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Book Reviewed by:Anyone who's read the movie listings during the last few months knows that
World War II and the Holocaust have recently been popular subjects for serious
films. Obviously, many of us are still struggling to make sense of what happened
and trying to make certain that these events don't fade into the past where they
become merely a part of history, among so many other half-forgotten horrors.
Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, which began in the summer of 1936 with
March Violets and now continues with its fifth entry, A Quiet Flame,
takes us to the Buenos Aires of 1950 and, in the novelistic version of
flashbacks, Germany in 1932, bringing us the perspective of a German
policeman turned private detective, a man who is still working to understand
what happened to his country, his friends and colleagues, and himself.
When we left him, in 2006's
The One From the Other, Bernie was on the
verge of fleeing 1949 Germany - the reasons are best left unstated (not to ruin
the book from those who have it to look forward to) - for Argentina. Among his
traveling companions is Adolf Eichmann, a man Bernie has previously noted looks
very Jewish. Bernie himself is feeling old and, by the time he arrives in Buenos
Aires, is having worrisome physical symptoms.
But Germans given sanctuary in Argentina are expected to earn their keep, and
there's a job for him with the police once Bernie comes clean and admits who he
really is. He's asked to investigate the mutilation-murder of one young girl and
the disappearance of another. The murder has such disturbing similarities to two
that occurred in Germany, which Bernie investigated, in 1932, that the Buenos
Aires police fear that one of the Germans they gave shelter to after World War
II may have brought his murderous ways with him. If Bernie agrees, he'll be
treated by Eva Peron's own American doctor.
The plot allows Kerr to explore both Germany on the brink of Nazi rule and
Argentina, a "very Catholic country" where "it is better to know everything than
to know too much," as it works out its own identity under the rule of the Perons
(who make appearances as characters). And when Bernie agrees to look into the
disappearance of the aunt and uncle of a beautiful Jewish lawyer, the
similarities between 1932 Germany and Argentina in 1950 become depressingly
clear.
Kerr's first three Bernie Gunther novels (March
Violets,
The Pale Criminal and
A German Requiem) have been collected under the title Berlin Noir
(although the third one takes place mostly in Vienna) and noir is certainly the
key word. Bernie has a distinctive voice and the ability to distance
himself, if only a bit, from his world through his smart aleck reactions and
language:
"I'd heard a lot about Proust. One day I was going to have to find an excuse
not to read him."
"[W]hereas Berlin had flaunted its vice and corruption, Buenos Aires hid its
appetite for depravity like an old priest sipping from a brandy bottle concealed in the pocket of a cassock."
"I ordered a bottle of red wine, the kind I knew Anna liked, made of grapes
and alcohol."
"'There are no murderers,'" I said. "There are just plumbers and shopkeepers
and lawyers who kill people. Everyone's quite normal until they pull the
trigger. That's all you need to fight a war. Lots of ordinary people to kill lots of other ordinary people. Couldn't be easier.'"
"I was keen to be someone who looked good in her eyes—not least because every
time I saw myself in a mirror, my own eyes were telling me something different.
And I'm not just talking about my appearance. I still had all my hair. There was
even quite a bit of color left in it. But my face was hardly what it used to be,
while my stomach was more than it had ever been. I was stiff when I awoke in the
morning, in all the wrong places and for all the wrong reasons. And I had
thyroid cancer. Apart from all that, I was just fine and dandy."
And, since this is noir fiction, Bernie gets to let loose on the subject of women quite frequently:
"I watched her go. I was glad to see the back of her. More important, I was
glad to see her behind... In a different room and wearing a clean shirt, I
might have tried slapping it. Some men liked slapping a guitar or a set of
dominoes. With me it was a woman's ass. It wasn't exactly a hobby. But I was
good at it. A man ought to be good at something." (The woman in question is Eva
Peron.)
"She looked flushed and very grateful, which is the way I like my women."
"She wore... a matching long pencil skirt that made me wish I had a couple
of sheets of paper."
"I... let the smoke curl into my eyes. I wanted to punish them for looking
into her cleavage when what I needed most was for them to do their job and keep
looking her in the eye so that I might get a better fix on whether she was
telling the truth. But I guess that's how things like cleavages evolved in the
first place."
Nazi Germany and Argentina under the Perons are places perhaps best visited
from the safety of an armchair, but Kerr never stints on atmosphere and his
books are a kind of immersion into place and time that can be hard to shake off.
He's both an excellent novelist and gifted architect of mysteries and his
dialogue is first-rate. As Colonel Montalban, Bernie's police boss says, "'To be a great detective one must also be a protagonist. A
dynamic sort of character who makes things happen just by being himself. I think
you are this kind of person, Gunther.'"
Montalban's right and readers are all the richer for it.
This review was originally published in April 2009, and has been updated for the
February 2010 paperback release.
Click here to go to this issue.
When I was a teenager, my mother gave me some advice which I almost
immediately ignored. We were both avid readers who preferred reading to talking
and most of our limited conversation was about what we were reading.
She had enjoyed English novelist Norah Lofts's trilogy about the history of a
house and the stories of the people who had lived in it over a century. "Make
sure," she said," to start with the first book." But when I went to the library,
it was out, so I started with the second, then went back to the first. Although
I still enjoyed the books, reading the middle before the beginning and then jumping to the end gave me a kind of Alice in Wonderland
sense of disjointedness. It taught me a lesson: I always try to start a series
at the beginning.
A few years ago, I made a rule for myself and then quickly ignored it. (Do I
ever learn?) I decided I was keeping details about characters in enough mystery
or police series already and that I would not start any new such series. That
didn't work, so I modified it: I would start no series involving a protagonist
who had no business getting involved in one murder after another. That vow was
much easier to keep and, except for an occasional reviewing assignment, I don't
think I've broken it.
(Although I've made no resolutions regarding series novels, much of what I've found about mystery/police series applies to them, and since their plots are likely to be more character and event-driven, without a central mystery to consume much of the plot, it can be even more confusing to start them out of order.)
It isn't always easy to start at the beginning, especially if it's a long-running series. It can be expensive and time-consuming and mean locating and buying a lot of earlier books or trying to get them through the library. Series that are introduced into the US midway through bring their own problems, as do books in a series with many years between them. For example, there's a gap of fifteen years between the first publication of Philip Kerr's third Bernie Gunther novel in 1991 and the fourth in 2006, but happily, all are still in print (see main review for details). This is when I become very grateful for the number of used books available on the internet.
I have a group of friends I consult about reading questions that intrigue me and I asked them about this. Most will go out of their way to start a series at the beginning. One person said that if she happened to start a series in the middle, she would than go back and read it from the beginning and even re-read any she had already read in the appropriate order. (I've done this once - with Ian Rankin's Rebus series - that I recall.) But another enjoys the occasional out-of-order experience and finds it can heighten her interest in going back and filling in the gaps, although she admits that this works less well with some series books than others.
I have no rule about when or if I stop reading a series, but I have dropped several (Sara Paretsky's and Sue Grafton's among them).
A more hidden aspect to the reading of mystery/police series is that one can lead to another (of course this is true of all books): An intriguing remark about Vienna made in A German Requiem, the third Bernie Gunther novel, made me
realize that it is time for me to read
Frank Tallis's series set there at the
turn of the twentieth century. But the third was just published in the USA so I'm not far behind.
All our problems should be like this!
Joanne Collings
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This review was originally published in April 2009, and has been updated for the
February 2010 paperback release.
Click here to go to this issue.
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