 | ||
| Auguste Groner | |
If someone asked you to name a female crime writer who created a serial detective a few years before the famous Sherlock Holmes and wrote in a language other than English, what would you reply? Auguste Groner, of course!
Auguste Groner (née Kopallik) was born in 1850 in Vienna, Imperial Austria, to a middleclass family. She received extensive schooling, studied both music and painting, and trained to become a teacher. She started working as a primary school teacher in 1876 and continued teaching even after her marriage to Richard Groner, a publisher, three years later – which I, personally, find remarkable for the time period. Auguste Groner not only continued to work as a married woman but also started writing a few years later. She was a prolific writer who started out with juvenile and historical fiction, as well as folktales. To this day, the exact number of stories in her body of work is unknown. A bibliography published in 1992 cites more than 90 individual book titles and a substantial number of short stories. Her work has been published in newspapers and illustrated magazines, as well as in almanacs and other sorts of publications. She published under various pen names, often using male pseudonyms or the gender-neutral A. Groner. However, her most important works—her crime fiction stories—were published under her given name.
Auguste Groner turned to crime fiction around the age of forty and wrote more than three dozen novellas and novels in this genre. It was important to her to create detectives that acted on more than logic and scientific methods; her detectives were not only brilliant in terms of methodological procedures but also very interested in their fellow citizens and invested in their fates.
Groner used her work not only to entertain but also to discuss and criticize the social conventions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The motives for murder in her stories usually arise from a necessity to maintain the façade of family respectability, and she criticizes the social conditions that force people into secrecy and concealment. Hence, her stories involve many issues of the social zeitgeist: illegitimate children, foundlings, problematic relationships between ward and guardian, unequal stepbrothers, fraternal inheritance disputes, etc. Her characters are often social outcasts such as former felons, ethnic minorities (Vienna being the capital of a multi-ethnic state), and nobility fallen from grace. The fact that these suspects often turn out to be innocent can be seen as a statement against prejudices and prejudgements. The case of Der seltsame Schatten, for example, tells the story of an exconvict (and suspect of this particular murder) who sets out to solve the case and prove his
innocence.
Although Groner’s work was quite famous in her time, it is more difficult nowadays to find her stories. However, thanks to her popularity in the beginning of the twentieth century, a substantial part of her work was translated into English, including many of her crime stories.
In her article “The Detective Story in Germany and Scandinavia”, published in The Bookman in 1909, Grace Isabel Colbron (who later translated several pieces of Groner’s work into English) calls Groner “[undoubtedly] the best writer of detective stories in Germany to-day”. (NB: Groner spent all her life in Austria, but I assume Colbron was referring to German writing authors.)
I am from Austria myself, and even though I’ve been interested in traditional crime fiction from an early age, I found out about Auguste Groner only accidentally while researching my own master’s thesis. It surprises me that an author who was once so well-known could fall into such oblivion. What I find particularly striking is that I could only find one doctoral thesis dedicated to Groner’s work – written in the US by Mary W. Tannert.
One contribution to Groner’s visibility was made by the crime writers’ association Mörderische Schwestern (Murderous Sisters). Every three years, they award the Golden Auguste to people who have made outstanding contributions to female crime fiction.
If you want to dive into Groner’s work, I recommend looking for her translations on Project Gutenberg or LibriVox for audiobooks. Her original work in German, as well as the older translations, are considered creative commons and available for free. You can also find formatted e-books on digital platforms for reasonable prices.
NB: Groner’s name is sometimes misspelled in English, and you’ll find her also as Augusta or Gröner.
Happy Reading!
Joseph Müller novels and stories:
The Secret of New Year's Eve (novella) 1890,
(Translated also as The Case of the Pocket Diary Found in the Snow)
The Golden Bullet (novella) 1892,
(Translated also as The Case of the Golden Bullet)
Who is it? (short story) 1894
How I Was Murdered (novella) 1895,
(Translated also as The Case of the Registered Letter)
The Confessional Secret (novella) 1897
The old gentleman (novella) 1898
Why she extinguished the light (novel) 1899,
(Translated also as The Case of the Lamp That Went Out)
The Pharaoh's Bracelet (novel) 1900
The House in the Shadow (novella) 1902
The Blue Lady (novel) 1905,
(Translated as The Lady in Blue, 1922)
Lush Grass (short story) 1905
The Man with the Many names (novel) 1906
The Black Cord (novel) 1908,
(Translated as The Man with the Black Cord, 1911)
The Red Mercury (novel) 1910
The Cross of the Welser (novel) 1912
The Secret of the Hermitage (novel) 1916
The Pentagram (novella) 1916
The Wandering Light (novel) 1922
Daniela M. Hartinger grew up raiding the shelves of her local library for children’s detective novels and ended up devouring Agatha Christie and the like. She has combined her literary passion with her enthusiasm for foreign languages to work as a freelance book translator. She also dabbles with writing and can’t resist a bar of chocolate – which, nowadays, she must share with her ever-hungry toddler son.
No comments:
Post a Comment