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

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Good historical novels aren’t a wax museum on parade but show us an alien world or a foreign country that we recognize in our own time and our society in, and in this these books succeed. Philip Kerr καταφέρνει να προκαλεί απολαυστική ανάγνωση και κομμένη ανάσα σε αυτό το έπος της τριλογίας του Βερολίνου. 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? The woman is Noreen Charalambides (she of the matching sable hair and coat), a Jewish American journalist whom Bernie meets through Hedda Adlon.

That piece takes place in 1937, or in between the story lines of March Violets and The Pale Criminal. 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. Downing’s main character John Russell and Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel are both news reporters, not detectives, so the sensibilities are different. They tickled me to the extent that I quickly stopped caring whether these books were intended as homage or imitation and just started inserting mental rimshots after each went past. 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.

Since they had the Josephine Tey I recently reviewed (worth the dollar by itself), I was incentivized to pick out another four books and this single-bound trilogy by Philip Kerr caught my eye.

He does admit, in the aforementioned interview, that his intent is to use each novel to reveal some additional aspects of Bernie’s character. 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. uk/landing-page/quercus/quercus-company-information/">The data controller is Quercus Editions Ltd. As Bernie follows the trail into the very heart of Nazi Germany, he's forced to confront a horrifying conspiracy. 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.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. The Bernie Gunther novels are first-class, as stylish as Chandler and as emotionally resonant as the best of Ross Macdonald. 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. German Requiem", [press fast-forward] the final book in this box-set trilogy is set in 1947, nine years after its predecessor and with the war over and Berlin in ruins, Gunther, now a former Russian prisoner of war is a detective for hire once more; and when a shady Russian offers him what appears to be a simple case of proving the innocence of a former Berlin cop accused of murdering an American military officer in Vienna Gunther takes the commission.

Kerr έχει κάνει πολύ βαθιά έρευνα στη περίοδο του Γερμανικού φασισμού και στη μετέπειτα καταστροφή της Γερμανίας - ο δε ήρωάς του Μπέρνι Γκούντερ μένει αξέχαστος στους αναγνώστες με το κυνισμό και την 'επικίνδυνη' ευελιξία του. 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. 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.And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. And they practiced the same sort of theft in the countries they occupied; Nazism was more like an organized crime syndicate running a government than what we think of as a government. 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.