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

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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! With some very clever and intricate plotting Kerr has managed to meld some disturbing real life events with excellent story telling. Kerr also avoids relying on cheap shtick that curses many neo-noirs, the cheap glamour and romance used to portray this era, and the moral simplification that boils the Nazi era down black and white hats, villain and hero. 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.

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. My perusal of Web sites did give me a heads up that I can expect to see another Bernie Gunther installment in a year or so: Field Grey is coming out in the UK in July 2010. I’ve briefly mentioned already that these novels are written in the first person, entirely from Bernie’s point of view. A man named Emil Becker, whom Bernie knew from the Kripo, is the accused, and the Russians seem to want him cleared of the charges. And even after the war, amidst the decayed, imperial splendour of Vienna, Bernie uncovered a legacy that made the wartime atrocities look lily-white in comparison .Just before he died Philip Kerr finished a fourteenth Bernie Gunther novel Metropolis, which will be published next year. Communism is the new enemy, and with the Nuremberg trials over, some strange alliances are being forged against the Red Menace - alignments that make many wartime atrocities look lily-white by comparison. There are people feeling like that now, but since society doesn't accept it, they either hide it or they are being judged. Having now finished the complete cycle of Bernie Gunter novels, I have decided to re-read from the beginning.

Kerr πετυχαίνει όχι μόνο να κρατήσει αμείωτο το ενδιαφέρον του αναγνώστη (αγγίζοντας επίπεδα Dan Brown στο θέμα της cliffhanger συγγραφής), αλλά κατορθώνει να παρουσιάσει εκτενώς τόσο τις κοινωνικές συνθήκες διαβίωσ��ς των Γερμανών της εποχής όσο και την αισχρότητα των πολεμικών επιχειρήσεων σε όλο της το μεγαλείο.uk/landing-page/quercus/quercus-company-information/">The data controller is Quercus Editions Ltd. Bernie is still working as a private investigator in Berlin, in shambles from the Allied bombings and divided into four sectors, each governed by a different force (USA, Britain, France and the Soviet Union).

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. One of Bernie’s traveling companions on this trip was the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. Oh, but our hardbitten narrator-detective has not read the genre, of course, and this awkward bit of authorial obviousness almost caused me to set the book aside.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.

A richly satisfying mystery, one that evokes the noir sensibilities of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald while breaking important new ground of its own. She had the kind of body I'd only ever dreamed about, in the sort of dream I'd often dreamed of having again. Naturally Bernie’s investigations (there’s also a case involving the missing daughter of a wealthy businessman, another German expatriate) get him into a mess of trouble.Bernie as a character is an unrepentant wise-ass, and this aspect of his personality rings loud and clear in his presentation of himself and his experiences to the reader.