I got "in trouble" once at a writing group where we were told to go on an "artist's date" and I said how walking my dog was my artist's date because I spent time making up poems and stories. But because I had nothing to "share with the group" I was told I'd "got it wrong."
One of the projects I was noodling around with a few years back was a police officer in Nazi Germany who is investigating a series of murders. He's just regular Kriminalpolizei and has no interest in politics, no prejudices, he's just a career cop. But the absurdity of chasing one murderer while the entire state is dedicated to horrendous crimes on a global scale gradually dawns on him. I couldn't think what to do with it, but I like the way your story takes a really small issue, the baking licence, and makes that the focal point of the whole theme, kind of like Ibsen's Enemy of the People or Willy Russell's Terraces.
I've read a few stories that have regular German cops in the Nazi era as protagonists. The problem is that they all seem to end up as political stories, where he realizes that his "normal" crime is actually something bigger. To me, it feels like that's an easy and obvious twist: I think it would be far more powerful to take the absurdist line, as you suggest. I think there are a few stories along these lines set in Britain in WW2, where you have a regular cop investigating murders carried out during the Blitz: how is he going to prove that they were murdered, not bomb victims?
Another angle occurred to me: make the cop a Nazi (it being too easy to have "a good German" who's uninvolved in the whole nasty business) but even so he's chasing an actual sadistic murderer, so to some extent we're rooting for him. But then I realized that's basically Judge Dredd.
Or Robert Harris' Fatherland, though that's alt-history, and also dives straight into "uncovering the evil Nazis" territory, as does Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther and The Berlin Wartime Thriller Series by Simon Scarrow, rather than just being a straight detective story with an uncomfortable setting.
I do like the "good German" aspect, because it allows you to play with themes around "can you really be a good guy if you're the representative of a bad government?" That puts him into even more of a grey area than the typical "well it was nothing to do with me" or "we had no idea" type of good German. I can imagine this cop making use of some of the extraordinary powers of the Kripo or calling on his friends in the Gestapo to catch the bad guy, even though they're morally questionable. Do the ends justify the means? And you can put him in a tricky position where his boss would like him to pin this on some nebulous Jewish or Communist conspiracy, but he knows that's not true, and he's seriously hoping it doesn't turn out to be someone with "connections". (Which it doesn't, but that's always weighing on his mind.)
I also found myself digging into Soviet detectives, like Arkady Renko, Leo Demidov, Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov and Captain Alexei Korolev. There's quite a few of them. They all seem to be regular police procedurals, where the honest cop is basically trying to avoid political entanglements as much as possible.
Seems there's quite a genre here of "honest cop working for a bad regime." Thanks for the rabbit hole!
Interesting idea (and, as always, interesting to read about your process).
There's a bit near the end of The Stand where a character says something along the lines of "a police force without a justice system is not a police force, it's just armed thugs." Since I started working in an LE-adjacent sphere, something that has really fascinated me as a writer is how much general fiction (and therefore the public conception) views police as totally separate to the courts. They imagine the job ends with the arrest, and this is true in all kinds of cop fiction, ranging from Midsomer Murders to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. But in reality every single cop is, in a manner of speaking, also a sort of lawyer. If they are arresting someone they have to be confident they can charge them, and charge them with something specific, and (even putting aside whether or not they have the support of their own chain of command in any given incident) be prepared to go through that process and work with prosecutors and give evidence in court.
Which is a bit of an aside, just something that has been really interesting to me in comparing the reality to the fiction/public imagination. (Which I guess exists because police fiction arose from detective fiction in which solving a mystery is the entire point of the story, and it ends when the mystery is solved.) I guess my point would be: what is the young cop thinking he'll do next after he arrests the baker? Even if it's something as short-sighted and wishful-thinking-y as "well, she'll have to wait on remand until order is restored to the country and I can put her before a judge," that's an interesting point for the town meeting to argue about too.
I got "in trouble" once at a writing group where we were told to go on an "artist's date" and I said how walking my dog was my artist's date because I spent time making up poems and stories. But because I had nothing to "share with the group" I was told I'd "got it wrong."
Guess what? I left that group :)
One of the projects I was noodling around with a few years back was a police officer in Nazi Germany who is investigating a series of murders. He's just regular Kriminalpolizei and has no interest in politics, no prejudices, he's just a career cop. But the absurdity of chasing one murderer while the entire state is dedicated to horrendous crimes on a global scale gradually dawns on him. I couldn't think what to do with it, but I like the way your story takes a really small issue, the baking licence, and makes that the focal point of the whole theme, kind of like Ibsen's Enemy of the People or Willy Russell's Terraces.
I've read a few stories that have regular German cops in the Nazi era as protagonists. The problem is that they all seem to end up as political stories, where he realizes that his "normal" crime is actually something bigger. To me, it feels like that's an easy and obvious twist: I think it would be far more powerful to take the absurdist line, as you suggest. I think there are a few stories along these lines set in Britain in WW2, where you have a regular cop investigating murders carried out during the Blitz: how is he going to prove that they were murdered, not bomb victims?
Also, have you seen Babylon Berlin?
Another angle occurred to me: make the cop a Nazi (it being too easy to have "a good German" who's uninvolved in the whole nasty business) but even so he's chasing an actual sadistic murderer, so to some extent we're rooting for him. But then I realized that's basically Judge Dredd.
Or Robert Harris' Fatherland, though that's alt-history, and also dives straight into "uncovering the evil Nazis" territory, as does Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther and The Berlin Wartime Thriller Series by Simon Scarrow, rather than just being a straight detective story with an uncomfortable setting.
I do like the "good German" aspect, because it allows you to play with themes around "can you really be a good guy if you're the representative of a bad government?" That puts him into even more of a grey area than the typical "well it was nothing to do with me" or "we had no idea" type of good German. I can imagine this cop making use of some of the extraordinary powers of the Kripo or calling on his friends in the Gestapo to catch the bad guy, even though they're morally questionable. Do the ends justify the means? And you can put him in a tricky position where his boss would like him to pin this on some nebulous Jewish or Communist conspiracy, but he knows that's not true, and he's seriously hoping it doesn't turn out to be someone with "connections". (Which it doesn't, but that's always weighing on his mind.)
I also found myself digging into Soviet detectives, like Arkady Renko, Leo Demidov, Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov and Captain Alexei Korolev. There's quite a few of them. They all seem to be regular police procedurals, where the honest cop is basically trying to avoid political entanglements as much as possible.
Seems there's quite a genre here of "honest cop working for a bad regime." Thanks for the rabbit hole!
There seem to be quite a few set in Argentina and Chile, too. I'm also intrigued by one set in apartheid South Africa, and one set in Laos.
Interesting idea (and, as always, interesting to read about your process).
There's a bit near the end of The Stand where a character says something along the lines of "a police force without a justice system is not a police force, it's just armed thugs." Since I started working in an LE-adjacent sphere, something that has really fascinated me as a writer is how much general fiction (and therefore the public conception) views police as totally separate to the courts. They imagine the job ends with the arrest, and this is true in all kinds of cop fiction, ranging from Midsomer Murders to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. But in reality every single cop is, in a manner of speaking, also a sort of lawyer. If they are arresting someone they have to be confident they can charge them, and charge them with something specific, and (even putting aside whether or not they have the support of their own chain of command in any given incident) be prepared to go through that process and work with prosecutors and give evidence in court.
Which is a bit of an aside, just something that has been really interesting to me in comparing the reality to the fiction/public imagination. (Which I guess exists because police fiction arose from detective fiction in which solving a mystery is the entire point of the story, and it ends when the mystery is solved.) I guess my point would be: what is the young cop thinking he'll do next after he arrests the baker? Even if it's something as short-sighted and wishful-thinking-y as "well, she'll have to wait on remand until order is restored to the country and I can put her before a judge," that's an interesting point for the town meeting to argue about too.
Interesting - I was watching The Stand last week, and noticed the exact same thing.