Laher’s hero is a jack-of-all-trades: a Bavarian justice administration inspector and a gifted storyteller with a talent for acting, out and about in the cabarets of the republic.
At last Oskar Brunngraber, who has been locked away as a justice administration inspector for the last 25 years, can tell someone about the mysterious pieces of evidence stored away in his hideaway: the guns and drugs and murder weapons and the criminal world they come from, most of which Brunngraber himself knows little about. But with the driving force of his fantasy behind him, he invents wild stories that are in a class of their own. How difficult it is for him sometimes to destroy these pieces of evidence, after the judgements have been spoken! – If you just think about their market value out there, the drugs for example, the narcotics, which take up most of the space in the hideaway and give off odours that you can’t get out of your clothes. The evidential objects from the security wing are not only there to expose the perpetrators, they also provide a basis for interpreting the world. Brunngraber almost overflows with inventiveness and a lust for language. By no means is his life reduced to the tasks he has to perform all day in his profession, into which he stumbled more or less by chance all those years ago.
At any rate, his name is well-known in the cabaret theatres of the world, and in the »Pfeffermühle« in Leipzig he is even said to be a »monster of mimic«.
Ludwig Laher, born in 1955, studied German, English and classical philology in Salzburg. From 1979 he worked as a teacher, translator and author of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, radio plays, screenplays. A freelance author since 1998, Laher lives in St. Panaleon and Vienna. His books have been translated into English, French, Japanese, Croatian and Spanish. Laher has received numerous literary awards; in 2011 he was nominated for the German Book Prize.
