The term “shotgun wedding”, which most English speaking people are familiar with, loses all its descriptive impact in German. “Mussehe” doesn’t sound as dramatic at all. It means “have-to wedding”. The first word, muss, meaning “have to”, also means “mash” or “sauce”, although that word is pronounced with […]
As the story hurtles towards what appears to be a bloody climax, our heroine and her mother, the baroness, seem like bait in a trap, a trap set to kill the only threat to Pascal Dunwolf’s dastardly plan to force Electra to marry him so he can inherit […]
Odd, that the simple maid should cry “murder, murder!” Or is it? I mean, long before anyone had been done in yet—without giving too much away. Now, any simple English maid who happened to be skulking around in any old dark secret passage and suddenly feeling a hand […]
Secret passages were one of my favourite elements in spooky old black and white movies. There was one in Ghost Breakers (dir. George Marshall) from1940, in which Paulette Goddard plays a particular combination of keys on the dusty old pipe organ of a very haunted castle in Cuba, […]
Interesting plot twists and a good knowledge of his foreign settings. Zenzel may sound a bit strange as a choice of name for one of Electra’s new maids these days, but it is a real one and reflects how much serious research Cobb put into his writing. More […]
For some people living in western democracies, reading Cobb’s story with spies lurking in the woods may almost seem a bit too fictional to be taken seriously. Yes, some of us remember all the “reds under the beds” hysteria from not so long ago, but wasn’t that a […]
The Swabian Alb is indeed the area of Germany with more caves than anywhere else. Around 2000 of them, apparently. That’s because it’s a karst area: a landscape in which limestone is constantly being hollowed out by erosion. Cobb knew his geography well. Hiding in caves is a […]
What would they call a villain or “badguy” in German? An older term was “Boesewicht“, “Boese” meaning bad or naughty, “wicht” being a derogatory term meaning something like “blackguard”, but also a toddler, a naughty child . It is still in use today, along with “Schurke“, which means […]
The first impression of a flight from danger I can remember was that of the Von Trapp family. Good heavens, no, I’m not one of those people that would mar an otherwise perfectly enchanting visit to a beautiful city like Salzburg by insisting on trying to sing songs […]
The German word for “dungeon” is “Verlies“. An unusual word, originating in Low German and Dutch, meaning loss, or leaving. Verlies sounds like the past form of “verlassen“, which means to leave. A place where you leave people, to an awful fate? There were dungeons like that in […]
