I first ran across Berlin Noir, containing the titles March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem) in one of those remaindered book catalogs several years ago. A detective series set in 1930s Berlin certainly sounded right up my alley, and it definitely was! Although we never managed to persuade the publisher of this series (Putnam being a division of Penguin) to send us review copies, I decided to write a review anyway, partly to give myself reason to reflect on the whole experience of reading them, partly to share my unabashed delight and enthusiasm with anyone who chances to read this review.
Yes, this is a detective series, for sure. 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. He becomes a private investigator, at least for a while. Taken altogether, the novels span a period of nearly a quarter century, and in that time Bernie covers a lot of territory, both in terms of his location and in terms of his means of support.
I would also characterize these novels as part of the suspense thriller genre. Like the novels of Alan Furst, David Downing, and Rebecca Cantrell, the Bernie Gunther series touches on a lot of issues related to living and surviving under a repressive political regime and on the many compromises that a person has to make in order to accomplish that goal. What sets these novels apart from Furst, of course, is that Furst doesn’t have any continuing character. Downing’s main character John Russell and Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel are both news reporters, not detectives, so the sensibilities are different.
I’ve briefly mentioned already that these novels are written in the first person, entirely from Bernie’s point of view. That means for the most part that the reader doesn’t know anything unless Bernie knows it too. Occasionally he will foreshadow some event, suggesting that if he had known then what he came to know later he might have acted or spoken differently – but even in those instances he doesn’t reveal too much to the reader, leaving that lovely uncertainty as motivation for turning the page again and again.
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. I honestly can’t think of a single other detective, murder mystery, or suspense thriller series I’ve read – including those I’ve mentioned above – that I would ever consider as funny. But this series is full of humor, some of it quite ribald, much of it quite mordant, as you might expect, given that Bernie lives through some pretty ugly times. Here are a couple of examples to whet your whistle:
Describing one of the women he falls for:
Her hair, which she wore in a bun, was also sable-colored, and, I imagined, every bit as nice to stroke [as her sable coat]. Nicer, probably, as it wasn’t likely to bite. All the same, I wouldn’t have minded being bitten by Noreen Charalambides. Any proximity to her pouting, cherry-red Fokker Albatross of a mouth would have been worth losing a fingertip or a piece of my ear. Vincent van Gogh wasn’t the only fellow who could make that kind of heady, romantic sacrificial gesture. (If the Dead Rise Not, 92)
One of numerous memorable street scenes:
In front of the German War Memorial a company of Reichswehr were making trade for chiropodists to the accompaniment of a brass band. Sometimes I think that there must be more brass bands in Germany than there are motor-cars. This one struck up with The Great Elector’s Cavalry March and set off at a lick towards the Brandenburger Tor. Everyone who was watching was getting some arm exercise, so I hung back, pausing in a shop doorway to avoid having to join them. (Berlin Noir/March Violets, 107)
A few more tidbits about Bernie, gleaned from the series to date: he served in the First World War and was awarded an Iron Cross, second class. He occasionally experiences flashbacks and recurring nightmares, both symptoms of posttraumatic stress. He’s a big guy, tall and stocky, with blond hair and blue eyes. Usually he wears a mustache, but not one of those little Hitler caterpillars. Perish the thought! He drinks and smokes, both to excess on occasion. His first wife died of influenza in the 1918 epidemic. His second wife died of influenza in a mental hospital after the war. He started his career with the Kripo shortly after the war and served to June 1933. After he resigned, he took a job as house detective at the Adlon Hotel and remained there for about a year, until he left to become his own boss, using money he received from one of his lady friends.
Let me tell you a bit about each of the titles in the series, originally published a year apart, and in so doing give you more of a sense of Bernie’s character and biography.
March Violets opens in 1936, shortly before the infamous Berlin Summer Olympics begin. The title of this novel is a derogatory reference to people who decided to join the National Socialist Party right after Hitler had himself declared dictator by a vote in the Reichstag in late March 1933 – often as a form of profiteering. Bernie, 38, is working as a private investigator with offices on Alexanderplatz near the police station. He is impressed into investigating a double murder, the victims the daughter and son-in-law of a Ruhr industrialist named Hermann Six. Herr Six happens to have a drop-dead beautiful wife and Bernie picks up an equally attractive assistant, Inge Lorenz, who disappears without a trace toward the end of the novel. The case, of course, is not as straightforward as one might hope. Hell, if it was, what fun would that be?
The Pale Criminal starts roughly two years later, in August 1938. When the novel opens, Bernie is still working as a private investigator. He’s picked up a partner, Bruno Stahlecker, one of his former colleagues from the Kripo, a man who seems to drink even more than Bernie. He goes undercover at one of those fancy clinics in the service of a client. Bernie in any kind of institutional setting is always hilarious, and this is no exception. Of course he can’t drink or smoke or eat greasy food, so what’s he supposed to do?
The Pale Criminal is dominated by the presence of two historical persons. Arthur Nebe was at this time the head of Kripo and another former colleague of Bernie’s. 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. Lucky Bernie gets impressed into re-joining the Kripo just so he can investigate a serial murder case for Heydrich. This is the kind of assignment that gives a man a reputation he can’t live down for the rest of his life! This novel climaxes on Kristallknacht, in early November 1938.
A German Requiem jumps ahead to 1947. Bernie is still working as a private investigator in Berlin, in shambles from the Allied bombings and divided into four sectors, each governed by a different force (USA, Britain, France and the Soviet Union). Like all the other novels I’ve read about post-war Europe, this is anything but pretty. The towns like Berlin that were initially “liberated” by the Red Army suffered terrible looting and destruction on the ground. Nearly every woman was raped, some repeatedly or with inanimate objects. Many were killed or badly maimed. Most were infected with venereal disease. Bernie’s second wife Kirsten is among the survivors of this horror. Oh, and she trades sex with American soldiers for food.
Bernie refers to the Russian soldiers as “the Ivans,” and there is clearly no love lost. In the second chapter of A German Requiem, he’s riding the train back to Berlin from a trip to Potsdam. He shares his carriage with a drunk and very belligerent Chechen, whom he eventually kills and tosses out the door in order to get rid of him. This scene is one of many that haunt Bernie throughout the rest of his life.
Ironically, Bernie’s main “case” in this novel is one he undertakes for the Russian secret police, the MVD (formerly known as the NKVD, an acronym I remember from the Alan Furst novels). He is dragooned (you expect the Russian secret police to be subtle?) into investigating a murder that took place in Vienna. A man named Emil Becker, whom Bernie knew from the Kripo, is the accused, and the Russians seem to want him cleared of the charges. Before this novel ends, Bernie gets the crap beat out of him by people in the employ of Heinrich Muller, a Gestapo leader who disappeared after the Fall of Berlin.
Over 10 years elapsed between the publication of the novels in the Berlin Noir set and the three stand-alone titles that complete the Bernie Gunther series to date. These later entries demonstrate Kerr’s maturation as a writer and reflect his willingness to engage in some stylistic experimentation. Oh, nothing too radical, just some interesting tweaks!
Although most of the action in The One From the Other takes place in 1949, Kerr provides a 37-page prologue to anticipate some of the later plot threads. That piece takes place in 1937, or in between the story lines of March Violets and The Pale Criminal. This caper has our hero taking a little trip to Palestine to
help a client, a Jewish businessman, emigrate and move his assets safely there. As his cover, he travels with two SD officers. Before Bernie leaves, a high-ranking Gestapo officer corrals him into using the trip as an opportunity to gather evidence on the criminal activities of the SD officer who arranged the trip in the first place. One of Bernie’s traveling companions on this trip was the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann.
By 1949 Bernie has shifted his quarters from Berlin to Munich, and after a terribly unsuccessful stint running a small hotel near Dachau, has resumed his private investigation business. Bernie takes on a case for an attractive woman attempting to establish whether her husband, a particularly vicious Nazi, is alive or dead. A very tangled plot leads Bernie to take on the identity of another war criminal and fall victim to one of the Jewish vengeance squads roaming post-war Europe. In order to save his skin, he seeks asylum with a group of Catholic priests who have formed a sort of underground railroad to help Nazi war criminals escape to Argentina. Bernie becomes Carlos Hausner. One of his traveling companions, once again, is Adolph Eichmann.
A Quiet Flame also moves back and forth in time, although Kerr uses a different narrative technique in this book, inserting chapters that relate an episode from Bernie’s past (Berlin, 1932) into the main story, which takes place in Buenos Aires in 1950. As was the case in The One From the Other, Bernie’s earlier experiences are highly relevant to his understanding of his new challenges. He is only in Argentina for a few weeks when he receives an invitation from the head of President Peron’s secret police to investigate a murder that looks a lot like two unsolved murders he investigated back in Berlin in (when else but?) 1932. Because of course the Argentines have a complete file on Bernie, so they know who he really is and what he’s done (or what someone thinks he’s done) that brought him to South America under an assumed name. They also know that our aging hero needs treatment for thyroid cancer. So Bernie doesn’t exactly have a choice.
I found Kerr’s depictions of Weimar Berlin and Peronist Buenos Aires utterly fascinating. He successfully evoked everything I already I knew about the former (especially in terms of the decadence) and surprised me at every turn with details about the latter that I had honestly never thought about before. Naturally Bernie’s investigations (there’s also a case involving the missing daughter of a wealthy businessman, another German expatriate) get him into a mess of trouble. By the end of A Quiet Flame Bernie is on a boat headed to Montevideo. Oh, and he has fallen in love with a beautiful woman, a recurring theme in his life.
Are you still with me? This is the last one, I promise, and it’s a lulu! If the Dead Rise Not offers another Bernie story that takes place in two different time periods. This time, Kerr splits the narrative into two discrete parts. The first part, which is considerably longer than the second, takes place in Berlin in 1934, during the time that Bernie worked as a house detective at the Adlon Hotel. The second part, which clocks in at just 150 pages, takes place in Havana in 1954. 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.
The two parts of the story are connected by a woman Bernie loved and a man he despised back in 1930s Berlin. The woman is Noreen Charalambides (she of the matching sable hair and coat), a Jewish American journalist whom Bernie meets through Hedda Adlon. Noreen wants to investigate the debate that followed the decision of the International Olympic Committee to hold the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Hedda asks Bernie to escort Noreen around Berlin, a responsibility he is only too happy to assume. The man is Max Reles, a German American businessman also staying at the Adlon. Over the course of the 1934 section, several murders take place. Bernie solves at least two of them, is a suspect in one and witnesses at least two others. Messy, messy stuff!
Fast forward twenty years to Havana. Bernie is leading a relatively quiet, low-key life, still under the Carlos Hausner name, when he encounters Noreen in a bookstore. 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. The problem with the daughter is far worse than Bernie could have ever imagined – the kid is seeing the evil and now elderly Max Reles, in fact wants to marry him. When Max is murdered, Meyer Lansky enlists Bernie to investigate the crime. I can say no more without giving away too much.
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. All feature photo montages with black as the dominant color. They look like noir fiction, if you know what I mean!
Philip Kerr keeps a pretty low profile online. I can tell you that he is Scottish and was born in 1956. As P.B. Kerr, he has also written a children’s book series. According to a March 2010 interview, Kerr prepares to write each of the novels in series by visiting some of Bernie’s haunts, reading about their history and exercising a very good imagination.
My perusal of Web sites did give me a heads up that I can expect to see another Bernie Gunther installment in a year or so: Field Grey is coming out in the UK in July 2010. Who knows what period of Bernie’s many misadventures this one will cover? As you can tell from my description of the titles to date, one of the ongoing features of this series is the way Kerr shifts his attention around Bernie’s colorful biography! He does admit, in the aforementioned interview, that his intent is to use each novel to reveal some additional aspects of Bernie’s character. Makes sense to me!
(Penguin Books, 1993)
(Penguin Books, 2009)
(G.P. Putnam, 2009)
(G. P. Putnam, 2010)
