Philip Kerr
Viking Penguin
Berlin Noir is a repackaging of the first three books in the Bernie Gunther series: March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and German Requiem. Noir is not and has never been a preferred genre for me but having read a review of the most recent Bernie Gunther, The Lady from Zagreb, I decided to give the series a spin.
Bernie is a cynical, hard-drinking, somewhat overweight PI working primarily on missing persons cases. The setting for March Violets (a derisive term for late-comers to Nazi Party membership) is Berlin in 1933, and missing persons cases are plentiful. A former Kriminalinspektor with Kripo, the Berlin Police, Bernie quit his job when the Nazi's began purging the police officers who were not party members. A new case of two murders takes him to the highest reaches of the party.
Skipping to 1938, The Pale Criminal shows a Germany even more under the jackboots of the Nazi Party. Personal freedom is non-existent, the persecution and deportation of Jews are in full implementation and Bernie is still stubbornly resistant to Party membership. But when none other than Reinhold Heydrich summons Bernie to solve the cases of missing and murdered young girls there is no way he can refuse. Kripo has had no luck, but Bernie's reputation makes him a likely candidate. Not that Heydrich has any real interest in the girls; indeed he is hoping to implicate his Nazi rivals.
A German Requiem skips over the war and covers the occupation by the Three Powers (American, Russian and British) of Berlin and Germany. Having been blackmailed by Heydrich into SS membership, Bernie found that the wholesale killing of women and children was something her could not stomach. He asked for a transfer to the Eastern Front, ending up in a Russian POW camp. Returning to Berlin he finds a ruined landscape, food shortages, ever-present corruption and an unfaithful wife. There is little to choose from among the occupying Americans, British and Russians. When a former Kripo colleague is accused of murdering an American Captain in Vienna, Bernie takes on the investigation, for a substantial fee.
Bernie Gunther is very much the tarnished knight; amoral, prone to dispatching opposition with no second thoughts and in it for the money. But he does have a sense of honor and an unfailing eye for hypocrisy. I am not a stranger to the brutality of the Nazi regime, but I found some of the books very hard to take. Nevertheless, the three books of the Berlin Trilogy are extraordinarily well-written and historically accurate. The audiobooks (available as separate units) are narrated very competently by John Lee, even though I found his American New York accent a little lacking. The Bernard Gunther series is relentlessly dark and while I will be continuing, I will be taking a break for something a little lighter.
RATING- 4 Stars
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