Review of Philip Kerr's The Other Side of Silence

I should start by saying that Philip Kerr's The Other Side of Silence (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, March 29, 2016) is the 11th book in the standout Bernie Gunther series and, if you’re not familiar with the series, you should start with March Violets, the book that introduces us to Bernie as a private investigator in 1936 Berlin. Philip Kerr hasn’t written the series in chronological order––in fact, some of the later books in the series are set several years before that first one––but your reading experience will be so much richer if you start with the first books. For the rest of this review, I’ll assume the reader is familiar with the series.


This is another one of Kerr’s dual-narrative novels, which he’s done a few times with Bernie. It starts in 1956, with Bernie working as a hotel concierge on the French Riviera. Because of his World War II misadventures as a reluctant aide to some big-time Nazi war criminals, he’s living under the false name Walter Wolf. The other narrative, which takes up only a couple of chapters, flashes back to 1945 Königsberg, East Prussia, when Bernie was in the German army, falling in love with a young radio operator while the Russian army encircled the city.

In 1956, Bernie’s life is uneventful, taken up with his job, playing bridge, and drinking away the time. That is, until he is invited to play bridge with the famous author Somerset Maugham, who lives in an opulent villa on the coast. Maugham, who had been a longtime agent for the British secret service (I didn’t know that, did you?), asks Bernie to help him deal with a blackmailer named Heinz Hebel. Bernie recognizes Hebel as Henning, a particularly despicable character whom Bernie had the displeasure of dealing with more than once, including in 1945 Königsberg.

Maugham called the French Riviera
"A sunny place for shady people"

Once this blackmail plot gets going, and you don’t have long to wait, it becomes a dizzyingly complex but thrilling game of Cold War espionage, betrayal, vengeance and revenge. And, as Bernie explains, there is a critical difference between vengeance and revenge.

The last Bernie book, The Lady From Zagreb, also has a plot that has one storyline about Bernie’s war experiences and another that is more espionage oriented. I liked that book, but I thought the espionage element was the much stronger storyline in that book. In this new book, the espionage plot is a far bigger part of the story. The flashback story is excellent, but it informs the bigger plot and blends well, which was not so much the case with The Lady From Zagreb. For me, this was a more successfully coordinated story, and it’s a particularly entertaining one if you know your Cold War espionage history.

Hey, Mr. Kerr, quit gazing soulfully
at the camera andvwrite faster!

My one criticism of this book concerns the romance element. As usual, Bernie has a romantic entanglement. This time around, it didn’t feel emotionally convincing. In fact, at the start, Kerr doesn't make it seem like Bernie even finds this woman attractive. But that’s a relatively minor problem, not enough to be of real concern. And that minor failing is more than made up for by the intricate plot and its clever denouement. I’m already impatient for Kerr’s promised 12th Bernie Gunther novel, Prussian Blue, coming in 2017.

Note: I received a free advance reviewing copy of the book from the publisher, via Amazon's Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Image sources: Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, hollywoodreporter.com.

Review of John Lawton's The Unfortunate Englishman

The Unfortunate Englishman by John Lawton (Atlantic Monthly Press, March 1, 2016)

At the center of Lawton’s stylish new espionage thriller is that classic set-piece of the Cold War espionage novel, the exchange of imprisoned spies on a bridge between East and West Berlin. But it’s the story of how the characters got there, physically and emotionally, that propels the story.

Protagonist Joe Wilderness (born John Wilfrid Holderness) is an agent for MI-6, given the task in 1965 of arranging to swap KGB deep-cover agent Bernard Alleyn for a hapless English businessman caught adding a little spying to his business trips to the USSR. We learn how Alleyn lived a thoroughly conventional English life for 20 years before being nabbed by British intelligence. On the other side, Geoffrey Masefield, a metallurgist, is betrayed by his own romantic notions of spydom and the incompetent ambitions of his British handler.

But the story that matters most is Wilderness’s. This novel begins in 1963, just where its predecessor, Then We Take Berlin (reviewed here) left off, with Joe being in a heck of a predicament as a result of an East/West smuggling operation gone spectacularly awry during JFK’s famous visit to Berlin that summer. We jump around between there and 1961, as well as 1965 and even all the way back to 1946, when Joe was an army sergeant, black marketeer and British intelligence agent in the chaos, romance and ethical soup that was Berlin after the World War II shooting war stopped and the Cold War was in its infancy. Coming back to Berlin in the 1960s isn’t easy for Joe; it brings back bittersweet memories and forces him to deal with some of his old black market contacts.

Joe Wilderness is one of my favorite espionage thriller characters. Born into East End poverty, trained in thievery by his burglar grandfather, talent-spotted after being drafted into the army at the end of World War II and educated in the languages, history and politics you’d want any Cold Warrior to know, Joe is as smart, conflicted and cynical as any Raymond Chandler character. In his world, moral ambiguity is the norm and he doesn’t waste his time putting his faith in any person or ideal. Still, he has a heart, even if he opens it up only occasionally and reluctantly.

Another strong point of the novel is John Lawton’s evocation of time, place and atmosphere. It’s hard to find a more fascinating time and place than Cold War Berlin, but Lawton still uses his narrative skills to transform history into gripping fiction. His description of barbed wire going up right through the middle of Berlin in 1961 had me gripping the book so hard my hand cramped, even though I know the history well. Lawton is a master at weaving the historical facts into the threads of his fictional story and bringing both to vivid life.

I’ve been debating whether I’d say that it’s necessary to read the first Joe Wilderness novel, Then We Take Berlin, before reading The Unfortunate Englishman. It’s definitely not absolutely necessary, and I’d hate for anybody to miss out on this book, but I have to recommend reading Then We Take Berlin first. That’s where you get Joe’s full and extremely colorful background, which adds extra richness to the plot of The Unfortunate Englishman.

If you like the Joe Wilderness books, Lawton also has a terrific series featuring Metropolitan Police detective Frederick Troy. The series begins with Black Out: An Inspector Troy Thriller and its titles are set during World War II and various times thereafter, through the 1960s.

Note: The publisher provided a free advance reviewing copy of The Unfortunate Englishman. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Image sources: bookdepository.com, bridgeofspies.com, harper-ganesvoort.com.

Review of Joseph Kanon's Leaving Berlin

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon (Atria Books, March 3, 2015)

I've always enjoyed Joseph Kanon's books, which are thrillers set in various places around the world, but all taking place shortly after World War II.  Kanon mines that same ground over and over because it's one of the richest veins of material you could ever hope to find.  The war has ended, but not the fighting. It is just a different kind of battle, and the players shifted around. No more Allies fighting Nazis; now it's the Cold War, with Berlin being dead center in the new conflict.

Alex Meier, Leaving Berlin's protagonist, had been a celebrated young novelist in Germany in the 1930s.  Alex was a Social Democrat with a Jewish father, and neither one of those were good things to be once the Nazis took over. But he was friends with the younger members of the powerful von Bernuth family, and their father got Alex out of the country before it was too late.  Alex's parents never got out.

Alex made a new home in the US, married and had a son. Then, along came the Red Scare and, suddenly, a young German socialist was in danger from the government yet again. To avoid being deported from the US permanently and losing all contact with his son, Alex agrees to act as a US government agent by returning to Berlin for a time; in particular to the Soviet Occupied Zone, where several other leftist German exiles had returned, the most prominent being playwright Berthold Brecht. Alex's assignment is to provide information about his friends in the new Germany, and if he does a good job, the promise is that he can return to the US.

Berlin in 1949 was about the most interesting place imaginable. Interesting in the usual sense, but also in the sense of the old curse, "May you live in interesting times."  The city was divided into four occupation zones for each of the Allied powers, but there was no Berlin Wall yet.  Tensions between the Soviets and the other Allies were increasing by the day, as the Soviets tried to squeeze the Allies out of the city, deep within the eastern half of the country, which the Soviets planned as a satellite state.

Along with the political and military Cold War, there was also a so-called Cultural Cold War. The Soviets and the West vied for superiority in literature, music, theater and all the other arts. The Soviets lavished privileges on artists who could burnish the reputation of communism around the world. Alex, who is well remembered as a novelist, is welcomed warmly in the Soviet Occupied Zone and treated as a valued member of the new socialist dream society. As an instantly prominent artist comrade, he can eat and drink off ration at the Kulturbund and is awarded a nice apartment all to himself, with a view to the street rather than the drab rear.

Alex quickly finds that Berlin is full of secrets and lies, with danger and betrayal all around him. This is no longer the city of his youth. His childhood home is rubble and his old and new friends may not be what they seem. Alex's reconnecting with his old love, Irene von Bernuth, who is now the mistress of a high-level Soviet military man, excites his US intelligence contacts, but it endangers Alex's heart and much more. What was supposed to be a quick and easy job soon turns deadly dangerous, and Alex must rely on his wits to save himself and those he still feels loyal to.

I've read a lot of espionage thrillers, but this one has one of the most satisfyingly twisty-turny plots ever; enough to make your head spin and heart pound. Along with the complex and exciting plot, Kanon delivers a large cast of realistic characters, starting with Alex, but also including childhood friends (especially Irene von Bernuth), Soviet officers, Alex's minder from the Party, intelligence contacts and more. Kanon also has a gift for invoking the atmosphere of the ruined city and what Berliners do to survive in the new reality.

This is Kanon's second book set in Berlin, with the first being The Good German (2002), made into a movie starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. This is a very different story, but also one that would make a terrific film. I feel sure of that, because Kanon's powerfully evocative writing turned it into a story that played out in my head as a movie while I was reading.

Another particular strength of the book is the focus on the return to East Berlin of so many members of the cultural and intellectual elite who missed their homeland and were true believers in the communist cause. They included Brecht and writers like Arnold Zweig, Anna Seghers and Stefan Heym.

Initially celebrated and given privileges not available to others in the workers' state, the returnees who spent the Nazi years in the West, rather than in Moscow, soon found their situations changed. Stalin and his henchmen began an "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign in 1950, targeting those who had spent time in the West. Many were expelled from the Communist Party, imprisoned on trumped-up charges and worse. If you'd like to read more on the subject, you might try Edith Anderson's Love In Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin (Steerforth Press, 1999). Or, to read about Bertold Brecht's tumultuous history with his native country, as well as his friends, colleagues and lovers, check out a new book by Pamela Katz: The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink (Nan A. Talese, January 6, 2015).

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy, via NetGalley.

Review of John Lawton's Then We Take Berlin

Then We Take Berlin, by John Lawton
(Atlantic Monthly Press; September 3, 2013)

John Lawton is on my top-five list of contemporary authors, so I was excited when I heard he had created a new protagonist, John Wilfrid Holderness. That sounds like a posh name, but he's known by most people as Joe Wilderness––a much better fit to this character.

Joe is a London East End wide boy, a chancer who lives on his wits and guile. That's all the more true when his mother is killed in the Blitz, found dead, ensconced on a barstool with her gin still sitting in front of her. Joe's grandfather, Abner, moves Joe into an attic room at his place in Whitechapel, where Abner lives with his longtime girlfriend (and sometime prostitute), Merle. (Not that her name really is Merle, but that's a good Hollywood-sounding sobriquet for when she's on the game.)

Abner teaches Joe everything he knows about burglary and safe-cracking. Joe is a quick study, not just about crime, but about books, and observing people. Smart and lucky are two different things, though. Just when all the soldiers and sailors are returning home from World War II, Joe is drafted. He's about to be tossed into the punishment cells for insubordination (that's a mild name for it) during his basic training, when he's plucked out by Lieutenant Colonel Burne-Jones, who's seen Joe's IQ score. Burne-Jones sends Joe to Cambridge to learn Russian and German, and to London for individual tutoring in languages, politics and history.

Of course, Burne-Jones is training Joe to work in military intelligence, but you already figured that out. Off Joe goes to Berlin in 1946, where his job is to assess German citizens looking to get jobs in the de-Nazified country. To qualify, Germans had to fill out a form the Germans nicknamed Fragebogen, the Questions. Intelligence officers like Joe quizzed candidates over their answers to determine whether they would qualify for the prized Entlastungsschein––which the Germans called Persilschein, after Persil laundry detergent––the whiter-than-white document that proved that you're not considered an enemy or a threat.

Aside from that dull desk job, though, what an amazing time and place for a wide boy. "It was love at first sight. He and Berlin were made for each other. He took to it like a rat to a sewer." In between intelligence jobs for Burne-Jones, Joe can't resist becoming a black market seller, then increasing the stakes in his black market game, which means making ever larger and more dangerous deals; deals that involve bent Russians and dangerous crossings to the Russian sector.

But for Joe, it's not all about sussing out former Nazi bigwigs and scientists by day, and smuggling by night. At one of Berlin's nightclubs––famous in the Weimar era for using tabletop telephones and pneumatic tubes so that strangers could propose assignations––Joe meets Christina Helene von Raeder Burckhardt, known by the Brits and Yanks as Nell Breakheart. Not because she actually breaks hearts, but because she's so beautiful, inside and out, that they're lining up in hopes of getting their hearts broken. And wouldn't you know, she chooses Joe.

Yes, Joe's quip is about Hitler, who was a
Corporal in the First World War

I can't blame Nell. Joe's got that bad-boy fascination and I wanted to hang around with him for the snappy patter alone. In one of my favorite scenes, he is introduced to Nell's old friend Werner, who's no fan of the occupying forces. Werner sneers, "I do not care to sit down with the Allies, Herr Corporal." Joe answers: "Now don't you go bashin' corporals. We may be a bunch of numskulls but some of us go on to run empires that last a thousand years."

Trümmerfrauen clearing rubble

In language so vivid the scenes unreel like a half-remembered film, Lawton recreates postwar Berlin, with its ruined buildings, squalid living quarters created in cellars or apartments with shorn-off walls, crews of women who earn rations by clearing rubble in bucket lines, dirty kids harassing occupation forces servicemen for candy bars, the stink of open sewers, fear and despair, and the sweeter scents of money, graft and opportunity. I read a ton of World War II historical novels and I can't think of another one that does it with more verve.

JFK in Berlin

But the novel isn't all postwar Berlin. The bombed-out Berlin tale is bookended by the stories of Joe and Nell in the summer of 1963. You know, the summer JFK made his famous visit to Berlin. If there is some of the 1963 plot that is not quite up to snuff (and, admittedly, there is), that takes up a very small proportion of what is a dazzlingly inventive and layered story, packed with fully dimensional characters–––several of whom Lawton fans will recognize from Lawton's series of Frederick Troy novels.

I've often wondered why John Lawton hasn't gained the recognition I firmly believe he deserves. I've come to think it might be because of the book world's compulsion to categorize books and authors into easy genres and sub-genres. Lawton's books are most often classified as mystery and espionage, but neither is accurate. As Lawton once commented, they are "historical, political thrillers with a big splash of romance, wrapped up in a coat of noir." The noir comes in because, as you might have suspected, reading about Joe Wilderness, John Lawton likes to write about people on the edge, living in a world of shadowy morality. Lawton says, "I don't think there are unequivocal good guys. If there are, then they're teetering on the edge, and it's the edge, the ambivalence, that I like about espionage and spooks." Me too.

If you enjoy authors like Ian McEwan, Philip Kerr, Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd, give this book a try, along with his other novels, especially his haunting 2011 title, A Lily of the Field.

Note: I received a free review e-galley of Then We Take Berlin from NetGalley––but I loved it so much I ordered the hardcover as soon as I finished reading the galley. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Philip Kerr's A Man Without Breath

A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr

It's 1943, and Bernie Gunther, former Berlin homicide cop, is now an investigator for the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau. Yep, you read those last four words right. During World War II, there actually was a German organization for investigating war crimes. Bernie, however, with all the cynicism and black humor of a Berliner, is keenly aware of the absurdity of the Bureau's practice of turning a blind eye to the systematic torture and murder of Jews, Gypsies, communists, Slavs, homosexuals and other designated enemies of the Reich. Instead, the Bureau focuses on investigating war crimes by the Allies and, occasionally, one-off criminal acts by German soldiers––like rape, murder and torture committed without benefit of an officer's order.

Bernie is sent to Smolensk, then precariously held by the Germans, when corpses are discovered buried in the nearby Katyń Forest. Those bodies turn out to be Polish army officers, executed by a shot to the back of the head, and the more the German troops dig in the forest, the more bodies they find.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (whom Bernie likes to call "Mahatma Propagandhi") spots a potential publicity coup: show the world that this massacre was perpetrated by the Soviets and drive a wedge between the democratic Allies and the USSR. Goebbels orders Bernie to coordinate an international commission's visit to Smolensk to witness the digging and autopsies and, of course, to help the publicity along.

Bernie's workload becomes heavier when two German soldiers are brutally murdered late one night after a visit to the local brothel in Smolensk, and other murders follow. Bernie's various investigations force him into contact with a number of Wehrmacht officers, nearly all of whom are aristocrats and seem to be related by blood, marriage or social connection. This is a double whammy for Bernie, who dislikes both military authority and class superiority. Naturally, he refuses to show any deference to the officers, even including those whom he figures out are part of the various plots to assassinate Hitler.

Bernie's insubordination and wisecracks have a tendency to make the local command less than cooperative with his investigations; not that this is a new phenomenon for Bernie. After knowing him only a couple of days, one member of the visiting committee says: "Trouble is what defines you, Gunther. Without trouble you have no meaning." True, but I like Gunther's own view of himself: "[F]or the last ten years[,] [t]here's hardly been a day when I haven't asked myself if I could live under a regime I neither understood nor desired. . . . For now, being a policeman seems like the only right thing I can do."

This is what the Bernie Gunther series is all about. Philip Kerr is a master at portraying the flawed hero doing the best he can in a corrupt and perverted time and place. And you sure can't get much more corrupt and perverted than Nazi Germany and World War II.

During this now nine-volume series, Kerr puts Bernie at ground zero at some of the notorious landmarks of the time. In this book, there are several, including the discovery of the Katyń Forest Massacre, a real event in which the Soviet NKVD killed over 14,000 Polish military officers as part of its "decapitation" policy, which systematically obliterated those who might lead resistance against them, including aristocrats, intellectuals and military elites. Kerr also includes references to the Gleiwitz Incident, the faked Polish attack on a German radio station, which the Nazis devised to justify their 1939 invasion of Poland; the Rosenstrasse protest, which I describe in a historical note below; some of the previously-mentioned officer class's attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler; and the horrific medical experiments on communists carried out by fascist doctors in Civil War-era Spain.

Dramatization of the Rosenstrasse Protest

I read a lot of World War II fiction, and a common mistake is for the author to put every bit of his or her
research on the page, which often kills the pace and flavor of the story. Having read all of the Bernie Gunther series, I can say that Philip Kerr never makes that mistake. His knowledge of World War II history is prodigious, and he works it seamlessly into his compelling fictional stories. Just read the Author's Note at the end of the book and marvel at all the real events and characters he's blended into this story without the least scent of a musty textbook creeping in.

I recommend A Man Without Breath to anyone who enjoys World War II fiction or books about characters trapped in morally compromising circumstances.  The book will be published in the US by Putnam on April 16. (I read the UK edition, which was published by Quercus on March 14.)

Historical Note: An intriguing event Kerr describes is the Rosenstrasse protest. In March 1943, the Nazis rounded up the last 10,000 Jews left in Berlin (at least those not in hiding), with the intent to transport them and declare Berlin judenfrei. About 1700 of these, the ones who were married to Aryans, were separated and placed in temporary holding in the Jewish community center building on Rosenstrasse. For a week, the wives and families of the Rosenstrasse prisoners demonstrated outside, loudly demanding the release of their loved ones, despite SS soldiers' threats to arrest and even shoot the demonstrators. Amazingly, at the end of the week, the prisoners were released, by Goebbels' order, and nearly all of them survived the war.

This event shows the sensitivity of the regime to bad publicity and forces us to ask what horrors might have been avoided if only the German people had risen up against Nazi actions earlier. For a thorough and fascinating history of the Rosenstrasse protest, I recommend Nathan Stoltzfus's Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany.

Note: Versions of this review may appear on Goodreads, Amazon and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.