Historical crime thriller – A post-war Robin Hood

What is more heroic? The commitment for God, Emperor and Fatherland at the front, in which Emil Dvorak lost a little finger (it could have been much more) and for which he was awarded a medal against his will? Or his subsequent commitment to the hungry Viennese population by stealing from a black market king as a kind of post-war Robin Hood and distributing medicines and food? For the protagonist in Simon Müllauer’s debut novel, this question does not actually arise, the war hero – who would not describe himself as such – is too disillusioned by his experiences there and there.

In any case, he sees the dire misery of those badly shaken by the First World War every day Residents of his Hometown. The hole in which he lives is the least of the evils. In “Wiener Wind”, author Simon Müllauer paints a very dreary and probably authentic picture of Vienna in 1918: the state is down, the monarchy is history, the black market is flourishing, the population is desperate – and a remaining elite can still do it go well. Whereby some rope teams are quite fragile and there are many dependencies.

This is the scene in which Emil Dvorak moves, who is planning the coup of his life together with his best friend Johann and his pregnant fiancé Karoline: after he has messed with Leo Kocinzky, who rules the Vienna black market, and has successively stolen goods from him he is now infiltrating a large banquet and there really is another big cream before he flees to South America – because after this action at the latest he is no longer safe in Vienna. Simon Müllauer – who also interspersed encounters with historical personalities such as Karl Kraus and the young Matthias Sindelar – turns it into a cat-and-mouse game in which he uses timing and moments of surprise in such a way that the reader quickly sees what because the protagonists are approaching, but a tension remains until the very abrupt end. For 175 pages, people are excited about Emil Dvorak.