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

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Before the war the Nazis and after the war the United States and the Soviet Union act as deux ex machina in these stories in a satisfying ways, showing the ubiquity of their control of their societies, government as a criminal conspiracy.

Since then he has written and published ten universally lauded Bernie Gunther novels, and is currently working on his eleventh. There wasn't much light apart from the coachlamp by the front door, but as far as I could see the house was… as big as a decent-sized hotel of the sort that I couldn't afford. Set two years after "March Violets" in 1938 against a backdrop of the Munich Agreement and Kristallnacht Kerr deftly weaves fact and fiction as Gunther is engaged by a wealthy Frau to trace a blackmailer; but before you know it he's co-opted back into the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), now part of Himmler's Reich Security Organisation, to investigate the serial sex-murders of Aryan teenage girls, killings with links to a conspiracy at the core of the SS [and of course in the best fictional style to the original throw-away blackmail story].He stayed on to read Law and Philosophy as a postgraduate, most of this German, which was when he first became interested in German twentieth century history.

Philip Kerr καταφέρνει να προκαλεί απολαυστική ανάγνωση και κομμένη ανάσα σε αυτό το έπος της τριλογίας του Βερολίνου. What Bernie discovers is far worse than a lone madman: an occult conspiracy at the very heart of the Nazi Party. The following quotes from the first book will either make you cringe or go running for your own copy.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. 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. It's a world where it's hard to hold on to honor; however, Gunther understands that honor has no boundaries, even when the Reich attempts to set them. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.

With some very clever and intricate plotting Kerr has managed to meld some disturbing real life events with excellent story telling. A group of watercolor landscapes went on sale at a German auction house, supposedly the work of a young and impoverished Adolf Hitler while he was struggling as an artist in Vienna. 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. I had fallen into Philip Kerr by way of his Wittgenstein-inspired bit of serial killer detective sci fi, A Philosophical Investigation.Any proximity to her pouting, cherry-red Fokker Albatross of a mouth would have been worth losing a fingertip or a piece of my ear. 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. This one struck up with The Great Elector’s Cavalry March and set off at a lick towards the Brandenburger Tor. Occasionally he will foreshadow some event, suggesting that if he had known then what he came to know later he might have acted or spoken differently – but even in those instances he doesn’t reveal too much to the reader, leaving that lovely uncertainty as motivation for turning the page again and again. The first person narrator and principal character is one Bernhard (Bernie) Gunther, a hard-boiled homicide detective who quits the Berlin police force (the Kripo) because he doesn’t want to become a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party.