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

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Brings to life the dystopia Germany of the30's and 40's, gives a lesson in one of our world's worst period in history from an angle rarely experienced, really makes the reader think, whilst enjoying and being gripped by the twists and mysteries. an investigation in which he finds himself exploring the crankier side of modern German medicine and psychotherapy.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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). 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.Set two years after "March Violets" in 1938 against a backdrop of the Munich Agreement and Kristallnacht Kerr deftly weaves fact and fiction as Gunther is engaged by a wealthy Frau to trace a blackmailer; but before you know it he's co-opted back into the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), now part of Himmler's Reich Security Organisation, to investigate the serial sex-murders of Aryan teenage girls, killings with links to a conspiracy at the core of the SS [and of course in the best fictional style to the original throw-away blackmail story].

The Pale Criminal finds Bernie back on the force in 1938 on the edge of war when Berlin experiences the mad spree of a serial killer. But then he went freelance, and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of the Nazi regime. Like most hard-boiled detectives, he's got a dry wisecrack for every situation, though he's better at it than most and I actually found myself laughing out loud at many of his comments. 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.The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. That piece takes place in 1937, or in between the story lines of March Violets and The Pale Criminal. Once you are already familiar with the noir genre and Nazi-era Germany, the two books which follow March Violets can offer you no real new insight.

In the bitter winter of 1947, as the Russian Zone closes around the ruined city, Berliners live on fear and dubiously earned PX goods. But as Gunther investigates the story twists and turns and he uncovers a complex web of crime and corruption in which both Goering and Heydrich have self-interests to protect … [enough, you can read the precis and plot spoilers elsewhere]. Kerr's private detective Gunther is to World War II Berlin what Martin Cruz Smith's Inspector Arkady Renko is to post-Soviet Moscow -- broody antiheroes whose ethics and personal loyalties forever place them at odds with the me-first-morality of their respective environments. And even after the war, amidst the decayed, imperial splendour of Vienna, Bernie uncovered a legacy that made the wartime atrocities look lily-white in comparison .

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. It's true that Hitler was never as popular in Berlin as he was in Bavaria, but he was elected with 37% of the vote initially, and his popularity went up steadily from there as he succeeded in absorbing Austria, Czechoslovakia, and finally France.

Communism is the 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. It ought to be the exclusive property of novelists—but only if they are as clever and knowledgeable as Philip Kerr.Let me explain: I’m not a devoted fan of the mystery genre though I’m thankful to GoodReads for introducing me to some worthy authors in that field that I would otherwise never have read.