Review of Philip Kerr's The Lady from Zagreb

The Lady from Zagreb, by Philip Kerr (G. P. Putnam's Sons, April 7, 2015)

A good detective should always be honest, but not too honest

So says Bernie Gunther to a visiting Swiss detective (and crime fiction author) as Bernie produces from his pockets a bottle of pear schnapps and SS-etched glasses that he lifted from an stately home where he'd been a speaker at an international crime conference. Considering that the stately home had itself been appropriated from its owner by the SS, Bernie's pilfering seems only fair.

This latest 10th adventure of Bernie Gunther, cynical German gumshoe, takes place mostly in 1942, in Germany, Switzerland and Yugoslavia, with some flash-forwards to 1956 on the Côte d'Azur. The 1942 Bernie is back home in Berlin from his time in Smolensk as an investigator with the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau. (Yes, there really was such a thing––and no, of course the Nazis didn't investigate their own genocidal atrocities.)

Coming back to Berlin is a lot better than being in Smolensk, but it has its drawbacks. Bernie, no fan of public speaking, is coerced into giving that address at the international criminal conference. He's also once again summoned by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (whom Bernie calls––though rarely aloud––"Mahatma Propagandhi" or "Joey the Crip") to do a little job for him. The job is to travel to Yugoslavia to get a message to a certain Father Ladislaus from his long-lost daughter, who is now up-and-coming film starlet Dalia Dresner.

Kerr says he based the Dalia character in part
on film star––and inventor––Hedy Lamarr

Goebbels, whose serial lusts are legendary, has a yen for Dalia. Both Goebbels and Dalia are married and she has resisted his advances, even risking her future at the UFA film studios, which Goebbels controls. Goebbels insists Bernie should do this favor, thinking that Dalia's gratitude will make her agree to be Goebbels's latest inamorata. When Bernie meets Dalia, he's immediately smitten too and will do whatever she asks. Yes, even go to Yugoslavia. That's a tall order during the war, when the Nazis' allies, the Croatian Ustaše, were bloodily laying waste to Serbs and Jews, and every bend in the road could lead to an ambush by various flavors of partisans. Bernie's visit to Yugoslavia is brief, but possibly an even worse experience than Smolensk.

The plot thickens back in Berlin, with Goebbels "asking" Bernie to go to Switzerland on another Dalia-related errand, and SS spymaster Walter Schellenberg adding a side job that turns into a spy/counterspy drama worthy of a James Bond film. If you've read the Bernie Gunther books, you'll know that no matter how unrelated Bernie's two jobs appear, their paths will converge at some point, and the meeting will be explosive.

Kerr wasn't quite as skillful as usual in bringing his two story threads together. The Swiss story was far stronger, involving Swiss neutrality and threats against it, and I found myself wishing Bernie could have spent more time in Zurich, getting into trouble with spies of various stripes, including agents of the OSS, the predecessor to the current CIA. The trip to Yugoslavia was almost perfunctory, despite its blood-drenched horror. And Kerr, who normally weaves history seamlessly into his story, has the convoluted saga of Yugoslavia during World War II presented by using Dalia as a mouthpiece, in a lengthy and painfully stilted explanation to Bernie.

Despite the unevenness of the two plot threads and some clunkiness in exposition, fans of Bernie
Gunther should enjoy their time with this entry. Bernie, the German Sam Spade, is his usual acerbic self. More than a little ground down by nearly 10 years of coexisting with Nazis, he's still open to love––or a reasonable facsimile. As always, he's the bottom-line reason for reading this series. And here's a teaser: we learn the background to a bit of Bernie's personal history that I've wondered about for years.

It's also good to read that Bernie will be back in 2016.  In his Author's Note, Kerr writes that the next novel in the series will be titled The Other Side of Silence.

Book Review of Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale

Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr

Do you know Bernie Gunther, Philip Kerr's Nazi-era Berlin detective? Berliners are known for their cynicism and mordant humor, but even among Berliners, Bernie Gunther stands out. Like a Teutonic Sam Spade, Bernie is a wisecracking, tough-talking hardhead who stubbornly refuses to kowtow to anybody, even when he knows it would be a lot better for his health and well-being.

In Prague Fatale, number eight in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, it's 1941 and Bernie has returned to Berlin from the Eastern Front. He's relieved to have left the East, but he's not happy and is unlikely ever to be happy again. He's seen too much, done too much. As a member of the SD, the intelligence arm of the SS, he witnessed "special actions," in which Jews––men, women and children––were murdered en masse, and Bernie himself executed Russian POWs suspected of being agents for the Soviet NKVD intelligence service.

Now back as a detective with Berlin's Kriminalpolizei ("Kripo"), Bernie is investigating the suspicious death of a railway worker who'd come to Berlin from the Netherlands. That's the investigation Bernie's officially assigned to. Off the books, though, he's investigating the story behind a mysterious package a bar girl was asked to deliver. Bernie's unofficial investigation began when he rescued the bar girl from an attack on the menacing, blacked-out streets of the capital. If there's one thing Bernie can't resist, it's a beautiful damsel in distress, and this bar girl has landed herself in some real trouble.

Reinhard Heydrich

A man with no sympathy for the Nazi cause of the Nazis he's met, Bernie has always tried to keep away from the powers that be in the Third Reich. But, not for the first time, he is collared for a special assignment by Reinhard Heydrich, head of both the Gestapo and the Kripo, and newly-appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia (the current Czech Republic). Heydrich is not only Bernie's ultimate boss, he is also known as "Hitler's Hangman" and "the man with the iron heart." Heydrich tells Bernie that there is a conspiracy to murder him and he wants Bernie to become part of Heydrich's detail and flush out the would-be killer.

In the countryside near Prague, at Heydrich's palatial home (stolen from a Jewish family), Bernie has to rub shoulders with a large collection of Nazi bigwigs, there to celebrate Heydrich's appointment as Reichsprotektor. They are every bit as unsavory as Bernie knew they would be, and he hopes to finish his assignment and get out of Prague pronto. His hopes are dashed when, one morning, the body of Heydrich's newest adjutant is found shot twice in the victim's locked bedroom.

Heydrich puts Bernie in charge of the investigation. It's a puzzler. How was the man killed in a locked room? Is there something in this new adjutant's past that led to his murder? Is there a thread that connects the adjutant's murder, the attempts to murder Heydrich, Heydrich's search for a Czech spy within Germany's upper echelons and maybe even Bernie's investigations back in Berlin? On a more personal note, what price will Bernie have to pay for subjecting Heydrich's high-powered Nazi thugs to questioning, Gunther-smartmouth-style?

Author Philip Kerr walks a fine line with the Bernie Gunther series. The books are written in a wisecracking style, and we laugh at Bernie's observations about the absurdities of life in the Third Reich. But, over the years of his experience with the Nazis, he never kids himself about what he learns of the depths of their depravity, or makes excuses about the complicity of all Germans, himself included, in the regime's crimes.

This novel and its predecessor (Field Gray) are the first in the Bernie Gunther series to go into detail about Bernie's World War II experiences, including his service in the SS. Kerr manages to keep Bernie a deeply flawed but sympathetic character despite that. In Bernie, we see a man in a country gone mad, where conventional morality has been subverted to a genocidally racist philosophy. He is faced with horrible choices and his moral dilemmas force us to ask ourselves what we would do in Bernie's situation.

Kerr is clearly well-versed in the history of Nazi Germany. He  places Bernie in the midst of real characters and events, and weaves together fact and fiction to make an entirely believable story. Kerr doesn't use his depth of knowledge in a show-offish way but, instead, he subtly imbues every scene with the language, sights, sounds, tastes and smells of the time and place, so that the overall effect is that we live in that world with Bernie.

Although this is the eighth book in the Bernie Gunter series, it can easily be read on its own, without having read other books in the series. In some ways, it's a bit of a departure from the other books in the series, because of the country-house, locked-room aspect that is reminiscent of a Golden-Age  mystery. (Agatha Christie is even referenced.) It's also a much more straightforward narrative than some of the recent books, which have tended to tell stories set in two or more time periods and places. But what hasn't changed is what has always made this series so compelling: powerful characterization and storytelling, and a masterful blend of fact and fiction.

Note: A version of this review appears on the Amazon product product page under my Amazon user name. I received a free review copy of this book.