Sabrina Rabow, only a fantastic press agent like you could have kept my criminal record out of the papers all these years. (I’m joooooking!) Thanks so much for that and for always being there for me.
I hit on the basic idea for SPLINTER during a conversation with the neurosurgeon Professor Samii at his clinic in Hannover. He startled me the following remark: ‘Most people are looking for new techniques and ways of storing knowledge in their brains more easily and quickly. Very few concern themselves with how one learns to forget.’ Learn to forget… Thank you, Professor Samii, for that wonderful quotation.
The following have earned a place in my acknowledgements’ eternal Hall of Fame:
Dr Hans-Peter Übleis and Beate Kuckertz.
Thank you for letting a child like me run riot in your publishing house. What publisher could suit my thrillers better than Droemer? After all, it’s an anagram of ‘Moerder’!
Carolin Graehl and Regine Weisbrod. Damn it, I always think after the first draft: ‘That’s it, there’s nothing more to be done.’
And then you come along and improve the book so much with your editing I can scarcely believe it myself. You’re wonderful. It isn’t your fault if people don’t like my thrillers, and that’s a fact.
It seems a lot of people clear off if they’ve had to work with me for any length of time. It started with my first editor, Dr Andrea Müller, who discovered me, and to whom I’m eternally grateful. She was followed by marketing boss Klaus Kluge, who has also defected to the competition. Well, you’ll soon discover what a tough sell obscure authors like Dan Brown and Ken Follett are.:-)
Seriously, though, I’m delighted for you and grateful to you for all you did for me.
I now know so many Droemer staff whose daily work ensures that my books get read I could type out the entire in-house telephone directory. On behalf of them all, I express my thanks to Andrea Ludorf, Andrea Fischer, Dominik Huber, Susanne Klein, Monika Neudeck, Sibylle Dietzel, Iris Haas, Andrea Bauer, Georg Regis, Andreas Thiele, Katrin Englberger and Heide Bogner, but the list is far from complete.
My thanks go also to Claudia von Hornstein, Christine Ziehl, Uwe Neumahr and everyone else in the team from AVA International, my literary agency and, first and foremost, of course, to Roman Hocke. He’s the agent who first made an author of me, but I wouldn’t recommend him to anyone else. He’d have less time for me if I did!
The same applies to Tanja Howarth. If you’ve got a book and want it published in Britain and the USA, take an amnesia pill and forget her phone number. Tanja is mine.
And now for the cheap seats, which I’ll polish off in a single sentence. (
So thanks to Ivo Beck, David Groenewold, Oliver Kalkofe, Arno Müller, Jochen Trus, Thomas Koschwitz, Dirk Stiller, Iván Sáinz-Pardo, Peter Prange, Christian Becker, Stefan Bäumer, Dagmar Miska, Christoph Menardi (thanks for your surname), Kossi, Fruti, the Alzners, Simon Jäger, Michael Treutler, and, of course, my father Freimut Fitzek, who was second to none in encouraging my love of literature. My next book is for you – not that it’ll be much use to you.
So… Have I forgotten anyone? Ten to one I have, and I can’t, alas, blame that on any pill. If, after reading this book, you aren’t so sure you can remember everything in your life – if you feel you may have taken part in an amnesia experiment at some stage – there’s a website on the Internet where you can find out:
www.mpu-berlin.or/anfrage
Drop in there sometime. It’ll be worth it!
I shall end by addressing the question I’m always being asked: Are my stories based on fact? To be quite honest, I can’t really remember.
Sebastian Fitzek
Berlin, March 2009
Sebastian Fitzek
Sebastian Fitzek has worked as a journalist and author for radio and TV stations all around Europe, and is now head of programming at RTL, Berlin’s leading radio station. His first and subsequent novels have become huge bestsellers in Germany, and he is currently working on his fifth.
