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the complete review - fiction

Bad Fucking

by
Kurt Palm

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : fun, but heaps too much on and pulls in too many directions

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Palm übertreibt, wo er nur kann, und zeichnet die Provinz, ihre Bewohner und bisweilen ganz Österreich so böse und scharf wie kaum ein anderer. Was ihn dabei auszeichnet, ist sein erzählerisches Kalkül. Wo andere Humoristen oft nur Albernheiten aufreihen, sorgt sich Palm um krimigerechte Spannungsbögen, zumindest ein wenig. (...) Palm spinnt die Posse bis zum unvermeidlichen Ende" - Horst Eckert, Focus

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Bad Fucking takes its title from the small town where most of the action takes place ('Bad' being common in German and Austrian place-names for spa- and lakeside-towns; there also long was an Austrian town called 'Fucking', though it officially changed its name, to 'Fugging', in 2021). Bad Fucking is an out-of-the-way place with less than 1500 inhabitants -- even more off the beaten track since a landslide eight years earlier largely closed it off from the rest of the world, making it a literally dead-end destination. On top of that, there is no cell phone or internet reception in town -- except on the plateau of a nearby mountain.
       Bad Fucking has been largely left to its own devices after a brief flurry of photo-op interest by the federal authorities after the landslide -- so forgotten that the local police force was overlooked in the 2005 national reorganization of the Austrian police force, that saw the consolidation of the 'Gendarmerie' (which handled much of the local police-work in the country) into a unified national police force, with the local officers still outfitted as Gendarms.
       Palm's crowded story includes mayor Aloysius Hirnsteiner, who, three years earlier, invested six million of the town's funds in an investment fund promising high returns, a pot whose value is now a mere million; he also invested a million of his own, an investment which has diminished to one-tenth its original value, with the bank he borrowed the money from now breathing down his neck. Hirnsteiner owns a local hotel, and he is giving son Philipp a trial run running the place -- but, unsurprisingly, business is not doing great -- though at least a group of cheerleaders, the Vienna Honeybees, have booked a weeklong-stay, coming to Bad Fucking to train before they head off for an international cheerleading competition in Oslo. Meanwhile, career gendarm Julius Wellisch, who runs the local force, is obsessed with fishing, and currently eagerly awaits the coming of the eels, the mysterious species that travels from the Sargasso Sea where they spawn and whose arrival this year is expected soon.
       Coïnciding with the arrival of the cheerleaders in Bad Fucking is the discovery of Vitus Schallmoser's body, a local who had spent the last few years living in a cave he had retreated to -- and a man who had previously been married to Karin, now the unhappy wife of mayor Hirnsteiner. The local authorities do their best in examining the scene and putting Vitus on ice -- at the local butcher's, since the refrigeration at the local funeral home has conked out -- but it's a pretty amateurish effort, not least because the town doctor is on vacation so dentist Dr.Ulrich has to handle the medical details. The evidence pretty clearly suggests someone killed Vitus, but no one seems to have much interest in pursuing that idea, so they treat it as an accidental death.
       Meanwhile, an important government official, Minister of the Interior Maria Sperr, has disappeared on the way to Bad Fucking -- where she was to check out its potential as a site for a(n out of the way) place to stick asylum-seekers, proposed by desperate Hirnsteiner --, a subplot that eventually comes to greater prominence in the story. There's also more to Vitus' cave than the locals had realized .....
       There's a lot going on here -- including then some efforts to blackmail both Dr.Ulrich and Philipp over some photographs they took, as well as some detours to Vienna, from where police inspector Camilla Glyck is then also sent out on the case(s). And, along the way, the bodies pile up -- including some semi-accidental deaths (Glyck just wanted to poison a dog, not a person ...), a suicide, and an assassination.
       Spread a bit thin, the story does have the advantage that, for example, it doesn't waste too much energy on the easy target of the social media-deprived cheerleading-group (wanting to check Facebook and ... Myspace (hey, the novel was published in 2010)) -- but in sum there are probably too many targets Palm goes after here, with too little follow-through. A bit of overlap between some of the things the various characters are facing and dealing with helps, but even though much here is very high-stakes -- from the personal to the international political stage -- it doesn't add up to all that much, all feeling too watered down. (So also, for example, with the (more or less incidental) downing of a plane carrying the Vienna Philharmonic (no worries, there are enough back-ups to immediately replace the whole orchestra) --, yet more easily-gotten-over catastrophe.)
       A few times there is mention of a weather event of unheard of proportions brewing over the Atlantic and making its way in the direction of Central Europe -- promising storms of an intensity never before experienced in these parts -- but the warnings are ignored by the local politicians, who refuse to raise any sort of alarm. It's just one more layer -- promising also to drown everything else out in the book's conclusion, but serving just to make the hoped-for resolutions more of a washout than anything else.
       There are quite a few fun ideas here, and the different threads are entertainingly presented -- if occasionally too up-closely disagreeable (one character shitting themselves is surely entirely enough). Palm juggles a few too many story-lines here, and so far too much gets short-shrift; there's lots of potential here -- not least in the writing, which is solid throughout -- but Bad Fucking winds up feeling a bit shapeless. It's fun to read, but not entirely satisfying.

- M.A.Orthofer, 7 August 2025

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Links:

• Residenz Verlag foreign rights page
• Rowohlt publicity page

• aus.gelesen (German)
• Focus (German)
• KrimiBlog (German)
• KrimiCouch.de (German)
• LiteraturhausWien (German)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• Weltending. (German)

• IMDb page
• Austrian Films information page

• Official site

• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• See Index of German literature

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About the Author:

       Austrian author Kurt Palm was born in 1955.

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© 2025 the complete review

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