Daisy Dunn

Crime and Guilt, by Ferdinand Von Schirach

Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip?

In a far bleaker arena, this is a question that plagues Ferdinand von Schirach, the criminal defence lawyer whose most recent novel, The Collini Case, I reviewed here last year.

Von Schirach’s earlier books, Crime and Guilt – both bestsellers in Germany – are compilations of stories derived from real life offences. Von Schirach has been involved in literally hundreds of criminal cases. In none of those he sets out in Crime was the guilty party ever convicted before a court of law. At the heart of both books is apparently an attempt to understand, if not justify, what drove the people he met from apparent sanity to criminality.

A museum worker in Crime steadily becomes so obsessed with a sculpture of the Spinario  (boy extracting a thorn from his foot) that he starts hiding drawing pins in shop shoes, as if emulating the artistic scenario. He seems only to overcome his fixation when he smashes the museum marble to pieces. Even then the psychiatrist is unable to say whether or not he still poses a danger to the public. In another case, a man attempts to cut a chunk of flesh out of his lover’s back because he has a sudden urge to eat her. He had lived with her for two years without incident.

This is not pleasant reading.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in