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

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What’s New for the 20th of August: Some favorite mysteries; jazz, country, RT, and a musical grab bag; a hoedown, a big dragon, Hellboy, and of course ice cream! He occasionally experiences flashbacks and recurring nightmares, both symptoms of posttraumatic stress. The fourteen Bernie Gunther novels written by Philip Kerr offer not only first-rate mystery plotting, atmospheric prose, and witty dialogue but also philosophical insights into the nature of ambition, loyalty, and identity.

In one big paperback you get the complete Berlin trilogy: March Violets; The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem. The towns like Berlin that were initially “liberated” by the Red Army suffered terrible looting and destruction on the ground. 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?

That said, the atmospherics, level of authentic historical detail, and genre-nailing fun kept me going here.

I honestly can’t think of a single other detective, murder mystery, or suspense thriller series I’ve read – including those I’ve mentioned above – that I would ever consider as funny. One of Bernie’s traveling companions on this trip was the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. 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]. Before Bernie leaves, a high-ranking Gestapo officer corrals him into using the trip as an opportunity to gather evidence on the criminal activities of the SD officer who arranged the trip in the first place.is not above using a little blackmail to obtain Gunther's racially unbiased services to catch the real culprit.

He was best known for his Bernie Gunther series of 13 historical thrillers and a children's series, Children of the Lamp, under the name P. Philip Kerr is the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Bernie Gunther novels, three of which—Field Gray, The Lady from Zagreb, and Prussian Blue—were finalists for the Edgar® Award for Best Novel. 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. In front of the German War Memorial a company of Reichswehr were making trade for chiropodists to the accompaniment of a brass band. As a reader I was constantly being thrown out of the story by Kerr’s clumsy and overwrought metaphors.

So good so far but then towards the end it all goes a bit urgh as Kerr achieves closure wrapping-up the final loose thread through a massive coincidence which frankly beggars belief, and after that the book suddenly finishes with a final chapter that's really more of an epilogue in which we get a recap; it's almost as though there's a chapter or two missing and that's why I marked it down when it could have been four or five stars! A richly satisfying mystery, one that evokes the noir sensibilities of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald while breaking important new ground of its own.

Vincent van Gogh wasn’t the only fellow who could make that kind of heady, romantic sacrificial gesture. I stuck with it for more than a hundred pages but in the end, I wasn’t interested enough to continue. uk/landing-page/quercus/quercus-company-information/">The data controller is Quercus Editions Ltd. A few more tidbits about Bernie, gleaned from the series to date: he served in the First World War and was awarded an Iron Cross, second class. For quite a while I pored over the text, turning the pages with my fingers and feasting my eyes on what I had never dreamed of possessing (pp.By the way, while Kerr has some interesting female characters, there is fair amount of objectivization in the great tradition of noir novels that women readers might take offense to. The three cases he deals with are interesting and I liked him as a character (he is not so "destroyed" as main characters of crime novels usually are).