Wow, I have really dropped the ball here. The stack of read-books, waiting to be blogged, stands unmoving next to my computer, growing steadily as I read, pile, and then procrastinate.
But NO LONGER! I'm going to bust through this pile in a new format, inspired by the extremely funny (I guess, if you're, like, in academia, or a college senior) tumblr lol my thesis. As you can read on the About page, lolmythesis was started as a procrastinatory measure in 2013, by a Harvard College student who was looking for ways to avoid working on her senior thesis. Submissions consist of one sentence (more or less) descriptions that succinctly and sometimes hilariously describe capstone projects. For example:
When you ride your bike a lot of stuff happens to your blood. But probably not this stuff because all the subjects were hungover. (Kinesiology, James Madison University)
We drugged the hell out of some crayfish and then poked them to see if they would move. They didn't. (Biology, Mount Holyoke College)
You haven't heard of this 16th c. Flemish playwright named Cornelis Everaert, but you totally should have. (Medieval Studies, Cornell University)
You get the idea. Let's see how I do.
Ashenden, or The British Agent (1927, this edition, Doubleday, 1941) by W. Somerset Maugham
British spy gets up to weirdly bloodless (until the very end) derring-do in Switzerland and France and Russia during The Great War. But what is his first name?
Read it if you are a student of the genre like moi.
Absolution by Murder (1994, this edition, Signet, 1997) by Peter Tremayne
Unsurprisingly red-headed seventh-century Celtic nun investigates a murder in the abbey while the future of Christianity is debated by a lot of very learned religious people. Is that a future love interest? Nope, 'cause he's a monk!
Read it!
The Blood Royal (2011, this edition Soho Crime, 2012) by Barbara Cleverly
Why am I still reading this? Joe Sandilands, you should have stayed in India.
Skip it!
Real Tigers (2016, John Murray) by Mick Herron
Another win for the Slow Horses, another loss for British integrity. On to Brexit!
Read it first! A selection from the British Crime Club at the Mysterious Bookshop.
Bring Up the Bodies (2012, this edition Picador, 2015) by Hilary Mantel
Thomas Cromwell does Henry VIII a solid by getting rid of wife no. 2. Hello Jane Seymour!
Read it! Even though you know how it ends. And even though it is not crime fiction.
Beloved Poison (2016, Constable) by E. S. Thompson
Egotistical doctors clash with a gender-bending apothecary in gross Victorian hospitals, prisons and brothels. Try to keep your limbs about you.
Read it! A selection from the British Crime Club at the Mysterious Bookshop.
The Lady from Zagreb (2015, G. P. Putnam Sons) by Philip Kerr
Bernie Gunther zooms through time again, this time bedding a hot Croatian actress in 1943. But Goebbels likes her too so watch out, Bernie!
Read it if you're into Nazi-crime, or if you've read every other Bernie Gunther book so you might as well read this one too.
Showing posts with label Philip Kerr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philip Kerr. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Sunday, October 5, 2014
A Man Without Breath
Please don't take this the wrong way but sometimes I just really love a good story about Nazis. Philip Kerr always delivers with point-blank perfect period detail, carefully researched and presented without a lot of hand-wringing. A Man Without Breath (2013; Penguin paperback 2014) is a great addition to his convoluted Everyman's history of the Third Reich and its aftermath. Kerr, and his reluctant hero Berlin cop Bernie Gunther lost their way a bit in some of these - A Quiet Flame, for example, and If The Dead Rise Not - but are back on their breathtakingly ghastly track now.
I use the word breathtaking not because it fits with the title, which is really only sort of explained on the last page, and not particularly satisfactorily, but because it is hard sometimes to feel shocked by stories from the European theater of the Second World War at this point. We've seen it all, the agonizing photographic record of the Holocaust, the physical destruction of France and Germany and England and pretty much anywhere anywhere in Europe where the war was actually fought, and of course the increasing realism of fictional and film treatments of the War. But two points.
First, we Americans don't really know much about the Eastern Front, other than that German soldiers really didn't want to go there. What did they fear? Read this book. Even without any battle scenes, in fact, this is all set well behind German lines, the desolation and deprivation of the German-Russian conflict is sobering. This too was a race war for the Germans at least, and the Russians responded with similar brutality.
Second and related, war is hell, yes, I know, but do we really know? While reading this book, I heard this story about ISIS' use of sexual violence. The piece didn't really work that well as a panel discussion because because the host kept trying to get the guests to talk about the apparent disconnect between a state for God and sexual violence - like it was somehow distinct from other violence, and maybe shouldn't be happening because ISIS is waging some kind of holy war, however perverted? The panelists weren't biting, essentially saying God or no, there is no excuse. During the Second World War, the Russians in particular were known for sexual violence, and references to that are casually strewn throughout this story. We don't really consider that in America, when we think of the Second World War, do we? That our allies for the last several years of the war were feared more by German women than anyone else, committing what some historians estimate to be up to 2 million rapes during the mid-1940s. This figure is disputed by the Russians, and there may be some merit to the Russian argument that Germans are trying to become the victim here. And the truth is that all of the occupying forces - British, French, and yes, Americans - perpetrated brutal crimes against German women in this period. Look, the point here is that our Good War was not so good for everyone else.
But I digress, sort of. Some of Kerr's Gunther stories are hard to follow because they jump back and forth in time, but this one stays in chronological order, ripped from the history books, of the Russian massacre of Polish army officers at Katyn Wood in 1940. Our Hero is sent to Smolensk, near Katyn, in 1943, to investigate some human remains found in the area. Why, you might be forgiven for asking, do the Germans care about a few bones in wood at this point in the death factory of their Eastern war? They are eager to show the world that they are not the only ones committing horrific crimes - see, the Russians kill thousands in cold blood, too! We only kill the sub-humans, not fine upstanding men like other army officers! Gunther is working for a unit of the Wehrmacht called the War Crimes Bureau; their job is to investigate war crimes perpetrated both by Germans and against Germans. It is presented as an oasis of sensibility in this crazy Nazi world - few of the judges are Party members, for example, although of course there are no Jews. "By state law the Wehrmacht was not supposed to be interested in politics" notes Kerr (35) and so it is a kind of haven for people like Bernie, who love Germany but hate what the Nazis have done to it, and who are trying to find a way to survive.
Bernie gets out to Poland, realizes pretty quickly that something seriously bad happened in Katyn (although references to Babi Yar and other atrocities make one wonder why anyone thinks this is any worse than everything else that is going on), and while he hopes to avoid going back, ends up leading spinmeister Josef Goebbels' plan to use the Katyn massacre for propaganda purposes.
Of course, there are a few random murders along the way, and while they are actually the crimes that Gunther must solve (and risk his neck doing so) they are completely overshadowed by the unfolding details of the massacre. As is the noir-ishness of Kerr's style. This is the least hard-boiled of all his books, perhaps because when the reality is so cold and dark, why would you pile on the atmospherics?* The ending of the fictional story is a even little incredible, with that old trope of the dramatic last-minute courtroom appearance of an unexpected witness who reveals the truth. Would that the nonfiction events surrounding these killings had been resolved as nicely but by 1943, even the Germans, though some won't admit it, the really bad parts of this war for them are just getting started.
I keep talking about the carefully researched detail, but you have to read this to believe it, and then challenge yourself by looking it up. Think that the reference to the Grischino Massacre has just a little too much blood to be real (114)? Look it up, it was, and is as bad as described. In fact, go ahead, search for World War Two Massacres and even if you know a lot you will be left without breath for a minute as you take it in. That's the thing about the Eastern Front; no novelist can concoct anything more gruesome in his or her imagination, than the Germans and the Russians did to each other in reality.
Kerr has used as his source Alfred de Zayas' The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (1979, University of Nebraska Press). It doesn't take a lot of digging to understand that while Kerr may have lifted much of his source material from this monumental work (readily credited in his Author's Note), de Zayas is indeed The Source for this topic. The point is, all of the framework of this novel is real, and many of the higher-ups are, too. The Author's Note briefly describes the fate of several critical characters and places and events. Kerr is artful at cloaking his crime fiction in an all-too-criminal reality - you can't tell where the one ends and the other begins.
Another piece of Kerr's oeuvre that I really like is his ability to tease apart the strands of German-ness. I know that I've said BEFORE that it is sometimes a little too easy to have Our Hero be so precisely anti-Nazi-but-pro-Germany, but in A Man Without Breath Kerr makes the good point that by 1943, post-Stalingrad, many Germans, even those in the High Command, are privately doubting the future of the Third Reich. Nicely complementing this is Kerr's portrayal of Junkers, the landed Prussian elite with their vons and their zus, their antipathy toward Hitler and general ambivalence about Nazis, as well as their insular society and disdain for everyone outside of it. Their involvement in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler at Wolfsschanze is well-known. Less famous are the many other attempts on The Leader's life, mostly by vons, in the year and a half leading up to that debacle. But you know, Kerr gets them all straight, right down the correct insignia, and you can look all this stuff up if you want to. You won't be disappointed.
The everyday nature of the business of war, where everyone knows what each side is doing to the other, is the most chilling aspect of all of this. The Germans are tense, because this is post-Stalingrad and everyone knows what happened to Napoleon when he tried to conquer Russia. The tide has turned against Germany, and all everyone in this place can hope for is to get out before the Russian counter-offensive comes in the summer. Civilians, too, especially those who may have aided the Germans (which is pretty much everyone in one way or another) can't really decide who is worse - the conquering Germans with their race-hatred of anyone not German or the Russians with their paranoid shoot-first-and-don't-ask-questions approach to national loyalty. Worked at the hospital for wounded German soldiers? Ran a brothel? You are S.O.L. when the Russians and their dreaded NKVD come back to town.
I'll offer an extended quote that I think demonstrates both Kerr's and his subjects command of the details of mass killing. Bernie has been assigned to show a particularly odious character around the massacre site, one Paul Blobel. Read the book or look him up, you'll find the same story: Blobel was not only in charge of the massacre at Babi Yar, but became something of an expert on killing, and then destroying the evidence of these massacres afterwards. He's brought to Katyn to advise on the public health aspects of mass exhumations. Yeah, the Nazis thought of everything. Anyway, Bernie describes the mass graves here to him.
"'It's as you can see,' I said. 'All of the victims so far have been shot in exactly the same way. And I do mean exctly - to within a few centimeters, from very close range, and at the same protrusion at the base of the skull. Nearly all of the exit wounds are between the nose and the hairline. Undoubtedly, the NKVD men who carried out this particular special action had done this many times before. Indeed, they'd done it so many times that they had even perfected where and how the bodies would fall into the grave. In fact, you can say with absolute certitude that on one was allowed to just fall in like a dead dog. There are maybe twelve layers of bodies in this grave. The heads of those in each row seem to be resing on the feet of the men below, and there was nothing about this that was not subject to thought and planning. When all of the men were dead, or at least shot, tons of sand were bulldozed on top, which helped to compress the bodies into one large mummified cake. Even the decomposition process appears to have been perfected by the NKVD. The fluids leaking from the bodies seem to have formed a kind of airtight seal around the cake. Finally, birch trees were replanted on top of the grave. It's really very methodical . . . .'"
Blobel is impressed. "'I used to be an architect and I've seen foundation works that weren't made as well as this grave.'" (284)
So, yes. Nazi, NKVD, who was worse? As an unlucky holder of evidence against the Russians (who is himself Russian) says, "Hitler is just a minor demon in hell, but Stalin is the devil himself." (190) Guess it all depends on your perspective.
*But he doesn't lose it all, and this little jewel raised a smile: "Tanya was the kind of blonde who could have stopped a whole division of cavalry with one flash of her underwear." (298)
I use the word breathtaking not because it fits with the title, which is really only sort of explained on the last page, and not particularly satisfactorily, but because it is hard sometimes to feel shocked by stories from the European theater of the Second World War at this point. We've seen it all, the agonizing photographic record of the Holocaust, the physical destruction of France and Germany and England and pretty much anywhere anywhere in Europe where the war was actually fought, and of course the increasing realism of fictional and film treatments of the War. But two points.
First, we Americans don't really know much about the Eastern Front, other than that German soldiers really didn't want to go there. What did they fear? Read this book. Even without any battle scenes, in fact, this is all set well behind German lines, the desolation and deprivation of the German-Russian conflict is sobering. This too was a race war for the Germans at least, and the Russians responded with similar brutality.
Second and related, war is hell, yes, I know, but do we really know? While reading this book, I heard this story about ISIS' use of sexual violence. The piece didn't really work that well as a panel discussion because because the host kept trying to get the guests to talk about the apparent disconnect between a state for God and sexual violence - like it was somehow distinct from other violence, and maybe shouldn't be happening because ISIS is waging some kind of holy war, however perverted? The panelists weren't biting, essentially saying God or no, there is no excuse. During the Second World War, the Russians in particular were known for sexual violence, and references to that are casually strewn throughout this story. We don't really consider that in America, when we think of the Second World War, do we? That our allies for the last several years of the war were feared more by German women than anyone else, committing what some historians estimate to be up to 2 million rapes during the mid-1940s. This figure is disputed by the Russians, and there may be some merit to the Russian argument that Germans are trying to become the victim here. And the truth is that all of the occupying forces - British, French, and yes, Americans - perpetrated brutal crimes against German women in this period. Look, the point here is that our Good War was not so good for everyone else.
But I digress, sort of. Some of Kerr's Gunther stories are hard to follow because they jump back and forth in time, but this one stays in chronological order, ripped from the history books, of the Russian massacre of Polish army officers at Katyn Wood in 1940. Our Hero is sent to Smolensk, near Katyn, in 1943, to investigate some human remains found in the area. Why, you might be forgiven for asking, do the Germans care about a few bones in wood at this point in the death factory of their Eastern war? They are eager to show the world that they are not the only ones committing horrific crimes - see, the Russians kill thousands in cold blood, too! We only kill the sub-humans, not fine upstanding men like other army officers! Gunther is working for a unit of the Wehrmacht called the War Crimes Bureau; their job is to investigate war crimes perpetrated both by Germans and against Germans. It is presented as an oasis of sensibility in this crazy Nazi world - few of the judges are Party members, for example, although of course there are no Jews. "By state law the Wehrmacht was not supposed to be interested in politics" notes Kerr (35) and so it is a kind of haven for people like Bernie, who love Germany but hate what the Nazis have done to it, and who are trying to find a way to survive.
Bernie gets out to Poland, realizes pretty quickly that something seriously bad happened in Katyn (although references to Babi Yar and other atrocities make one wonder why anyone thinks this is any worse than everything else that is going on), and while he hopes to avoid going back, ends up leading spinmeister Josef Goebbels' plan to use the Katyn massacre for propaganda purposes.
Of course, there are a few random murders along the way, and while they are actually the crimes that Gunther must solve (and risk his neck doing so) they are completely overshadowed by the unfolding details of the massacre. As is the noir-ishness of Kerr's style. This is the least hard-boiled of all his books, perhaps because when the reality is so cold and dark, why would you pile on the atmospherics?* The ending of the fictional story is a even little incredible, with that old trope of the dramatic last-minute courtroom appearance of an unexpected witness who reveals the truth. Would that the nonfiction events surrounding these killings had been resolved as nicely but by 1943, even the Germans, though some won't admit it, the really bad parts of this war for them are just getting started.
I keep talking about the carefully researched detail, but you have to read this to believe it, and then challenge yourself by looking it up. Think that the reference to the Grischino Massacre has just a little too much blood to be real (114)? Look it up, it was, and is as bad as described. In fact, go ahead, search for World War Two Massacres and even if you know a lot you will be left without breath for a minute as you take it in. That's the thing about the Eastern Front; no novelist can concoct anything more gruesome in his or her imagination, than the Germans and the Russians did to each other in reality.
Kerr has used as his source Alfred de Zayas' The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (1979, University of Nebraska Press). It doesn't take a lot of digging to understand that while Kerr may have lifted much of his source material from this monumental work (readily credited in his Author's Note), de Zayas is indeed The Source for this topic. The point is, all of the framework of this novel is real, and many of the higher-ups are, too. The Author's Note briefly describes the fate of several critical characters and places and events. Kerr is artful at cloaking his crime fiction in an all-too-criminal reality - you can't tell where the one ends and the other begins.
Another piece of Kerr's oeuvre that I really like is his ability to tease apart the strands of German-ness. I know that I've said BEFORE that it is sometimes a little too easy to have Our Hero be so precisely anti-Nazi-but-pro-Germany, but in A Man Without Breath Kerr makes the good point that by 1943, post-Stalingrad, many Germans, even those in the High Command, are privately doubting the future of the Third Reich. Nicely complementing this is Kerr's portrayal of Junkers, the landed Prussian elite with their vons and their zus, their antipathy toward Hitler and general ambivalence about Nazis, as well as their insular society and disdain for everyone outside of it. Their involvement in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler at Wolfsschanze is well-known. Less famous are the many other attempts on The Leader's life, mostly by vons, in the year and a half leading up to that debacle. But you know, Kerr gets them all straight, right down the correct insignia, and you can look all this stuff up if you want to. You won't be disappointed.
The everyday nature of the business of war, where everyone knows what each side is doing to the other, is the most chilling aspect of all of this. The Germans are tense, because this is post-Stalingrad and everyone knows what happened to Napoleon when he tried to conquer Russia. The tide has turned against Germany, and all everyone in this place can hope for is to get out before the Russian counter-offensive comes in the summer. Civilians, too, especially those who may have aided the Germans (which is pretty much everyone in one way or another) can't really decide who is worse - the conquering Germans with their race-hatred of anyone not German or the Russians with their paranoid shoot-first-and-don't-ask-questions approach to national loyalty. Worked at the hospital for wounded German soldiers? Ran a brothel? You are S.O.L. when the Russians and their dreaded NKVD come back to town.
I'll offer an extended quote that I think demonstrates both Kerr's and his subjects command of the details of mass killing. Bernie has been assigned to show a particularly odious character around the massacre site, one Paul Blobel. Read the book or look him up, you'll find the same story: Blobel was not only in charge of the massacre at Babi Yar, but became something of an expert on killing, and then destroying the evidence of these massacres afterwards. He's brought to Katyn to advise on the public health aspects of mass exhumations. Yeah, the Nazis thought of everything. Anyway, Bernie describes the mass graves here to him.
"'It's as you can see,' I said. 'All of the victims so far have been shot in exactly the same way. And I do mean exctly - to within a few centimeters, from very close range, and at the same protrusion at the base of the skull. Nearly all of the exit wounds are between the nose and the hairline. Undoubtedly, the NKVD men who carried out this particular special action had done this many times before. Indeed, they'd done it so many times that they had even perfected where and how the bodies would fall into the grave. In fact, you can say with absolute certitude that on one was allowed to just fall in like a dead dog. There are maybe twelve layers of bodies in this grave. The heads of those in each row seem to be resing on the feet of the men below, and there was nothing about this that was not subject to thought and planning. When all of the men were dead, or at least shot, tons of sand were bulldozed on top, which helped to compress the bodies into one large mummified cake. Even the decomposition process appears to have been perfected by the NKVD. The fluids leaking from the bodies seem to have formed a kind of airtight seal around the cake. Finally, birch trees were replanted on top of the grave. It's really very methodical . . . .'"
Blobel is impressed. "'I used to be an architect and I've seen foundation works that weren't made as well as this grave.'" (284)
So, yes. Nazi, NKVD, who was worse? As an unlucky holder of evidence against the Russians (who is himself Russian) says, "Hitler is just a minor demon in hell, but Stalin is the devil himself." (190) Guess it all depends on your perspective.
*But he doesn't lose it all, and this little jewel raised a smile: "Tanya was the kind of blonde who could have stopped a whole division of cavalry with one flash of her underwear." (298)
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Prague Fatale
Philip Kerr, will you ever not deliver? How do I love your Bernie Gunther novels, let me count the ways.
Prague Fatale is a great read for several reasons, but let's start with language. Kerr has a deft touch with noir-speak, and he pours on the lingo - bulls and polenta for cops and police, cauliflower for the officers, etc. - but Our Hero Bernie Gunther is not entirely hard-boiled. His weakness, if you want to call it that, in the world of the Nazis is that he is no Nazi, and he has nothing good to say about them. An earlier novel in the series mentioned Gunther's elation when Germany conquered France, hoping for a return to the Germany he cared about, full of national pride in strong deeds. But his transfer to the Eastern Front in 1941, and terrible duties with Einsatzgruppen quickly erase any Teutonic pride, leaving him in a suicide-contemplating funk that drifts into this story. Gunther is a survivor, despite himself, and perhaps it is his story-telling talent (because that is always the format of these stories, Gunther telling - us, the Americans, the gal on the next bar stool - his story) and dark humor that keep him alive. Consider this example. Gunther is just meeting Kurt Kahlo, who will be his no. 2 in Prague.
"The man who spoke had a head as big as a stonemason's bucket, but the face carved on the front of it was small, like a child's. The eyes were cold and hard, even a little sad, but the mouth was a vicious tear." (164) Despite Gunther's unfavorable first impression, he and Kahlo find much common ground in their investigative styles, and develop a strong respect for one another. My favorite example of noir-speak from the whole book describes Kahlo during a good-cop/bad-cop routine.
"Kahlo folded his arms, and looked sad, as if disappointed that he couldn't obey the order. I didn't doubt that he was more than equal to the task of dealing with Kluckholm if the third adjutant decided to try and get tough with him. Khalo looked tougher. Khalo would have looked tough in a bath full of Turkish wrestlers." (303)
I find myself reaching for reference materials when I read Kerr's stories, just to get the full picture about all the characters. I think that's why these stick in my brain for a few days after reading them. Kerr manages that rare feat of placing fictional characters and stories in historical settings without the whole thing feeling contrived. This must be due to very careful research, and while I'm generally suspicious of those who immerse themselves in details of uniform and rank (esp. of the Nazi regime) here it just works draw the reader in. In Prague Fatale, Gunther has been summoned to the Czech residence of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security (including the Gestapo) and Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (meaning the man in charge in Czechoslovakia). Heydrich is convinced there is an assassination plot being formulated against him, by one of his inner circle. And while he knows that Gunther's politics are not exactly up to Nazi standard, he likes the cop's investigative streetsmarts, and recognizes that they are the only way to get under the field-gray skins of the sycophants around him. When another murder happens at the house, well of course it is convenient that Gunther is there to solve it. Over the course of that investigation, Gunther learns more than he wants to about the infighting and backstabbing and arrogance and stupidity of most members of this very elite group of Nazi leaders. I didn't research all of them, but the deeply-layered depiction of Heydrich and the Czech milieu suggest that there is a huge amount of historical legwork backing up this group portrait
I've said before that I thought Kerr's post-Berlin Noir works were a little uneven - I was particularly not wild about the one in Argentina - but he is back in tight World War II form with Prague Fatale. And that's the final piece that makes this story work so well. In many ways it is a classic country-house murder mystery, right down to the body-in-a-locked-room conceit and the group of characters, one of whom is . . . a murderer! Heydrich is even reading Agatha Christie during this story! But this permits Kerr to display Gunther's impressive investigative skills, as well as his own character writing, through a series of interviews with each of the guests, which, as everyone knows, is what you do when you find a dead body in a locked room in a country house full of weekend guests. Unlike the chronologically ambitious but challenging plot of Field Gray, we're all pretty much in real time here. It works to keep the story focused, but you will not escape the larger context of the Nazi's brutal regime in Czechoslovakia, the courage of the resistance, and the omnipresent Kerr/Gunther theme of the price of survival in particularly nasty and brutish world.
I always like a postscript - you know, what happened afterwards to everyone - and Kerr delivers one here that hangs around like a historical earworm. You think you're kind of immune to Nazi nastiness, but you know, you never really are.
Prague Fatale is a great read for several reasons, but let's start with language. Kerr has a deft touch with noir-speak, and he pours on the lingo - bulls and polenta for cops and police, cauliflower for the officers, etc. - but Our Hero Bernie Gunther is not entirely hard-boiled. His weakness, if you want to call it that, in the world of the Nazis is that he is no Nazi, and he has nothing good to say about them. An earlier novel in the series mentioned Gunther's elation when Germany conquered France, hoping for a return to the Germany he cared about, full of national pride in strong deeds. But his transfer to the Eastern Front in 1941, and terrible duties with Einsatzgruppen quickly erase any Teutonic pride, leaving him in a suicide-contemplating funk that drifts into this story. Gunther is a survivor, despite himself, and perhaps it is his story-telling talent (because that is always the format of these stories, Gunther telling - us, the Americans, the gal on the next bar stool - his story) and dark humor that keep him alive. Consider this example. Gunther is just meeting Kurt Kahlo, who will be his no. 2 in Prague.
"The man who spoke had a head as big as a stonemason's bucket, but the face carved on the front of it was small, like a child's. The eyes were cold and hard, even a little sad, but the mouth was a vicious tear." (164) Despite Gunther's unfavorable first impression, he and Kahlo find much common ground in their investigative styles, and develop a strong respect for one another. My favorite example of noir-speak from the whole book describes Kahlo during a good-cop/bad-cop routine.
"Kahlo folded his arms, and looked sad, as if disappointed that he couldn't obey the order. I didn't doubt that he was more than equal to the task of dealing with Kluckholm if the third adjutant decided to try and get tough with him. Khalo looked tougher. Khalo would have looked tough in a bath full of Turkish wrestlers." (303)
I find myself reaching for reference materials when I read Kerr's stories, just to get the full picture about all the characters. I think that's why these stick in my brain for a few days after reading them. Kerr manages that rare feat of placing fictional characters and stories in historical settings without the whole thing feeling contrived. This must be due to very careful research, and while I'm generally suspicious of those who immerse themselves in details of uniform and rank (esp. of the Nazi regime) here it just works draw the reader in. In Prague Fatale, Gunther has been summoned to the Czech residence of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security (including the Gestapo) and Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (meaning the man in charge in Czechoslovakia). Heydrich is convinced there is an assassination plot being formulated against him, by one of his inner circle. And while he knows that Gunther's politics are not exactly up to Nazi standard, he likes the cop's investigative streetsmarts, and recognizes that they are the only way to get under the field-gray skins of the sycophants around him. When another murder happens at the house, well of course it is convenient that Gunther is there to solve it. Over the course of that investigation, Gunther learns more than he wants to about the infighting and backstabbing and arrogance and stupidity of most members of this very elite group of Nazi leaders. I didn't research all of them, but the deeply-layered depiction of Heydrich and the Czech milieu suggest that there is a huge amount of historical legwork backing up this group portrait
I've said before that I thought Kerr's post-Berlin Noir works were a little uneven - I was particularly not wild about the one in Argentina - but he is back in tight World War II form with Prague Fatale. And that's the final piece that makes this story work so well. In many ways it is a classic country-house murder mystery, right down to the body-in-a-locked-room conceit and the group of characters, one of whom is . . . a murderer! Heydrich is even reading Agatha Christie during this story! But this permits Kerr to display Gunther's impressive investigative skills, as well as his own character writing, through a series of interviews with each of the guests, which, as everyone knows, is what you do when you find a dead body in a locked room in a country house full of weekend guests. Unlike the chronologically ambitious but challenging plot of Field Gray, we're all pretty much in real time here. It works to keep the story focused, but you will not escape the larger context of the Nazi's brutal regime in Czechoslovakia, the courage of the resistance, and the omnipresent Kerr/Gunther theme of the price of survival in particularly nasty and brutish world.
I always like a postscript - you know, what happened afterwards to everyone - and Kerr delivers one here that hangs around like a historical earworm. You think you're kind of immune to Nazi nastiness, but you know, you never really are.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Keep Calm and le Carré On
Soon, soon, I will write up a review of M. J. McGrath's White Heat, a different (for me) and terrifically engaging direction in crime fiction.
But in the meantime, John le Carré obviously has an awesome agent. With a new book coming out just in time for my birthday, he's popping up in all the correct places. You can read a splendid interview with him here, and a kind of sad but totally charming article by him here (subscription required).
Le Carré is in a class by himself. But I was almost as taken with this interview of Philip Kerr, whose Bernie Gunther series I also quite like. Kerr says to write about what you don't know. Le Carré is pretty much writing about what he does know, although he's not now a practicing spy (so he SAYS). Both work, but JLC's bleak patriotism and British-ly taut command of language always gets me in the end.
But in the meantime, John le Carré obviously has an awesome agent. With a new book coming out just in time for my birthday, he's popping up in all the correct places. You can read a splendid interview with him here, and a kind of sad but totally charming article by him here (subscription required).
Le Carré is in a class by himself. But I was almost as taken with this interview of Philip Kerr, whose Bernie Gunther series I also quite like. Kerr says to write about what you don't know. Le Carré is pretty much writing about what he does know, although he's not now a practicing spy (so he SAYS). Both work, but JLC's bleak patriotism and British-ly taut command of language always gets me in the end.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Field Gray
Philip Kerr's Field Gray (Penguin, 2010) starts up right where If the Dead Rise Not leaves off, in a brothel in Cuba. (Pretty much all of If the Dead Rise Not takes place in a brothel in Cuba) I was not thrilled with this, in fact as with most books lately it took me more than a few pages and a couple of start to get into it. But once in, I can say with conviction that this may be the best Bernie Gunther story yet.
Now, do I remember ALL the details of the Berlin Noir trilogy, so that I can make that statement even more certitude? Well, no. If you haven't read any of these, you should do yourself the favor of reading them in order of publication. It's a terrific journey through the cataclysm of WW2. Every story in the Gunther series is complicated, and the more recent are even more so than the earlier ones. As with its predecessor, Field Gray moves back and forth in time to trace the story over the cataclysmic arc of WW2 and the nascent Cold War. Gunther falls into the hands of the Americans while boating around Cuba in the mid-1950s, and they soon realize that he is the key to landing a very big Cold War intelligence fish. It all has to do with his service as a cop in Berlin in the 1930s, and then his actions as an SS officer in France and the Ukraine during the war, and then as a POW in the USSR afterwards. Kerr's ability to draw out the story in these multiple locations and time periods, adding and subtracting characters and plot threads, is breathtaking. You should pay attention while reading this, so you don't get hopelessly lost, but you'll want to because as usual, Kerr deploys his great noir style.
"She was wearing a bright print percale dress with a hear-shaped button waistline, a lacy collar, and cute puff sleeves. The print was a riot of red and white fruit and flowers on a solid black background. She looked like a market garden at midnight. On her head was a little white trilby with a red silk ribbon, as if the hat were a cake and it was someone's birthday. Mine perhaps. Which, of course, it was. The smell of sweat on her body was honest and more provocative to me than some expensive, cloying scent. Underneath the midnight garden was a real woman with skin on every part of her body, and organs and glands and all the other things about women I know I liked but had almost forgotten. Because it was the kind of day when girls like Elisabeth were wearing summer dresses gain, and I remembered just what a long winter it had been in Berlin, sleeping in that cave with just my dreams for company." (103)
Now, since the contemporary plot line in this particular story has much to do with Bernie's pre-war and war-time service, much of that backstory is presented through lengthy interviews between Bernie and his American captors-cum-handlers. It is a little annoying at first - come on, who can really recall ALL THAT detail? - and is reminiscent of the didactic quality of the last Bruno novel I read. But it grows on you as the story itself deepens and becomes more compelling, and it all comes together toward the end anyway so you kind of forget that you found it an irritant at the start.
And, there's that prescience that rings a touch false - an SS officer who is deeply rattled by being ordered to kill Jewish women and children in the Ukraine (78-79), or the kind of hilarious comment by a CIA agent about whether the prize they're trying to capture will in fact come along to the US.
"'You're forgetting Mielke's wife, Gertrud, aren't you? And doesn't he have a son now? Frank? He won't want to leave them, surely.'
'We're not forgetting them at all,' said Sheuer. 'But I rather think that Erich will. From everything we know about him, he's not the sentimental sort. Besides, he can always apply for them to come to the West as well. And it's not like there's a wall that's stopping them from coming.'" (409)
hahahahahaha
But back to that officer in the Ukraine for a moment, for the central conceit of the Bernie Gunther series is that while he operates reasonably successfully within the state organizations of the police and the security service after the Nazis come to power and during the war, he manages to never drink their kool-aid. The ambivalence writes well, in fact there's an excellent sequence where Gunther (and many others) think that since France fell so easily in 1940, maybe this while world-conquest business won't be so bloody after all.
"To defeat France as quickly as we did seemed nothing short of miraculous. You have to bear in mind that many of us sat in the trenches of northern France for four years. Four years of slaughter and stalemate. And then a victory over our oldest enemy in just four weeks! You didn't have to be a Nazi to feel good about that. And if I'm honest, the summer of 1940 was when I came the closest to thinking well of the Nazis. Indeed, that was the time when being a Nazi hardly seemed to matter. Suddenly, we were all proud to be German again." (138)
Yes! Accurate historical contextualizing, that makes it all make sense for a moment.
But just for a moment because of course we all know that the Nazi's policies concerning Jews were already well-entrenched at this point. And while Gunther's disgust at the conditions in which German prisoners were kept in Vichy camps is justified (188-201), it's hard to imagine he wasn't comparing it to the conditions in which prisoners were kept in Germany and her satellites by then. In college, I studied with the late Klemens von Klemperer, whose life work as a historian was to show that there had been resistance in Nazi Germany, that there was good there, that the German response to the Final Solution was not uniformly willful blindness to the horrors of the Holocaust. KvK believed that by chronicling the German resistance he was perhaps providing example and inspiration to those today who fight against oppression and totalitarianism. I like this idea of activist history, of course in part because of KvK's genteel European overlay. But just this weekend, we learn that we have not known the full scope of the Nazi efforts to eradicate those whom they deemed undesirable from the face of the earth. While this does not surprise me, it does deepen the ambivalence that I can't help but feel about Germany, Germans, my own German heritage. And to raise the question, as KvK's work did, what would YOU have done? So Bernie Gunther, with all his efforts to walk that very thin line between falling into the Nazi abyss, and doing anything about it, turns out to be just an average human - no hero - after all.
Now, do I remember ALL the details of the Berlin Noir trilogy, so that I can make that statement even more certitude? Well, no. If you haven't read any of these, you should do yourself the favor of reading them in order of publication. It's a terrific journey through the cataclysm of WW2. Every story in the Gunther series is complicated, and the more recent are even more so than the earlier ones. As with its predecessor, Field Gray moves back and forth in time to trace the story over the cataclysmic arc of WW2 and the nascent Cold War. Gunther falls into the hands of the Americans while boating around Cuba in the mid-1950s, and they soon realize that he is the key to landing a very big Cold War intelligence fish. It all has to do with his service as a cop in Berlin in the 1930s, and then his actions as an SS officer in France and the Ukraine during the war, and then as a POW in the USSR afterwards. Kerr's ability to draw out the story in these multiple locations and time periods, adding and subtracting characters and plot threads, is breathtaking. You should pay attention while reading this, so you don't get hopelessly lost, but you'll want to because as usual, Kerr deploys his great noir style.
"She was wearing a bright print percale dress with a hear-shaped button waistline, a lacy collar, and cute puff sleeves. The print was a riot of red and white fruit and flowers on a solid black background. She looked like a market garden at midnight. On her head was a little white trilby with a red silk ribbon, as if the hat were a cake and it was someone's birthday. Mine perhaps. Which, of course, it was. The smell of sweat on her body was honest and more provocative to me than some expensive, cloying scent. Underneath the midnight garden was a real woman with skin on every part of her body, and organs and glands and all the other things about women I know I liked but had almost forgotten. Because it was the kind of day when girls like Elisabeth were wearing summer dresses gain, and I remembered just what a long winter it had been in Berlin, sleeping in that cave with just my dreams for company." (103)
Now, since the contemporary plot line in this particular story has much to do with Bernie's pre-war and war-time service, much of that backstory is presented through lengthy interviews between Bernie and his American captors-cum-handlers. It is a little annoying at first - come on, who can really recall ALL THAT detail? - and is reminiscent of the didactic quality of the last Bruno novel I read. But it grows on you as the story itself deepens and becomes more compelling, and it all comes together toward the end anyway so you kind of forget that you found it an irritant at the start.
And, there's that prescience that rings a touch false - an SS officer who is deeply rattled by being ordered to kill Jewish women and children in the Ukraine (78-79), or the kind of hilarious comment by a CIA agent about whether the prize they're trying to capture will in fact come along to the US.
"'You're forgetting Mielke's wife, Gertrud, aren't you? And doesn't he have a son now? Frank? He won't want to leave them, surely.'
'We're not forgetting them at all,' said Sheuer. 'But I rather think that Erich will. From everything we know about him, he's not the sentimental sort. Besides, he can always apply for them to come to the West as well. And it's not like there's a wall that's stopping them from coming.'" (409)
hahahahahaha
But back to that officer in the Ukraine for a moment, for the central conceit of the Bernie Gunther series is that while he operates reasonably successfully within the state organizations of the police and the security service after the Nazis come to power and during the war, he manages to never drink their kool-aid. The ambivalence writes well, in fact there's an excellent sequence where Gunther (and many others) think that since France fell so easily in 1940, maybe this while world-conquest business won't be so bloody after all.
"To defeat France as quickly as we did seemed nothing short of miraculous. You have to bear in mind that many of us sat in the trenches of northern France for four years. Four years of slaughter and stalemate. And then a victory over our oldest enemy in just four weeks! You didn't have to be a Nazi to feel good about that. And if I'm honest, the summer of 1940 was when I came the closest to thinking well of the Nazis. Indeed, that was the time when being a Nazi hardly seemed to matter. Suddenly, we were all proud to be German again." (138)
Yes! Accurate historical contextualizing, that makes it all make sense for a moment.
But just for a moment because of course we all know that the Nazi's policies concerning Jews were already well-entrenched at this point. And while Gunther's disgust at the conditions in which German prisoners were kept in Vichy camps is justified (188-201), it's hard to imagine he wasn't comparing it to the conditions in which prisoners were kept in Germany and her satellites by then. In college, I studied with the late Klemens von Klemperer, whose life work as a historian was to show that there had been resistance in Nazi Germany, that there was good there, that the German response to the Final Solution was not uniformly willful blindness to the horrors of the Holocaust. KvK believed that by chronicling the German resistance he was perhaps providing example and inspiration to those today who fight against oppression and totalitarianism. I like this idea of activist history, of course in part because of KvK's genteel European overlay. But just this weekend, we learn that we have not known the full scope of the Nazi efforts to eradicate those whom they deemed undesirable from the face of the earth. While this does not surprise me, it does deepen the ambivalence that I can't help but feel about Germany, Germans, my own German heritage. And to raise the question, as KvK's work did, what would YOU have done? So Bernie Gunther, with all his efforts to walk that very thin line between falling into the Nazi abyss, and doing anything about it, turns out to be just an average human - no hero - after all.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
A year of profitable reading
Hello, and welcome to the one year anniversary of Crime Pays. I think I've done pretty well reporting out on my reading for 2012, and I look forward to adding on in 2013. If you're new to Crime Pays, you can start at the bottom of the list to your right, last January, and read forward for all the gory details. This time of year, all the other crime fiction blogs seem to report endless lists of a) the best crime/mystery/thriller fiction of 2012 (almost none of which I have read) and b) what's coming in 2013 (more to add to the list of books I will probably never get to). Not I! And no New Year's Resolutions, either. But I may see if I can figure out a way to post some of my travel journals here, since you may find them mildly interesting. And by all means, if you have suggestions for good books, please do send them my way.
At any rate, the turn of the year sees me enjoying the start of another promising series from Soho Crime, with Martin Límon's so-far-terrific Jade Lady Burning. The tough pair of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are CID detectives with the 8th Army in Seoul in the early 1970s, and while they've seen it all, Límon's strong sense of place keeps the story grounded and compelling. I'll report out on this one as soon as I finish it, which will be soon because I am really inhaling it. There have been series from Soho Crime that I've not cottoned to, but man when they hit it, they really hit it. Maybe this will be the year I write and tell them that, and they will hire me on the strength of that letter as a senior editor who works from her home in Cambridge just twenty hours a week, choosing the next great crime fiction series while being a devoted and loving wife and mother and getting to yoga regularly.
I'm also taking a little break from the dark stuff with Miranda Hart's Britishly sweet and funny Is It Just Me? (she's a kind of nerdier English Tina Fey- can you imagine), Jennifer Worth's Call The Midwife (yes, Miranda Hart is game Chummy in telly version of same), and the so-far rather melancholy My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss. Crime, England, humor, and food are an odd literary mashup, but it works for me, in fact now that I put it together it is rather the perfecta of my interests (minus musical theater of course, but that's for another day).
On deck are Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken (xmas gift), Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody (ditto), Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (more in the immensely entertaining genre of look-what-a-dorkus-I-was-and-how-I-turned-that-into-being-a-super-smart-and-wildly-successful-comedienne), Benjamin Lorr's Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga (that's me, competitive yogi), and Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale (because one should just keep up with Kerr). Possibly not in that order. I'm also pretty excited that the latest Charles Todd and Andrea Camilleri books are coming out in January and February respectively. Well, that may be another New Year's Resolution: I will not buy any more books for the next week.
I note that in my introductory entry on this blog, I thought I might also note what was for dinner. That seems to have fallen by the wayside, probably because if you really want to know what we're eating you can just friend me on Facebook, and there you'll find it pretty much every day that I cook. For what it is worth, frascatelli with mustard greens tonight.
At any rate, the turn of the year sees me enjoying the start of another promising series from Soho Crime, with Martin Límon's so-far-terrific Jade Lady Burning. The tough pair of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are CID detectives with the 8th Army in Seoul in the early 1970s, and while they've seen it all, Límon's strong sense of place keeps the story grounded and compelling. I'll report out on this one as soon as I finish it, which will be soon because I am really inhaling it. There have been series from Soho Crime that I've not cottoned to, but man when they hit it, they really hit it. Maybe this will be the year I write and tell them that, and they will hire me on the strength of that letter as a senior editor who works from her home in Cambridge just twenty hours a week, choosing the next great crime fiction series while being a devoted and loving wife and mother and getting to yoga regularly.
I'm also taking a little break from the dark stuff with Miranda Hart's Britishly sweet and funny Is It Just Me? (she's a kind of nerdier English Tina Fey- can you imagine), Jennifer Worth's Call The Midwife (yes, Miranda Hart is game Chummy in telly version of same), and the so-far rather melancholy My Berlin Kitchen by Luisa Weiss. Crime, England, humor, and food are an odd literary mashup, but it works for me, in fact now that I put it together it is rather the perfecta of my interests (minus musical theater of course, but that's for another day).
On deck are Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken (xmas gift), Muriel Barbery's Gourmet Rhapsody (ditto), Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (more in the immensely entertaining genre of look-what-a-dorkus-I-was-and-how-I-turned-that-into-being-a-super-smart-and-wildly-successful-comedienne), Benjamin Lorr's Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga (that's me, competitive yogi), and Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale (because one should just keep up with Kerr). Possibly not in that order. I'm also pretty excited that the latest Charles Todd and Andrea Camilleri books are coming out in January and February respectively. Well, that may be another New Year's Resolution: I will not buy any more books for the next week.
I note that in my introductory entry on this blog, I thought I might also note what was for dinner. That seems to have fallen by the wayside, probably because if you really want to know what we're eating you can just friend me on Facebook, and there you'll find it pretty much every day that I cook. For what it is worth, frascatelli with mustard greens tonight.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
If The Dead Rise Not
My latest Bernie Gunther novel arrived a couple of weeks
ago, and I am enjoying getting reacquainted with the hard-boiled hero of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy and The One From the Other and A Quiet Flame. In If
The Dead Rise Not, we find Bernie as house detective at the glamorous Adlon
Hotel in 1934 Berlin, on the eve of the Nazi Olympics in Germany. At some point the plot will apparently leap
forward twenty years to 1954 Havana, and goings-on there will be somehow
connected to goings-on in pre-war Berlin.
It’s a little hard to say because Kerr is taking his sweet time getting
to the dramatic point, although it is clear that it will involve dead Jews whom
nobody cares about, the Olympics, the Amis (that’s us) and the usual bag of assorted
nasty Nazis and classy dames. The latter
category is represented here by Mrs. Noreen Charambalides (isn’t that fun to
say? Char-am-ba-LEED-es), a gorgeous
American journalist who is paling around with Hedda Adlon, the equally
glamorous and sharp young wife of the hotel’s owner. Noreen is conveniently sort-of separated from
her husband at the moment, and needs Bernie to help her get some dirt on the
German Olympic Committee so she can push the US government to boycott the
Games. Bernie and Noreen have already
gotten themselves in some touchy situations with various shady characters, as
well as some bumsen, natch.
“Herr Rubusch was still in bed. I hoped he’d wake up and shout at us to get
out and let him get some sleep, but he didn’t.
I put my fingers on the big vein on his neck, but there was so much fat
on him that I soon gave up and, having opened his pajama jacket, pressed my ear
to his cold ham of a chest.
‘Shall I call Dr. Küttner?’ asked Pieck.
‘Yes. But tell him
not to hurry. He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
I shrugged. ‘Staying
in a hotel is a bit like life. At some
stage you have to check out.’
‘Oh, dear me, are you sure?’
‘Baron Frankenstein couldn’t make this character move.’”
(57)
One of the main things that makes Bernie so palatable is
that he is no Nazi, in fact, he rather despises the new party in power, but is
pragmatic enough about his own survival to visit a vaguely criminal type who
will “erase” his one jewish grandmother from his record, making him effectively
untouchable – as long as he keeps his mouth shut. Still, one can’t help but find him just a
little too prescient as in this exchange with Gypsy Trollman, a former boxing
star now turned dive-club bouncer thanks to his Romany heritage”
“’[Trollman] shrugged.
Roma people. Jewish people. Homos and commies. The Nazis need someone to hate, that’s all.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ I said. ‘But it makes me worry if there’s another
war. I worry what will happen to all
these poor bastards the Nazis don’t like.’”
(128)
True, there were those who had a sense of what was coming,
but Bernie doesn’t come across as that introspective so it rings a little false
even from this Weimar Republic-loving WW1 veteran.
If The Dead Rise Not is
clearly filling in some of the story between the tales in the Berlin Noir trilogy, and then will take
us forward after that last odd story that was set in Argentina and if I recall
seemed to involve baby selling and toxic mining or something really far-fetched
like that. So far, so good! Because you’ve got to enjoy a guy who claims
that the good looking gal on his arm “commanded attention like a nudist playing
the trombone.” (159) Just think about that one for a moment.
Friday, January 27, 2012
The Nazis
My descent into crime fiction started with Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy. That got me back into reading about WW2 Europe, an old friend in a way, long neglected for the American Civil War (who proved a fickle and ultimately faithless mistress. Or perhaps it was I who was unfaithful. In any case, I am totally off the ACW as far as reading goes.).
I lost track of Kerr, and his weary survivor Bernie Gunther after A Quiet Flame, which was set in Argentina, and a little too fantastically dark for me. But I see now that there are more and I might pick him up again since I quite enjoyed Bernie's tight-rope walk of solving crimes for the bad guys.
Of course, Berlin during the war has a weird fascination. I tried David Downing's Zoo Station, but the idea of a British journalist somehow solving crimes in the heart of Nazi Berlin didn't spark much although I see that he's written more with the same fellow, each involving a different station. There seems to be a niche for the Nazi-era-investigator-who-is-acceptable-to-the-bad-guys-but-harbors-resistence-in-his-heart. It worked with Gunther, perhaps because his timeline goes well beyond the war. Maybe Downing's fellow works too, but I haven't stuck around to find out. I'm not sure that the line between collaborator and resister is all that fine, and after a while it just becomes hard to believe.
I also read several of Alan Furst's novels, which are quite well written, and take place all over war-time Europe with lots of intrigue and moral dilemma and much darkness. I fell off of that bandwagon because his protagonists all seemed vaguely too good to be true - mostly single, male, a bit world-weary and of course cynical, but ultimately doing the right thing, staying just this side of romantic. I'm lumping wildly here, and it's been several years since I read any of these. (Note: but I might have to check him out again, having just found his website with all these terrific period pictures right at the intro. Still, it's loaded with cookies or something that my computer is balking about.) But after a while, WW2 just gets completely wrapped in its cliches, and one wonders if anyone can write anything really original set in this era.
Kerr's novels go well beyond the war, and of course Joseph Kanon's The Good German is all about immediate post-war Berlin. But it features yet another uencumbered-except-by-Allied-good-sense protagonist, and while the setting is compelling - how did anyone pick up the pieces after that? - I find myself not really caring that much anymore. It is pretty telling that I have little recollection of most of these fellows. The Arms-Maker of Berlin, by Dan Fesperman, pretty much ended my affair with this era, since it committed the unpardonable sin of not only trafficking in pretty much every WW2/Nazi-era Berlin cliche possible, but also of adding a layer of modern academia in the form of the rumpled, unencumbered, present-day history professor protagonist. That just cut a little too close to home.
Culinarily, there is absolutely no inspiration from the Nazis.
I lost track of Kerr, and his weary survivor Bernie Gunther after A Quiet Flame, which was set in Argentina, and a little too fantastically dark for me. But I see now that there are more and I might pick him up again since I quite enjoyed Bernie's tight-rope walk of solving crimes for the bad guys.
Of course, Berlin during the war has a weird fascination. I tried David Downing's Zoo Station, but the idea of a British journalist somehow solving crimes in the heart of Nazi Berlin didn't spark much although I see that he's written more with the same fellow, each involving a different station. There seems to be a niche for the Nazi-era-investigator-who-is-acceptable-to-the-bad-guys-but-harbors-resistence-in-his-heart. It worked with Gunther, perhaps because his timeline goes well beyond the war. Maybe Downing's fellow works too, but I haven't stuck around to find out. I'm not sure that the line between collaborator and resister is all that fine, and after a while it just becomes hard to believe.
I also read several of Alan Furst's novels, which are quite well written, and take place all over war-time Europe with lots of intrigue and moral dilemma and much darkness. I fell off of that bandwagon because his protagonists all seemed vaguely too good to be true - mostly single, male, a bit world-weary and of course cynical, but ultimately doing the right thing, staying just this side of romantic. I'm lumping wildly here, and it's been several years since I read any of these. (Note: but I might have to check him out again, having just found his website with all these terrific period pictures right at the intro. Still, it's loaded with cookies or something that my computer is balking about.) But after a while, WW2 just gets completely wrapped in its cliches, and one wonders if anyone can write anything really original set in this era.
Kerr's novels go well beyond the war, and of course Joseph Kanon's The Good German is all about immediate post-war Berlin. But it features yet another uencumbered-except-by-Allied-good-sense protagonist, and while the setting is compelling - how did anyone pick up the pieces after that? - I find myself not really caring that much anymore. It is pretty telling that I have little recollection of most of these fellows. The Arms-Maker of Berlin, by Dan Fesperman, pretty much ended my affair with this era, since it committed the unpardonable sin of not only trafficking in pretty much every WW2/Nazi-era Berlin cliche possible, but also of adding a layer of modern academia in the form of the rumpled, unencumbered, present-day history professor protagonist. That just cut a little too close to home.
Culinarily, there is absolutely no inspiration from the Nazis.
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