Ice Cold, By Andrea Maria Schenkel

A cycling psychotic is on the loose

Andrea Maria Schenkel's highly successful first novel, The Murder Farm, introduced a neo-realist crime fiction. Ice Cold, translated by Anthea Bell, is presented as a dossier of witness statements, bald official pronouncements, and the killer's own stark accounts.

We begin with the report of an execution. Josef Kalte is, "ice cold in his crimes", has been convicted of multiple horrifying murders. But is he guilty of all of them? The setting is Munich just before the Second World War, where a serial killer is snatching women cyclists, raping and mutilating them. The murderer gets excited beyond restraint by the sight of female thighs pumping up and down, and his brutality grows with his attacks. He finds pleasure in dismantling the bicycle itself, describing the destruction of the machine as he did the dismemberment of its rider and the butchering of a pig in his native countryside. Their obliterations are recounted in the same flat and brutal language.

Yet through this seeming reportage runs runs the carefully constructed narrative of an innocent country girl, Kathie, who comes to the big city determined to lead a better life. She ignores friends who could protect her and drifts into casual prostitution. Yet she has retained a touching quality of trust, even as she puts herself at risk. As Kathie moves towards her fate, we catch unnerving glimpses in fragmentary reports: a passing truck-driver spotting a man on the edge of woods, the killer's wife wondering if knives are missing and, heart-breakingly, Kathie's mother setting out in search of her daughter. The tenderness with which Kathie is observed culminates in her final dreams of childhood summers splashing barefoot through puddles.

Beyond these private worlds lies the authority of the Nazi state, compelling a fear of stepping out of line that may result, even for non-Jews, in "re-education" at Dachau. The guillotined man is a member of the Nazi party: how significant is that? Make up your own mind, as you must about the identity of Kathie's killer in this short and brilliant ice-diamond of a book.