Berlin Noir: March Violets, The Pale Criminal, A German Requiem (Bernie Gunther, 1-3)

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Communism is the Americans' new enemy, and with the Nuremberg trials over, some strange alliances are being forged against the Red Menace—alignments that make many wartime atrocities look lily-white by comparison. Philip Kerr καταφέρνει να προκαλεί απολαυστική ανάγνωση και κομμένη ανάσα σε αυτό το έπος της τριλογίας του Βερολίνου. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. By the way, while Kerr has some interesting female characters, there is fair amount of objectivization in the great tradition of noir novels that women readers might take offense to.

Her hair was every bit as natural as a parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she’d evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she’d applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth. I bought the second trilogy on Kindle and found I wanted to read the next novel as soon as I finished the last and now have all the novels to read in one form or another. Bernie as a character is an unrepentant wise-ass, and this aspect of his personality rings loud and clear in his presentation of himself and his experiences to the reader. But he doesn't, and for me, the endless intriguing within the Nazi leadership that underlies much of the more byzantine twists of the trilogy's plots quickly becomes tiresome. Although the titles are not all on the same imprint (I have Berlin Noir and The One From the Other in trade paper, the other two in cloth), the series as a whole has a very consistent look in terms of title typeface, layout and cover design.

What Bernie discovers is far worse than a lone madman: an occult conspiracy at the very heart of the Nazi Party. Boldly asking for the temporary rank of Kommissar, Gunther finds that a murder hunt for a perverted criminal soon escalates beyond all his predictions. However, this bit of authorial insecurity is not yet the low point in the series, as the previously tacit cliché of "the shoddy little man in the barely furnished office, who drinks like a suicide who's lost his nerve, and who comes to the assistance of the beautiful but mysterious woman in black" is explicitly written into the text on page 220. By mixing fact and fiction in pre and post war Berlin Kerr demonstrated his mastery of the modern history faction genre with this trilogy; and if Gunther is Marlowe's German twin then Kerr is Raymond Chandler's alter ego with his writing style mastering and channelling Chandler's sardonic, drole, laid-back wit with complex story-telling, so if like me you love Chandler's writing then the chances are you'll probably enjoy Kerr's, and with another dozen or so later Gunthers I'll be back for more.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. The first person narrator and principal character is one Bernhard (Bernie) Gunther, a hard-boiled homicide detective who quits the Berlin police force (the Kripo) because he doesn’t want to become a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. Oh, but our hardbitten narrator-detective has not read the genre, of course, and this awkward bit of authorial obviousness almost caused me to set the book aside. We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.Like a damsel in distress, she enlists Bernie’s aid first with her errant but beautiful 19-year-old daughter Dinah, later with her boyfriend Alfredo Lopez, a dissident lawyer who runs afoul of Batista’s police. One thing the books illustrate is the extent to which Nazism was a kleptocracy, in which anyone with a bit of power stole from stigmatized groups: Jews, of course, but really anyone who was not a staunch Nazi.

Thanks to the built-in philosophy, the book had style, even if the plot (which looks forward to Showtime's TV show Dexter) ultimately fell flat. It's a world where it's hard to hold on to honor; however, Gunther understands that honor has no boundaries, even when the Reich attempts to set them.Discover the original Bernie Gunther stories that make up the late Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir: the tale of an ex-cop turned private investigator uncovering the corruption, lies, brutality and murder that lie at the heart of Nazi Germany in the Thirties and Forties. As head of Kripo, the Gestapo, and the SD (the Security Police), Reinhard Heydrich was Arthur’s immediate supervisor and a man who had distinguished himself by his ruthless suppression of all dissent during the 1936 Summer Olympics. Every time we’re afraid we’ve seen the last of Bernie Gunther, Philip Kerr comes through with another unnerving adventure for his morally conflicted hero. She had the kind of body I'd only ever dreamed about, in the sort of dream I'd often dreamed of having again. Yes, although A Quiet Flame ends with our hero bound for Uruguay, he didn’t tarry long there, but instead washed up on the shores of Cuba, during the time when that island nation was ruled by the dictator Fulgencio Batista in cahoots with several members of the American Mafia.