In the darkness of the Internet and the Irish Sea

Ellen Dunne opens the abyss beneath our digital everyday life. It shines a light into the hidden working world of content moderators – the mostly young people who are supposed to keep social media platforms free of hate and violent fantasies. “Content moderators wade through the dregs of human nature,” Ellen Dunne says to her main character in the latest novel “Unfollow Stella.” This character, Stella Schatz, an Austrian, knows what she’s talking about. She does this job like thousands of others. Or not, because he will be her downfall. Stella Schatz is missing. Detective Inspector Patricia “Patsy” Logan sets out on her trail in Dublin.

Google’s expansion

At the author’s side, we walk through the Docklands of Dublin, the district in the southeast that clearly shows the changes of the past decades. “When I came here in 2004 as an employee of Google,” says Ellen Dunne, “we were rented on two floors. The space has now multiplied and the area is now called Silicon Docks.” Huge towers of tech multinationals rise into the sky, with modest brick houses crouched in front of them, the remains of the workers’ settlements of the old port. The new office buildings also tower over the impressive historic granaries.

Back to the book: “The candidate understands and accepts that in her position she may be confronted with extreme, disturbing and sensitive content,” reads Stella Schatz’s employment contract. The dark side of the internet that we use every day. We get to know her with Ellen Dunne. The questions – what should and may be shared and exchanged online, what needs to be deleted and who decides – are current and real sources of conflict. “In my books, the perpetrator and the victim are often one person,” she says. “The interesting thing is where the boundaries blur. You can question your own morals; after all, we are all users and part of the system by scrolling through,” says the author, who develops her characters from book to book. Your new novel examines the gray area between control and crime. Moral standards and crime go hand in hand. Dunne’s crime novels are always exciting portraits of society.

The Salzburg native moved to Dublin in 2004 after working in Munich and Berlin. “Ellen Dunne” is the pseudonym of Eva-Maria Oberauer, a native of Salzburg. She once chose it for marketing reasons. Writing about Irish topics with an Austrian name is not credible, she says. Now, for 20 years, Ireland has long been the reality of their lives.

The Irish Sea is mysterious in her crime novels; the inspector’s father goes missing at sea. Dunne allows this mystery to appear in every book. So the sea still has narrative potential.

A complex commissioner

The freelance author knows how to unobtrusively incorporate research results into the tightly structured narrative and thus strengthen the credibility of the fiction. And with her title character, Patricia “Patsy” Logan, she doesn’t bring a female clone of a traditional inspector onto the stage, but rather “a complex woman over 40 who notices that old concepts no longer work, who experiences a career downturn, relationship crises and the glass labyrinth, not just upwards”. And who still stays on top of her job as a police officer.

The narrator’s humor is rough, often black. In any case, the gentle cliché of Ireland, which has developed into an engaging stereotype in our part of the world, is corrected and supplemented by Ellen Dunne. We experience the Ireland of today.

Ellen Dunne says about her adopted homeland: “The Irish are better at the warm routine than the Central Europeans. And they are helpful.” But the republic also suffers from a housing shortage, high costs of living and crime, the activities of which have recently made business people in Dublin city nervous.

We have already left the Silicon Docks behind us and are walking along Grafton Street towards Stephens Green, all locations for her books. “I want to become smarter without any effort,” Dunne also says of herself as a reader. An added value that applies to her crime novels. In May of this year she was awarded the German Friedrich Glauser Prize.

• Ellen Dunne: “Unfollow Stella”, Novel, Haymon-Verlag, 312 pages, 13.95 euros