Leaving the intrigue to the flashy guys in espionage novels, Bernie arms himself with a strong right hook and a tough-guy line of patter to make it out of this one alive.
Both newcomers and established fans will appreciate Kerr's outstanding sixth Bernie Gunther novel (after A Quiet Flame), as it fills in much of the German PI's backstory. By 1934, as the Nazis tighten their grip on power, Gunther has left the Berlin police force for a job as a hotel detective. His routine inquiry into the theft of a Chinese box from a guest, a German-American from New York, becomes more complex after he learns that the identical objet d'art was reported stolen just the previous day by an official from the Asiatic Museum. The case proves to be connected with German efforts to forestall an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics, and provides ample opportunities for Gunther, whom Sam Spade would have found a kindred spirit, to make difficult moral choices. Once again the author smoothly integrates a noir crime plot with an authentic historical background. Note that the action precedes the events recounted in the series' debut, March Violets (1989). (Mar.)
The pace is cracking, the dialogue crisply Chandleresque, the mise-en-scene and characterisation refreshingly stereotype free... Bernie Gunther is an iconic creation and each book a treat to look forward to.
Kerr's period detail is utterly convincing. The way he captures a lost Berlin on the brink of cataclysmic change is in turns poignant and gritty....[T]he city and its citizens are caught insect-like in the amber of Kerr's words. A sophisticated thriller.
...we should all be taking (and reading) him and the best of his genre more seriously.
Something special.
The Daily Telegraph (London)
As in A Quiet Flame, British author Kerr sets the action of his sixth Bernie Gunther series in two distinct epochs—prewar Berlin (1934) and Havana 20 years later. Forced off the Berlin police force because of his allegiance to the old Weimar Republic, Bernie is now the Adlon Hotel's house detective. As the Nazis consolidate power, the survival of the city's Jews grows more precarious. Bernie, one-fourth Jewish himself, gets embroiled in a conflict between corrupt businessmen who aim to profit from the 1936 Olympiad and a beautiful American (and Jewish) journalist, Noreen Charalambides, who hopes to derail U.S. participation. By the time the dust settles, Bernie is locked in a stalemate with American mobster Max Reles. In 1954, Bernie is living in Havana and runs across Noreen, now a successful author living in Hemingway's Finca Vigía, where she consorts with Communists. To Bernie's surprise, Noreen's daughter is palling around with Max Reles, now in cahoots with Meyer Lansky and other mobsters. Soon, Bernie will have one more murder to solve if he hopes to survive and save those dear to him. VERDICT As rich in historical atmosphere as any Alan Furst thriller and leavened by the cutting wit of Bernie's cynicism, this outstanding roman noir will delight readers of detective fiction and historical thrillers alike. [See "Prepub Exploded," BookSmack!, 10/1/09.]—Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
It's 1934, and Bernie Gunther's chasing bad guys in Hitler's Berlin. It's 1954, and bad guys are chasing Bernie in the Mafia's Havana. Twenty years will mark a man's face. It will also mark his psyche, and Bernie, ex-homicide detective, ex-hotel dick, ex-soldier in two losing wars, ex-secret policeman in Hitler's despised S.A., has a deeply damaged one. Skeptical to the point of cynicism, a bred-in-the-bone survivalist, he's lied, cheated and, on several occasions, murdered to stay alive. And yet there's that inextinguishable Galahad in him-obdurate, and often as not painfully inconvenient. In 1934, for instance, when it would have been so easy to join the Nazi party and keep his job, he declined the invitation. And Bernie truly relished being a homicide cop. The fact that he saw the Weimar Republic as seriously flawed and probably not worth the sacrifice didn't matter. Loyalty mattered. Flash forward to 1954. It's not been an easy couple of decades for Bernie, including two miserable years in a Russian prison camp. Now here he is in Havana, confronting deja vu situations and at least two very unsettling people: Noreen Charalambides, a beautiful Jewish woman he'd loved and risked for, and Max Reles, a ferocious gangster he both hated and feared. In Berlin, Noreen had enlisted him in a cause he knew was lost, and that, thanks to Reles, he had almost died for. Suddenly, Berlin is an unfinished story, and Bernie has choices to make. Another sexy, mordantly funny, thinking man's thriller from Kerr (A Quiet Flame, 2009, etc.), who, despite an impressive body of work, continues to fly under the radar.
Praise for Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther Novels The Washington Post The New York Times Book Review Chicago Tribune Esquire Los Angeles Times Fresh Air (NPR)Publishers Weekly (starred review)
What happened in Nazi Germany didn't end with Hitler's fall. It sent shock waves through the next decades, and what's great about this series is the way that Kerr has expanded his vision beyond the conventional crime novel. Bernie isn't one of those detectives who gets to solve crimes and put things right. Instead, he just tries to behave decently in a world where the serial killers run governments and history itself may be the biggest crime of all."
This sixth book in Kerr’s Bernie Gunther detective series is not the jumping-in point for a newcomer to the saga of a former German policeman, now a hotel house detective in 1934 Berlin. The deep-noir plot gives Paul Hecht plenty of opportunity to display Bernie’s cool imperturbability in circumstances that include being interrogated by police and being in the throes of passion with an American writer who is in town to write about the upcoming Berlin Olympics and its exclusion of Jews. Hecht offers a guttural tone to portray the malevolent Nazis but, in the novel’s second part, set 20 years later in Havana, does little to flavor the musical speech of the Cuban natives and émigrés. Nonetheless, Hecht skillfully captures Bernie’s Chandleresque wisecracking. B.V.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
SEPTEMBER 2010 - AudioFile
