Book review - The Pale Criminal

‘It didn’t need much explaining. That’s the thing about being a detective: I catch on real fast.’ (p272)

Philip Kerr’s second Bernie Gunther novel The Pale Criminal was published in 1990. 

I read the first, March Violets (1989) in January 2016. [Glowing review here]

I ended that review by saying I was looking forward to reading #2 ‘soon’. So much for ‘soon’…! To reiterate, it’s most remiss of me to only be reading these books at this late juncture, when they’ve been on my shelf for quarter of a century!

Kerr exploded on the crime book scene with March Violets and has consistently produced best seller after best seller – to date there are 12 novels in this series; he has written standalone books too. He’s popular because he inhabits his character, a typical private eye with a wise-cracking jaundiced view of the world. But these books are more than PI novels; they’re set in Berlin before and after the Second World War. An inspired choice: Berlin is almost a living breathing character in itself. The research and detail - without being overdone - provide believability.

March Violets was set at the time of the Berlin Olympics, 1936. The Pale Criminal jumps to 1938 (for an historical reason).

Gunther used to work in the police but has since gone private.

‘My business doesn’t exactly suit those who are disposed to be neat. Being a private investigator leaves you holding more loose ends than a blind carpet-weaver.’ (p246)

Obergruppenfuhrer Heydrich tends to use Gunther from time to time and this second foray is no exception. Ironically, Heydrich has got wind of secret plans for a pogrom against the Jews; he’s more concerned about the cost to German insurance companies than the fate of the citizens of that race, so he wants Gunther to stymie the plot.

Meanwhile, Gunther is investigating the brutal murders of Aryan girls; not for the squeamish. There’s a definite link, it seems between the deaths and the pogrom plot.

Taut and gripping, and steeped in period detail, the book races along. Complete with repulsive and intriguing characters:

‘Certainly time had stood still with his prognathous features – somewhere around one million years BC. Tanker could not have looked less civilized than if he had been wearing the skin of a sabre-toothed tiger.’ (p117)

And the plot neatly chimes with a terrible real historic event.

The book title fittingly comes from a phrase in a Nietzsche quotation.

Excellent.

[Interestingly, the third book in the series is set in 1947. Some other later books jump back to the early 1940s. I’m not sure which way to jump in reading more – go for the publishing sequence or the chronological timeline. It probably doesn’t matter.]

Book review – March Violets

I’ve had this book by Philip Kerr, his writing debut, on my bookshelf since 1990 and have only now finally read it. I must admit I’m annoyed it took me so long to discover this series. Here, he introduces private investigator Bernie Gunther – whose eleventh appearance is in The Other Side of Silence (2016).

The novels are set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

March Violets (1989) begins in Berlin, in 1936, at the time of the Olympics. The title means those late converts to National Socialism. Gunther steered clear of divorce cases but anyway had his hands full with missing person enquiries – there was no shortage of these cases in the Third Reich.

Narrated in the first person, Gunther is fully formed, a brave and stubborn German private eye of the noir pulps, complete with wisecracks and telling observation. He welcomes a change from missing persons when the Ruhr industrialist Hermann Six hires him to find the murderers of his daughter and son-in-law who also stole a priceless necklace.

Gunther’s office is in a block administered by ‘Gruber, a shifty little undertaker of a man’. Gruber is also a Gestapo informer, so Gunther tries to keep on the right side of him, which is not always easy:

‘Ah, Herr Gunther, it’s you,’ he said, coming out of his office. He edged towards me like a crab with a bad case of corns… There was something about his face that always reminded me of Max Schreck’s screen portrayal of Nosferatu, an effect that was enhanced by the rodent-like washing movements of his skeletal hands. (p26)

Uncanny, this. only a few days earlier I’d read Nosferatu, inspired by the 1922 Schreck film (see my blog http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2016/01/book-of-film-nosferatu-vampyre.html)

Kerr’s descriptions are a joy to read and seem wholly original: ‘Tesmer’s mouth was like a slash in a length of cheap curtain. And all you saw through the hole were the pints of his rodent’s teeth, and the occasional glimpse of the ragged grey-white oyster that was his tongue.’(p74).

And throughout his character’s ironic humour sustains the story: ‘Dogs are not at all keen on private investigators, and it’s an antipathy that is entirely mutual.’ (p78) Or try: ‘Looking around the room I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught.’ (p101)

Needless to say, Gunther is not pro-Nazi and isn’t overly fond of the Great Persuader, Adolf Hitler: ‘Everyone who was watching was getting in some arm exercise, so I hung back, pausing in a shop doorway to avoid having to join them.’ (p107).

The trail Gunther follows leads him down those mean streets so familiar to fans of private eye fiction – yet additionally laced with the mortal threat of the Nazi menace. One moment we witness Jesse Owens’ victory – ‘the tall, graceful negro accelerate down the track, making a mockery of crackpot theories of Aryan superiority’ and the next we’re in a concentration camp, with all that entails – ‘it changes a man…’

It’s an extraordinary debut novel. Kerr captures the mood of the place and the period, employing criminal slang and witty insights; the research is just right, never overdone. I’m looking forward to reading the next in the series, The Pale Criminal (1990) soon.