Interview - The thriller author from GB

Arne Dessaul interviewed me for ‘Rubens’, the magazine of the Ruhr-Universität.

I tried to answer the questions as well as possible. You can check whether I succeeded here.

Christian Heinke is publishing his first novel at the end of October.

In one life, he is a media technician and looks after the 20,000 or so films in the media library at the Institute of Media Studies. In the other life, he comes up with exciting stories. Until now, Christian Heinke has distributed his thrillers via podcast on the Internet, chapter by chapter, and read them aloud himself. Now, for the first time, they are publishing one of his novels as a book: ›Die Haut‹ (The Skin) will be released on October 1. Arne Dessaul met with the author beforehand.

Dessaul: Mr. Heinke, are you already tingling, so few days before the publication of your novel?

Heinke: Yes, absolutely, I couldn’t be more excited. After writing, editing and many other things, the time has finally come.

Dessaul: ›Die Haut‹ (The Skin) is already listed for sale on Amazon. In which bookshops in Bo- chum and the surrounding area will people be able to buy the book?

Heinke: I think it’ll be available everywhere. I can’t say yet whether it will be in stock anywhere. There will also be readings, beginning in Zurich at the publisher’s headquarters and then soon in Bochum.

Dessaul: How big is the first print run?

Five thousand. That’s pretty high for a small publisher like KaMeRu.

Call from Switzerland

Dessaul: When and why did you write thrillers?

Heinke: I was already writing at school. But then I started studying media studies and also made a few short films during my studies. However, the many financial and personal dependencies involved in filmmaking bothered me. When writing, all I need is a pen and a sheet of paper or a laptop. At some point I started a text again, couldn’t stop and had a sudden thought to myself: Oh, oh ... this is going to be a novel!

Dessaul: Was that already ›Die Haut‹ (The Skin)?

Heinke: No, it was indeed a horror novel. I posted samples of it on various websites, including the forum of a women’s magazine where young authors present themselves. The publishing director of KaMeRu stumbled upon it by chance and called me.

Dessaul: Oops, that’s unusual, isn’t it?

Heinke: Yes, normally the author tries to get in touch with the publisher, often in vain. Sometime late in the evening, Dr. Graf-Mullis contacted me from Switzerland. In the beginning, I believed she was joking, but it was indeed the case. The publisher wasn’t interested in publishing my horror manuscript, but they asked if I would like to write a thriller or crime novel for them. With my writing, that should be something. This eventually resulted in “Die Haut”.

Dessaul: Which was originally distributed as a podcast on the Internet. How should one imagine that?

Heinke: Quite mundane. I sit in my kitchen and record the text.

Dessaul: Our readers should know that you speak with clarity and distinctness and that people enjoy listening to you ...

Heinke: ... and that I’ve already done radio reports for WDR. The text is put online afterwards, one chapter at a time, month after month.

Dessaul: But so your Internet listeners already know the complete story?

Heinke: No, understandably, we have not yet revealed the end. We reached an agreement with the publisher on that.

Dessaul: Sure, they were in on it.

Heinke: Sure, and they liked it for the publicity. Thanks to the Internet, I’m no longer an unknown quantity, especially as I was the first German to publish an audio book as a podcast.

Dessaul: Do you have literary role models?

Heinke: Yes, mostly writers of sophisticated entertainment literature from the Anglo-American world, and my writing style is based on them. These are people like Thomas Harris, Dashiell Hammett, or Stephen King.

Dessaul: Are you planning further publications with Kameru-Verlag?

Heinke: Absolutely. Next, the publisher is planning to bring out a mystery novel of mine, ›Kabbala‹. Another thriller will follow this, ›The Heart‹, which I’m writing. I have finished ›Kabbala‹ and the publisher is currently reading it.

Victims from the fashion scene

Dessaul: Can you explain in a nutshell why people should definitely buy ›Die Haut‹ (The Skin)?

Heinke: I think the initial situation is unparalleled: a woman who lives solely from her beauty as a top model loses it in an accident, regains it through an operation, and shortly after, must dread losing it again because she is being hunted by a serial killer and literally has to fear for her own skin. I also think I’ve given my characters a certain psychological depth. I look behind the beautiful appearance of the fashion scene and show some hideous things there. My first readers have told me it’s really creepy, that the plot doesn’t follow a conventional pattern and that you want to read on and on.

Dessaul: Not a bad premise, indeed.

Heinke: I hope for the best.

More of Heinke’s stories

For the thriller ›Die Haut‹ (The Skin) (Kameru-Verlag, Zurich 2007, 220 pages, 19 euros), we can’t reveal any more than the blurb: »A plane crash destroys the life of former top model Katherine Williams: husband Richard and son Denny are dead, 60 percent of Katherine’s skin is burnt. However, a new procedure gives her a second life and restores her beauty. But when a serial killer begins murdering Katherine’s colleagues from the catwalk, the investigations of New York policewoman Helen Louisiani indicate that the killer is also after Katherine’s skin.«

Christian Heinke has written a lot more than ›Die Haut‹ (The Skin), including the novels ›Kabbala‹ and ›The Mark‹. In addition to ›Die Haut‹ (The Skin), ›Kabbala‹ has already been distributed as a podcast on the Internet, as has the ›TV Watchdog‹ series, in which Heinke presents and analyzes TV series from the USA; further information: heinke.digital ad