The road to their crime is told from their perspective, and the author fills in the voice of the law. Ferdinand von Schirach gives us a base of German law, and how it is practiced. There may be a different format but essentially the law is the same in Germany and the United Sates. There is good and then there is bad, and then we have the legal system. We get a glimpse of the man and his make-up, and the hope is that more stories are on their way.

Highly Recommended. prisrob 03-14-11
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Eleven Miniature Masterpieces of Crime Psychology 11 Dec 2011
By A. Ross TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
This debut collection of eleven short stories by a prominent German lawyer is an excellent window into the psychology of crime. Each brief story (all apparently based at least in part on real cases) lays out the facts of a case taken up by a criminal defense lawyer who is also the book's unobtrusive narrator. Using economical and unadorned prose, the author is able to create a strong sense of the lives of the defendants, and the circumstances and choices that led to their legal troubles. There is a certain dry restraint to this approach that some readers may find a little lifeless, but I found it to be honest and even compassionate in its execution.

The crimes range from the relatively mundane (an elderly man snaps after fifty years of marriage to a shrewish woman and kills her, a sister kills her disabled brother after years of caring for him) to the extreme (a museum guard destroys the piece he has been guarding for 23 years, a schizophrenic young man attempts to slice off a portion of the woman he is deeply in love with so that he can eat her). What is unveiled over the course of most of the stories is not the mundane matter of guilt or innocence, but the underlying psychology of the individuals, and in these cases, the narrator is keen to express their humanity. However in a few stories, such as one about about a mysterious mute man who kills two skinheads who attack him on a train platform, or another about a Lebanese boy who creates a perfect alibi for his criminal brother, the author seems more intent in showing how the law can sometimes be circumvented by the truly clever.

The stories are fascinating, not only for their details and presentation, but for the small insights they offer into contemporary German society. Among the characters are a man who was adopted from Ethiopia, a Balkan refugee woman who ends up in the sex trade, a large family of Lebanese brothers, a Palestinian refugee, a Turkish street thug, and a Greek gangster. The German legal system is a character in its own right, with procedures (no juries), roles (prosecutors are supposed to be neutral participants), and goals that will strike the American reader as alien. But it's hard not to come away from this book thinking that the German system is somewhat better at producing true justice. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys intelligent procedural crime fiction or television shows.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars I liked it so much I bought this for a Christmas present 31 Dec 2011
By KathyKDReader
Format:Paperback
I saw this book in our independent book shop, bought a copy and liked it so much that I bought a second copy from Amazon.It is very well written and easy to read. I like the short stories, I can read one and finish it before dropping off to sleep at night or also read and finish a story on a short journey.It is an easy book to carry around. The stories are varying length and all very different.They are about people and the crimes they commit- sometimes the crimes are very understandable. I have read some of the stories more than twice.It is obvous that the author is using his experience as a lawyer to write. My German friends have also read and enjoyed the original German book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars So compelling
I am a working mum with 3 kids under 4, so I can barely stay awake to read 2 pages most nights. I read this book in two nights. Read more
Published 2 days ago by JWinOz
3.0 out of 5 stars "And what number are you?" "Green," he said...
This book consists of 26 stories about either crime or guilt taking place in Germany. They are tightly packed with information, but not exactly expansive. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Eileen Shaw
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting 1st novel
Interesting German Grisham - actually better than that implies. Not a what or who dunnit but why. Give it a go!
Published 3 months ago by Charles Jones
5.0 out of 5 stars Ferdinand von Schirach: Crime and Guilt
I discovered von Schirach through 'The Cassini Case,' and the spare, taut character of that book is carried through in this collection. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mr. P. F. Harrison
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
I was recommended this by a fellow reader whose opinion I value and I'm so pleased I bought this. I'm not usually a fan of short stories, preferring instead to spend more indepth... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mooglemeg
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb collection
Really fascinating collection of short stories. I was totally captivated.
I heard Von Schirach on the radio talking about his latest book, the Collini Case and I bought Guilt... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Jane O'Sullivan
5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty and Truth
Here are two collections of short stories Guilt and Crime, narratives linked by the presence of the lawyer in each of the tales, collected together in one edition. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Remnant
4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Interesting and Enlightening Collection
`Crime' is a very interesting book in many ways. In part it is a collection of short stories which then reads like a novel because it is the same nameless lawyer telling is the... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Simon Savidge Reads
5.0 out of 5 stars Great stuff, write more of it
Northern European sensibility brought to crime fiction again, this time in short stories of bleak but elegant savagery: Isaak Dinesen meets Philip Marlowe. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Tom Thomas
4.0 out of 5 stars vivid compelling short stories
11 short stories all involving a crime and (in a minor way) a defence barrister - the book is written by a defence barrister and it has a strong sense of realism - although it's... Read more
Published on 8 April 2011 by William Jordan
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