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

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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. As a reader I was constantly being thrown out of the story by Kerr’s clumsy and overwrought metaphors. 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. The first three in the Bernie Gunther series, March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem are true crime classics that transport readers to the rotten heart of Nazi Berlin, and introduce the cynical, wise-cracking private eye who sought justice within it.

And following several trips to Germany - and a great deal of walking around mean streets of Berlin - his first novel, March Violets , was published in 1989 and introduced the world to the iconic tough-talking detective Bernie Gunther. 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. 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. His idea for Bernie came the moment he found himself wondering what Raymond Chandler would have come up with if instead of leaving London for Los Angeles, he’d gone east, to Berlin,” was how The Telegraph put it in a Kerr profile. He's also as moral as a man can be, it seems, while continuing to live and work in wartime Germany, and by the end of the series I came to feel that Bernie was much more than just another hard-boiled shamus.For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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? So yes, I enjoyed the books, but I was left wanting more than noir detective stories set in the shadow of the rise of Hitler. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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].

I had read the first two books in the series, and was trying to separate my reviews, but I ended up putting a general review on the trilogy rather than critiquing each book separately as was my intent. 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.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. He has won both the RBA International Prize for Crime Writing, and the CWA Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award. What’s New for the 26th of November: Music we’re thankful for; fairy tales and myths; a graphic novel about a pandemic; an Old Hag, a Piglet, Canadian television, and hot chocolate! 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. The idea of a 'gumshoe' in (and before and after) the Nazi era seemed a bit odd, but the more I read, the more I adapted to the style and the idea and by the end of the 3rd book, I was in.

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. 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. 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.The Bernie Gunther novels are first-class, as stylish as Chandler and as emotionally resonant as the best of Ross Macdonald. The first book take place in 1936: Hitler is on the rise, people like him, there are some weird laws, Jewish people are slowly trying to flee the country. He does admit, in the aforementioned interview, that his intent is to use each novel to reveal some additional aspects of Bernie’s character. Who knows but Kerr weaves the minutiae of mundane daily life with the exciting plot developments very skilfully.