Spuren is a four part German crime fiction serial – a detailed police procedural rather than a gory crime thriller. In many ways it’s a conventional example of a procedural with familiar genre elements but it is well performed with close attention to detail and I recommend it as a good watch. German audiences/readers are big consumers of crime fiction TV shows and several have been imported by Channel 4 via its ‘Walter Presents’ brand but as far as I’m aware this is only the second on BBC4 which is airing the serial in two 45 minute episodes on Saturday evenings. All four episodes are however available on iPlayer and it should be available via local channels in other territories. It’s currently screening in Australia on SBS? The show is made by an independent, Lailaps films for Studio Canal and the German regional broadcaster Südwestrundfunk.

Most of the core investigation team on site. Barbara in the foreground and Thomas behind her.

In the first few minutes of episode one I was struck by two things. One was the landscape and the village in the Black Forest, an area of rolling foothills, vineyards and forest which, as the new ‘Senior Detective’ of the nearby town notes has seen significant development of new dwellings. This character, Barbara Kramer, is a striking older woman who I knew I had seen before and I quickly realised that Nina Kunzendorf plays the close friend of the Nina Hoss character in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (Germany 2014). This connection is of no real importance here except that it attracted my attention and helped me concentrate. The pacing of the serial is quite slow but there is a wide range of characters and plenty of details to savour. Barbara is a local who spent time policing in Berlin. Now she is back a little tension develops between her and her deputy Thomas (Tilman Strauss) who lives in the village. Barbara is also seen as an outsider by the rest of the team and there are various familiar characters in the rest of the dramatis personae. There is a slightly macho and ‘unreconstructed’ guy, a rather eager and bright young woman and an Iranian computer whizz-kid and of course the local prosecutor and the forensics person are youngish women (as they are in British, American, Scandinavian crime fictions). We usually have a father figure for a female detective and here he is Barbara’s actual father, mostly away in a camper van after the death of her mother. None of these ‘typical characters’ is pushed too far but the father returns at the end of the narrative and I wonder if this signals a second series?

Tobias (David Richter), the husband of the first victim on the search for his wife in the vineyards.

The investigation team from the town move to a temporary incident room in the village and the locals have mixed responses. On the one hand their hospitality extends to cakes home-baked and delivered to the team each day but on the other the detectives are treated with some suspicion. Thomas finds himself in the middle of potentially difficult situations. I don’t want to spoil the narrative too much but a second murder takes place and eventually the procedural work uncovers a possible link to an unsolved crime in Austria. The team are working in a region which sees traffic flows between Eastern Europe and Italy or France via Switzerland. Unless the perpetrator is local, they could come from anywhere within a thousand kilometres or more. This means a long hard slog for the investigation team. I like the scenario but others may prefer the thriller structure in which it is a race to find the killer, risking everything. That doesn’t happen here. There are no wild guesses and flashes of insight. The team recognise that a procedure might not be producing anything useful and switch to another approach, eventually making everything add up.

Bernd (Bozidar Kocevski) is one of the characters in the investigation team who ‘develops’ over the course of the serial. foto@swr.de

I think I did get the sense that this was at least ‘inspired’ by a real case and later I learned that there was a non-fiction book about two murders in 2016. This is ‘Soko Kerle’ by Walter Roth. There are elements that are completely fictional, however. The whole issue of realism is arguably central to the success of the serial which seems to have either a very good PR team or has indeed genuinely appealed to audiences by not focusing on the exploitation of the murders of young women. Nor has it developed the melodrama potential of the story like the recent Irish serial Crá (Ireland-UK 2024) which deals with a small community and the intrusion of a police investigation team from the nearest large town.  In fact I think this German serial could be seen as ‘restrained’ in its approach. Some characters are ‘developed’, in particular Bernd (Bozidar Kocevski) the macho character noted above who initially criticises his boss but eventually apologises and proves a good team member. The realism is partly achieved by refusing the more conventional approaches to the procedural but also by allowing scenes to develop that have genuine narrative importance but also reveal aspects of the local culture. I particularly enjoyed a choir singing a delightful arrangement of ‘My Bonnie’, the Scottish folk song, but which is undercut by presaging the second murder. Overall, a very good import for BBC4. More like this please. I’d like to show you the BBC trailer but it seems difficult to find an ‘official trailer’. There are a few chancers out there offering their own trailers but it’s easy to look it up on iPlayer.