Perhaps there’s a charm imbued here by being slightly separated from too direct an experience of the career of former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel; the porcine indiscretions of David Cameron, for example, don’t exactly compel him as a kooky amateur sleuth.

To be perfectly honest, I originally had no desire to read Murder at the Castle (2021) by David Safier, translated from the original German by Jamie Bulloch for publication recently. The slightly cutesy cover, the clear attempt to muscle in on the popularity of Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple…it seemed to be trying a bit too hard. But then I stumbled across it twice in one day and, well, the least I could do was read the synopsis before dismissing it completely. Two minutes later, the mention of “the eccentric Baron von Baugenwitz [being] found poisoned in a castle dungeon locked from the inside” got me thinking that, okay, maybe this might be worth a look.

And good thing, too, because I had a wonderful time.

The German sense of humour is about as famous as British success at international football tournaments, but this is honestly the funniest book I’ve read in ages. At points I was helpless with silent mirth — testament both to Safier’s original text and, no doubt, to the keen eye of Bulloch in carrying those jokes over the language barrier in such a way that they continue to land. As a mystery it has its flaws — we’ll get to that — but I feel a little sorry for anyone who isn’t charmed by the deft job done to pilot this through its serious subject matter with such a good eye for comedy.

“We’ve got the best wine cellar in eastern Germany. There are Riojas from 1917, clarets from 1929, a 1943 Cheval Blanc.”

Achim was taken aback. “Wow… those really are the best years! For wine I mean. They weren’t so great for humanity.”

The plot is simplicity itself: Angela Merkel has retired from international politics to the picturesque Klein-Freudenstadt, where she hopes to enjoy a peaceful existence with her husband Joachim ‘Achim’ Sauer. But how does one move on after being a dominating force in international politics? What fills the days of the powerful when they’re no longer steering the ship of their country through history?

Enter Baron Philipp von Baugenwitz, whose forebears were feudal lords and who has inherited much of the land in the area, as well as the classic castle that stands on it, though modern times find the Von Baugenwitz coffers somewhat more barren these days. So classically-styled a future victim you cannot hope to meet: he might be selling the castle, leading to the loss of livelihood of the local farmers; his current and ex-wife both live within the castle and hate each other almost as much as they hate him; and stories of his infidelity are legendary, with seemingly every woman in the area having fallen under his spell at some point. So when the Baron is found, poisoned in his wine cellar, wearing a suit of armour in which an antecedent has similarly perished, Angela’s interest is piqued.

She mustn’t get carried away by her fantasies — as she had in 2015, when for a few weeks she’d believed the Germans would actually welcome refugees into the country with open arms.

Angela may consider herself “about as much of a genuine detective as Melania Trump was a genuine feminist”, but something tells her Von Baugenwitz was murdered — the taste of the poison in his wine would have been too acute for him to miss, for one, and the mysterious dying message he seems to have scrawled on a nearby piece of paper (the letter ‘a’ and nothing else) surely indicates foul play. So when gloomy local police inspector Harmut Hannemann refuses to see anything suspicious in the situation, Angela, Achim, and their pug Putin set out to find the killer in their midst.

From here, Safier ticks off all the cosy clichés you could hope for, from the burgeoning friendship with a suspect to the secondary murder just as someone is About To Tell All, via an attack on our amateur detective and the realisation that playing detective is difficult because you have to pry into the personal lives of people you’re seeing every day. It treads, then, no new ground, but good lord is it fun.

He was such an idiot! A champion idiot! If there was a world cup for idiots no one else would even bother competing because they’d know they didn’t stand a chance. Even Kanye West would stay at home.

Safier does well to work in the theme of Angela’s loneliness, and parses this into a genuine desire to unpick the crime she has stumbled into. And he writes about her marriage with Achim with honest-to-goodness feeling, showing a loving couple who still know, trust, and adore each other after years spent in service to something bigger than themselves. Indeed, it’s the personal relationships — see also their growing friendship with Mike, the bodyguard employed by Angela, who ends up far more involved in events than he’s strictly comfortable with — that make this stand out, and will no doubt see this compared to Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books by critics far more visible than myself. Safier has that same canny ability to get to the heart of fundamentally decent people quickly, and for once someone drawing such parallels wouldn’t be doing so emptily.

It’s less successful as the sort of Marple-esque detective fiction the cover wants you to think it is — there’s arguably one clue in the entire thing, and a lot of convenient interpretation put on evidence that happens to fit the eventual result rather than the result coming as a consequence of those occurrences. The locked room has the exact solution that occurred to me when I read the synopsis, and I’m also not sure the dying message makes sense…but, honestly, these are pretty minor quibbles this time around. Yes, I — the internet’s arch plot-fixated harridan when it comes to clued detective fiction — am giving Murder at the Castle a pass on it’s plot and clewing. That’s how much fun I had.

No excuse for giving away the solution to Murder on the Orient Express (1934) by Agatha Christie, though. It’s one of the most popular mystery books of all time, and new readers are coming to that every year. Unacceptable.

It is to be hoped that this fictional Angela Merkel doesn’t resort merely to “baking, cooking and reading books” too soon; for all its flaws, I’d read several more of these in a heartbeat. When your amateur detective is described “[d]eploying the authoritative tone she had perfected when dismissing British claims that all the benefits of Europe could be retained while leaving the EU,” it’s fair to say that an unholy alliance of character and author (and, in this case, translator) has occurred in a way that feels all to rare in my reading of modern crime fiction. I know there are at least three more titles in this series in German, so here’s hoping this does well and Bulloch is brought on board to render it in such appealing English once again.

After a quarter century of titles pretending to read these for TomCat‘s benefit — not all of them duds, by any means — it’s lovely to find a series I’m intrigued to read further even if no more impossible shenanigans present themselves. If there’s a Richard Osman fan in your house, get them this for Christmas and know that you’re doing good work: spreading the word, helping out an author who deserves the attention, and potentially bringing another good book for me to read to the market. ‘Tis the season of goodwill, after all…

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