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 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.

Spring Preview 2015: Part Three

Some weather gurus are saying this week is winter's last hurrah. Well, we'll see about that. I'm not going to be putting away my mittens and boot grippers just yet. In fact, I have put down money that we won't see bare ground in our back yard for at least three more weeks.

While we're all waiting for the crocuses to dare show themselves, there are quite a few books we can curl up with.

The ship's first-class dining room

May 7 will be the 100th anniversary of Germany's torpedoing of Cunard's luxury cruiser Lusitania, with the loss of 1,200 of the nearly 2,000 passengers and crew onboard. Lusitania was sailing from New York to its home port of Liverpool, and was just a few miles offshore of Ireland, expecting to reach home port later that afternoon, when a German U-boat blasted it just under the wheelhouse. The ship listed so badly and sank so quickly that only a few lifeboats were launched. As with Titanic, most victims drowned or died of hypothermia.

Many of those who survived were rescued by Irish volunteers who sailed to help as soon as they heard of the calamity. Mysteriously, HMS Juno, a British cruiser, set off from Cork, but then turned around.

So why did the Germans fire on a luxury passenger ship? They had warned that all shipping passages in the British Isles were war zones, and this warning was printed in newspapers. In response to the outraged responses to the sinking and loss of civilian life, Germany pointed to the fact that the ship was carrying munitions, which was true. Though the US didn't enter World War I for two more years, the sinking of Lusitania and the loss of most of the 139 Americans onboard increased agitation for American involvement, both from Europe and within the US.

We have less than a week to wait until Erik Larson's Dead Wake (Crown, March 10) arrives to recount the story of Lusitania. The publisher's blurb says that we may think we know the story, but we really don't, and that Larson's book is filled with glamor, mystery, suspense and evocative characters.

I take blurbs with a grain of salt, but this is Erik Larson, after all, the man who has given us spellbinders like In the Garden of Beasts, The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck and Isaac's Storm. I pre-ordered Dead Wake months ago and I'll be haunting my mailbox next week until it arrives.

Speaking of mystery, suspense and evocative characters (but not so much glamor), March 10 will also see the publication of Olen Steinhauer's new novel, All the Old Knives (Minotaur). I had the opportunity to read an advance review copy of this one, and it's an unusual, but gripping espionage thriller, with nearly all the action taking place in one evening, in a restaurant.

Henry and Celia were lovers and fellow CIA agents in Vienna when a terrorist hijacking went very wrong on the tarmac at the city's airport, after a low-level CIA agent who happened to be on the plane had his identity discovered by the terrorists. Was the agent betrayed and, if so, how? After that terrible tragedy, Celia left her old life, married, moved to the paradise of Carmel, California, and became a stay-at-home mother to two kids. Now, Henry calls to say that he's in the area for a conference and would love to get together for dinner.

At the restaurant, they begin with that polite chit-chat of old colleagues and lovers; they talk about mutual friends and work acquaintances, Celia's kids and husband, the beauty of Carmel. With each glass of wine (and there are many) and each bit of perfectly composed California cuisine, the talk becomes deeper and more intense. They circle each other, looking for vulnerabilities that will bring out the truth of their old relationship and what really happened that terrible day in Vienna. These old knives can still slice.

Who knows what may lurk behind the doors of these quaint Carmel eateries?

The story is told in the alternating voices of Henry and Celia. Is one of them an unreliable narrator? Are both of them? This is a quick read, but completely engrossing. I was gripping the book so hard I left indentations. When I reached the end, nearly everything Henry and Celia said now appeared in a different light.

I've read all but one of Olen Steinhauer's many espionage novels, and I'm a big fan. In this case, I was impressed that he went in a different direction with his plotting and that it was a success. In the book, he says he wrote the story in a very short time, inspired by having seen The Song of Lunch, a televised adaptation of Christopher Reid's poem, which stars Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as former lovers who meet for lunch in a London restaurant, 15 years after the end of their affair. If you saw that production, you might be particularly interested in reading All the Old Knives.

Do you remember that old line, "If you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there"? I was in high school during the Summer of Love and in college during the ferment of the early to mid-'70s, and I thought I remembered those times. But now I'm reading an advance review copy of Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Penguin Press, April 7), and I'm seeing I was wrong, in a big way.

Sure, I remember when the Weather Underground accidentally blew up one of their members' family's townhouse in Manhattan; the Kent State shootings; the massive bombing of the University of Wisconsin building; Patty Heart's kidnapping, apparent conversion to a cadre in the Symbionese Liberation Army, the live televised shootout and inferno of the SLA hideout in Los Angeles and Patty going on the run for over a year until her eventual capture in San Francisco. I remember that the national news every night during that period seemed like a nonstop cycle of updates about the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and the student protest movement. But I either never knew or plain forgot about just how much shooting, bombing, kidnapping and other violent actions were associated with the various self-styled revolutionary groups.

Here's a bit of trivia: Dustin Hoffman lived next door to the townhouse in
Greenwich Village that the Weather Underground accidentally blew up

Burrough writes that in 1970, 330 bombs were set off by our own citizens. Usually, the bombers timed the devices to explode after hours and phoned in warnings, so it was rare to have fatalities or even injuries. Still, we're talking about bombs going off and causing serious damage in buildings like the New York Police Department's headquarters, major Manhattan banks, the National Guard building in Washington, DC, the Marin County (CA) courthouse, the Presidio Army base in San Francisco, even the US Capitol and the Pentagon, and many more important sites. Just imagine if that happened today!

I'm finding this a fascinating read, and it will have me reflecting for a long time about those times, where we are today, and what accounts for the differences in who now engages in violent political action and how we respond.

I've written here so many times about Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series. As soon as I finish one book, I start looking out for the next one. As far as I'm concerned, he can't write them fast enough. I won't have long to wait for his new one, The Lady From Zagreb (G. P. Putnam's Sons, April 7). This is the 10th book in the series, but if you're a regular reader, you know Kerr has jumped around a lot in time. The good news is that means reading the series in order isn't all that critical.

This book is set in 1942 and 1943. Bernie is a criminal investigator for the Nazi SD, and his first case in this story is to find out who beat an attorney to death in his office––with a bust of Hitler. Bernie already has a connection with the victim, who had asked him to provide information about the attorney's suspicion that a charitable foundation was a fraud.  A year later, with no solution to the lawyer's murder, a new case is pressed on Bernie. He's asked by Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels (whom Bernie refers to––not to his face, of course––as Mahatma Propagandhi or, more often, Joey the Crip) to help a film starlet named Dalia Dresner track down her missing father. Goebbels, a famously unattractive but powerful and oversexed man, was known for pursuing actresses, so I'm going to guess he won't be happy when Bernie falls for Dalia.

Dalia's case takes Bernie to Yugoslavia, where the Nazis had teamed up with the ultra-nationalist and repressive Croatian group called the Ustashe. The Ustashe actions may not be as well known as some of the others in World War II, especially by those in the so-called bloodlands, but they were every bit as chillingly brutal and genocidal. Bernie will witness yet more of the atrocities of his own people and their allies.

Hitler and Goebbels at German's famous UFA film studio

Kerr makes Bernie Gunther a sort of wisecracking German Sam Spade, and combines classic hardboiled plot lines with serious issues of how a decent guy––but no angel––gets by in Nazi Germany. Publishers Weekly says this one's superlative, so I'm even more anxious than usual to read what fresh hell Bernie Gunther's gotten into.

Here's another bit of trivia I learned recently. Philip Kerr is married to journalist Jane Thynne, who is also a novelist. She has a series featuring a British/German actress named Clara Vine, who is trying to become a film star in Germany in the 1930s and gets mixed up with powerful Nazis. I just got the first book in the series, Black Roses, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Thynne's Clara Vine deals with the people and events that Bernie Gunther comes up against in his series.

You know how our seasonal preview posts are supposed to be about the books we're most looking forward to reading? Well, there is this one book that I know I have to read, but I susupect I'll hate myself afterward. It's Andrew Morton's 17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis and the Biggest Cover-Up in History (Grand Central, March 10). I mean, first of all, what an embarrassingly over-the-top title! Second, the author is Andrew Morton, an English writer of celebrity biographies. He's written about Princess Diana, Prince William and Kate Middleton, Tom Cruise, Madonna, Monica Lewinsky, and Angelina Jolie. Some of his books have sold well, but many have been heavily criticized, especially the Angelina Jolie bio.

So why will I read this book? You know I can't resist a story about how the former Edward VIII, who famously abdicated the British throne to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, supposedly conspired with the Nazis to be re-installed as the British monarch once Germany invaded Britain. Documentary evidence ostensibly existed, but a secret operation was launched to recover and destroy it, to preserve the monarchy. I am very dubious about the story (to say the least) and I would bet serious money that Morton will focus on all the most salacious stories about Simpson. The title alone tells me that. The "17 Carnations" part is a shorthand reference to a bit of scurrilous and never-verified gossip that Wallis Warfield Simpson had an affair with Nazi Germany's Ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and that he gave her 17 carnations to memorialize each time they slept together. I haven't read anything really trashy in awhile; maybe that's also part of why I'm attracted to this in spite of myself. So here's the deal: I'll read it so you don't have to.

Note: Thanks to the publishers for providing advance review copies of Olen Steinhauer's All the Old Knives and Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage. Some of my description of Olen Steinhauer's All the Old Knives is taken from the review I posted on Amazon under my username there.

Jumping the Shark

Lady Jane Digby, painted by
Joseph Karl Stieler

Today we welcome a guest writer, who calls herself Lady Jane Digby's Ghost. Read a little about her inspiration, 19th-century Lady Jane Digby, here.

Lady Jane Digby's Ghost: I'm a history jock and a voracious reader, which combine to make me a prodigious consumer of European and American mysteries. I don't like cozies, but appreciate that others less hard-boiled than I do. I often consult Wikipedia while reading to get the 411 on people and places referred to in the text. After retiring––honorably––from several careers, I live in Santa Fe where I review books for Amazon, participate in our local adult education group, www.renesan.org, and hang out with my cats. I was born in 1951–you do the math.

I like series books. I really do. I like returning to old friends and accompanying them on their new adventures. And I particularly like mystery series. Give me a new volume in British author Susan Hill's masterful series starring Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler and I'm a happy clam.

But all too many authors have hung on to their once-interesting characters for one or two books too many, and it's the reader who pays the price. Literally "pays the price," as in money spent and time wasted on a book in a series that, once upon a time, was good reading but has degenerated into a mishmash.

When the author loses interest, the reader does, too. But all too often, the author doesn't realize he's lost both the series and the readers until the books stop selling.

So, who's still "got it" and who should hang the characters out to dry? These are my picks, based on years and years and years of reading.

Daniel Silva has been writing his Gabriel Allon books since 2003. They feature an Israeli spy/assassin who wants to leave Israeli intelligence and make his avocation, art restoration, his trade. But, like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, just when he thinks he's out, they pull him back in. In Silva's case, this happens annually, as a new series book appears every summer, like clockwork.

The books are getting a bit repetitive, but they could be improved by further character development. Give Allon a kid––one who is not killed in a terrorist attack. Let Chiara, Allon's younger Italian wife, age a little, and become a little less gorgeous. Give her a haircut. Finally, kill off Shomron, who seems to be a pain in everyone's side in Israeli intelligence. Silva needs to move forward to keep me reading.

Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the "Maisie Dobbs" series. While the series started off well, Ms. Winspear seems to be losing interest in her character and the plots are becoming rote. It's difficult to explain, but Maisie was originally a nuanced creation. She was mentored by Dr. Maurice Blanche, a noted psychologist. After serving in World War I as a nurse in France, she returned to London to set up a detective agency, where she used psychological insight to solve cases. The cases in the succeeding books were well thought out. The past few books seem slapdash, though, without the careful writing Winspear is noted for. She seems to be going through the motions.

Winspear is publishing a new book in April, The Care and Management of Lies: A Novel of the Great War, that does not seem to be part of the Maisie Dobbs series. I think it's time she created another leading character and series. She's a really good writer.

"Charles Todd" is the mother/son writing team who have two World War I series, one featuring Inspector Rutledge, and the other Bess Crawford. Rutledge has been keeping my interest, but the Bess Crawford character seems to be stuck in time. She needs a major shake-up––maybe marrying her father's adjunct, who's been in love with her forever. Maybe as the Great War draws to a close, so should the Bess Crawford character. Or, as the two series are placed in two slightly different times, maybe the final book should be Bess meeting Rutledge. They do seem to have a common friend, Melinda Crawford, who is Bess's cousin and a friend of Rutledge's family, and who appears in both Todd series.

British author David Downing has run out of Berlin train stations with which to title his John Russell series. Masaryk Station, in Prague, was his last book in the series. His main characters, journalist/spy John Russell and actress Effi Koenen, have reached a natural end to the World War II and post-war period, and Downing has gracefully tied up his loose ends in a good final book. He has a new series set in World War I, with the first book, Jack of Spies, published last year. I thought it was a bit overwritten, but otherwise a good start to a new series.


Philip Kerr, with his Bernie Gunther series, keeps his character interesting by not writing the series in timely order. The books are set everywhere from 1930s Berlin, to Cuba in the 1950s, to the Russian front during World War II, and more. The reader never knows where––or when––Bernie will turn up next. That keeps me buying and reading the books. I think that his first three books, now combined in one large volume, Berlin Noir, are his best; some of the best writing about 1930s Berlin available.


Alan Furst will continue writing as long as he wants. He has built up such a following that his books sell well to readers who love everything he puts in front of them. Because he also alternates time and place and characters, his books stay fresh––though look out for his standard scene in a French bar in every book, no matter where otherwise set.

I'm a big fan of British author John Lawton, who writes the Troy series, set in London. Like Philip Kerr, he ranges his books throughout a vast period of time and there are enough characters in the Troy family that the storylines are kept fresh. (Note to American readers who also read British books: Beware when ordering Troy books from the UK. For some odd and unknown reason, Lawton's books sometimes have different titles in the UK and the US. You might see a book on a British seller's site, think you haven't read it, order it, and then be disappointed when it arrives because it is a book you've read, under a different title.)

Many readers have not yet discovered the Billy Boyle series, set in World War II, by author James R. Benn. There are eight titles in the series––like Daniel Silva, Benn publishes a book every summer––and are beginning to get a bit tired. Billy is a former Boston police detective who is a sort of enforcer for his uncle, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.  As befits Billy's background, he "looks into things" for "Uncle Ike" in the European theater.

Benn has improved greatly as a writer, but he's beginning to lose me as a reader due to the repetitious plot lines. Benn also tries to write Billy a love interest, which seems to be spurious at best. He doesn't need one, and her presence drags down the story. (This is a major pet peeve of mine; love interests in books where they're not needed, but are there because the publisher feels they should be, to juice up sales.) Still, every September, I'll look to see if Benn has a new Billy Boyle title. If you haven't heard of James R. Benn, look him up; you might like his wartime mysteries.

There are many other series of mysteries and police procedurals set in England, Canada and the United States that I'd like to cover in future guest posts.

So, what authors and series will you continue to buy and read? And which ones just seem to have petered out, but the author doesn't know it? Let us know.

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.

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.

World War II: The 1930s

The gathering storm. That's what Winston Churchill titled the first volume of his history of World War II, describing the period when the Nazis were gaining strength and the other European powers failed to see or deal with the impending threat.

The Versailles Treaty ending World War I placed a heavy reparations burden on Germany. The western powers insisted on Germany paying reparations in gold or foreign currency, and turning over more than a quarter of the value of the exports from its industries, which were Germany's key strength and had mostly remained intact at the end of the war.

During World War I, tight government controls on the press meant that German citizens had little idea that they would lose the war until it was suddenly over. In their shock and humiliation, they were ready to believe the stab-in-the-back story told by right-wing nationalist groups. According to this myth, the German armed forces didn't lose the war; instead, they were betrayed by socialists, communists and Jews in the civilian population and government, whose ambition was to overthrow Germany's monarchy and establish a republic.

Germany's postwar democracy was weak and tentative, and its economy precarious at best. Reparation demands for gold and foreign currency exceeded all of Germany's reserves, and attempts to buy foreign currency with German (paper) marks accelerated the devaluation of the mark. The result was the horrific hyperinflation of 1923, when workers rushed from their jobs with their day's pay to buy whatever they could, knowing that the money would likely be worthless the next day.

During the middle 1920s, Germany's economy shakily and tentatively recovered, only to be destroyed by the worldwide Great Depression starting in 1929. Two faiths now battled for the souls of the German people: communism and fascism. Extremist political factions raised their own private armies and pitched battles were regularly fought in the streets.

Many Germans concluded that the Weimar Republic was ineffective and doomed, and decided to support the Nazis, who promised order in the streets, full employment, the end to payment of reparations and a restoration of national pride through the resurrection of its armed forces and reclamation of lands lost through the Versailles Treaty. Fearful of the communists and weary of the political and economic chaos of the postwar years, enough Germans were persuaded to support the Nazis to result in Hitler's becoming Chancellor in January, 1933.

That the Germans had made a deal with the devil became clear almost instantly, as the Nazis moved quickly to outlaw or co-opt all other political parties and changed the constitution to allow Hitler's government to act unilaterally. The Nazi party's propaganda machine went into high gear, promoting the notion of a great Aryan race, destined to rule over huge territories and the inferior Slavs, Jews and Roma.

The rise of fascism in Spain, Italy and Japan in the mid-1930s, along with Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, convinced Hitler that Britain and France lacked the will to stop Hitler's territorial ambitions. In quick succession, Austria, Bohemia and Moravia were absorbed into the Reich. Then, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, the UK and France declared war on Germany. The fury of the storm descended as World War II began.

I've always been interested in World War II history and fiction and that gathering storm period fascinates me too. Now that we've finished our quick background history, here is some espionage and crime fiction set in the period. I've also included a few books of nonfiction.

Eric Ambler's A Coffin For Dimitrios (1939) is often called the best spy novel ever written. Protagonist Charles Latimer is an English academic-turned-crime-novelist who is in Greece for his health when he takes a trip to Istanbul and meets Colonel Haki of the Turkish secret police. Haki tells Latimer about Dimitrios Makropoulos, a criminal whose body has been found in Istanbul. From his impoverished beginnings, Dimitrios became an underworld kingpin, involved in espionage, assassination, theft rings and the drug trade.

Latimer is intrigued by what Haki tells him of Dimitrios and thinks there could be a novel in it if he researches Dimitrios's 20-years life in crime. Latimer's research takes him to Bulgaria, Serbia, Paris, Switzerland and Croatia. Latimer comes to the realization that Dimitrios is very much a creature of his time and place. As another character says, the conditions that produced the kinds of criminals typified by Dimitrios are those where "might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment." Evil exists and takes every advantage of the naive and ineffectual.

For a very different trip through prewar Europe, try Patrick Leigh Fermor's memoirs of his walk throughout Europe beginning in 1933, when he was 18 years old. Imagine being 18 and traveling on foot from one end of Europe to the other in such a momentous time! Fermor's plan was to tell the story of his trip in three volumes of nonfiction. The first two volumes are A Time Of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube and Between the Wind and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates. Unfortunately, Fermor died last year without publication of his third volume. However, his biographer, Artemis Cooper, reports that Fermor had completed a draft of the book and that it will be published.

Munich in 1929 was a city on the brink. Private armies representing every political faction marched and engaged in vicious street fights. Hitler and his Sturmabteilung [English translation is Stormtroopers] (SA), known as the Brownshirts, were on the rise, pushing the population ever closer to embracing Nazism. With Straight Into Darkness, Faye Kellerman, best known for her Pete Decker/Rina Lazarus series, drops us into this seething atmosphere, just as a serial killer of glamorous women tightens the city's tension to the breaking point. Her protagonist, homicide detective Axel Berg, is not a Nazi sympathizer, but he's no hero either.

Kellerman shows how the Nazis used these murders as fuel for their poisonous propaganda against their enemies, especially Jews. Munich's residents, still feeling the sting of their WWI defeat and living a precarious existence in an unstable and depressed economy, are only too ready to explode in an orgy of violence. Kellerman skillfully paints a picture of the conditions that helped nurture Nazism and pivotal moments in the Nazis' ascension to power.

In A Trace of Smoke, Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel is a crime reporter in 1931 Berlin when she learns that her beloved brother, Ernst, has been murdered. Ernst was a gay transvestite singer in one of Berlin's many nightclubs. As Hannah quietly investigates, she learns of Ernst's involvement with powerful members of Hitler's Brownshirts––who certainly don't want her nosing around their business. This novel's strength is its evocation of the seedy, dangerous atmosphere of Berlin as the Weimar era crumbles.

Cantrell's followup is A Night of Long Knives, set in 1934, after the Nazis have taken over and the rivalry between the SA's Brownshirts and the  Schutzstaffel [English translation is Defense Corps] (SS) comes to a head. And the third in the series is 2011's A Game of Lies, set at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin. While I enjoyed A Trace of Smoke, I've been disappointed by its successors. A Night of Long Knives was a ludicrously far-fetched chase thriller, while A Game of Lies read like a painful marriage of espionage and Harlequin romance. Cantrell consistently demonstrates that she has done her historical research, but I find Hannah Vogel's personal story mawkish and uninteresting. The series is popular, though, so don't go by me. Try it for yourself.

Jeffery Deaver, perhaps best known for his Lincoln Rhyme series that started with The Bone Collector, is also a prolific writer of nonseries books. In his 2004 book, Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936, Paul Schumann is a mob hitman who must make a deal with the government or be prosecuted for his crimes. The feds want to take advantage of Schumann's fluency with the German language (and as a rub-out artist) to throw a monkey wrench in Germany's remilitarization plans. Schumann's assignment is to eliminate Reinhard Ernst, the talented man responsible for Germany's rearmament program.

Schumann's cover for his trip to Germany is that he's a journalist going to Berlin for the Olympic Games. Schumann gets into trouble with a German agent immediately, and his local contact kills the agent. This brings police detective Willi Kohl into play, in addition to the Gestapo, and there follows quite a multiple-player cat-and-mouse game as Schumann attempts to complete his murderous assignment. Although the book suffers from uneven pacing and implausibility, and the way Deaver translates well-known German words into English is annoying and distracting (not to mention sometimes downright wrong), he manages to create good dramatic tension and has some nice insights into the characters of ordinary Germans and how they cope with lives radically changed under the menace of the Third Reich. Garden of Beasts won the 2004 Steel Dagger Award.

"Garden of Beasts" is a loose translation of "Tiergarten," Berlin's celebrated urban park. Erik Larson used the same translation for his recent book of nonfiction, In the Garden of Beasts. This stellar, novelistic book tells the story of college professor William Dodd, who acted as America's ambassador to Germany for several years from 1933, and his adult daughter, Martha, who came along to live in Berlin. Dodd found conditions under the Nazi fist far worse than he imagined, but was unable to get the hidebound foreign service to act. Meanwhile, Martha was having the time of her life, enthralled with the pageantry of the Stormtroopers and SS, believing in Hitler as the savior of Germany, and more than a little attracted to various Nazis. But Martha then began an affair with a Soviet NKVD agent and began to see the dark side of Nazism. Martha's infatuation with fascism, and then with communism, helps us see in one person the passionate believers each of these belief systems attracted and the collision course they were on throughout Europe in the 1930s.

Tiergarten

Reading Manning Coles's Tommy Hambledon espionage books can be a disconcerting experience. Several of the books were written before WW2 or at the beginning of the war; in other words, before the world knew the full horrors of Nazism. The Nazis in the prewar-written books can be a little like cartoon villains at times. But I hope you'll read A Toast to Tomorrow, about a man who awakes in a German military hospital with no memory and takes up a new life, becoming an insider in the Nazi party until the day in 1933 when he remembers that he's actually a British spy. Though it has its comic moments, it's a terrific peek into the duality of the life of a spy. A more serious look at the same subject is Manning Coles's first book, the unforgettable Drink to Yesterday, set at the end of World War I.

In Manning Coles's next book, They Tell No Tales, Tommy Hambledon is back in England after his adventures in A Toast to Tomorrow, and investigating the sabotage of ships sailing from Portsmouth. This book is set in 1938, after Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" Munich agreement with Hitler. Unlike Mr. Chamberlain, Tommy wasn't fooled by Hitler and knew that "our time" in peace was limited.

Manning Coles was a pseudonym for friends Adelaide Manning and Cyril Coles, the latter of whom was a longtime British intelligence officer who lived in Cologne for much of the between-the-war years. Rue Morgue Press has republished almost half of the Tommy Hambledon series and a couple of Manning Coles's nonseries books.

Spain was something of a dress rehearsal for what Germany would experience after the Nazi rise to power. Rebecca Pawel's four-book series, set in fascist Spain after the Spanish Civil War between the fascist Loyalists and the left-wing Republicans, features Carlos Alonso Tejada y León, an officer in the country's civil guard. War veteran Tejada is a true believer in fascism and a firm anti-Republican. Members of the civil guard, with their tricorn hats, are hated and feared by ordinary citizens––and with good reason. Tejada and his fellow guards are iron-fisted, with no interest in due process of the law.

In the first book in the series, Death of a Nationalist, set in 1939 Madrid, Tejada summarily executes a woman found next to the body of his murdered friend and colleague, but quickly realizes she was not his killer. He is compelled to try to find his friend's real murderer, but must also confront the devastation his killing of the woman has had on those who loved her. At the same time, one of them, her lover, is looking to avenge her death.

Pawel doesn't shy away from difficult realities in these books; from showing how a deeply-held political conviction and a black-and-white point of view can turn a man who is not a psycho or a monster into someone who believes he is doing a sacred duty when he brutalizes or even murders those who don't share his political viewpoint. But, somehow, Pawel manages to make Tejada into something of a sympathetic character. His development as a person and his growing recognition of shades of gray are helped along when he meets and falls in love with Elena Fernández, a schoolteacher who had been on the side of the Republicans in the Civil War.

The later books in the series, Law of Return, The Watcher in the Pine and The Summer Snow take place in the 1940s. All are recommended.

For a more light-hearted series about the Spanish Civil Guard (though set much later), try Delano Ames's four-volume series featuring Juan Llorca: The Man in the Tricorn Hat, The Man with Three Jaguars, The Man with Three Chins and The Man with Three Passports.

I have to admit that I haven't been much of a fan of Alan Furst's 1930s and World War II-era espionage books, though many consider him the preeminent novelist of World War II-era espionage. I value character development above all and have never felt a connection with his characters. However, I'm going to give him another try in June, when Mission to Paris is published.

Some of Furst's books set in the gathering storm era are: Night Soldiers is a book in which a Bulgarian boy becomes a Soviet agent after his father is murdered by fascists in 1934, and is sent by his spymasters to Spain during its civil war; Dark Star is set in 1937 and concerns a Soviet spy stationed in Paris; The Foreign Correspondent is set in 1938 Paris and tells the story of Italian anti-fascists living in the city; The Spies of Warsaw is about––guess what––spies in Warsaw in 1937; and the upcoming Mission to Paris will send an American film star to 1938 Paris to film a movie, but also to act as an agent of U.S. intelligence operating from the American embassy.

I've barely dipped my toe into Marek Krajewski's noir series set in between-the-wars Breslau, part of the Prussian province of Lower Silesia (now Wrocław, Poland). The series features Eberhard Mock, a dissolute and corrupt police detective who is at home in the city's decadent and seedy precincts. There are six books in the series, three currently available in English and another to come in August. The series begins with Death In Breslau.

Breslau is a particularly interesting setting for World War II buffs. In the between-the-wars period and during the war, its population was nearly all German and assimilated Jews, with just a tiny percentage of Poles. The city was a stronghold of Nazi sympathizers and almost as soon as the Nazis formally assumed power, the city's Poles and Jews were subject to official persecution. During the war, waves of refugees descended on the city from both the west and east. During the three-month siege by the Russians in 1945, nearly half the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of its residents killed. After the war, the city's ethnic Germans either fled or were forced out. Within just five years, the city's population became overwhelmingly Polish.

Timothy Snyder's nonfictional Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a stunning history of the nightmares visited on the people living in the lands between Russia and Germany. Supreme victims of geography, they were treated as disposable by both occupying authoritarian regimes, sacrificed in service to the ambitions of two madmen.

In his stellar Bernie Gunther series, Philip Kerr uses the smart-mouthed Berlin police-inspector-turned-private-detective to confront the reader with the moral dilemmas and impossible choices facing citizens of a country gone mad, where conventional morality has been subverted to serve a genocidally racist philosophy. Even those who hate the new regime are generally complicit in one way or another. Four books in the Bernie Gunther series are set, at least partially, in the 1930s:

The first book, March Violets, in set in 1936, a few years after Bernie has effectively been forced out of Berlin's Kriminalpolizei as a result of the Nazi takeover and the politicization of the police force. The second in the series, The Pale Criminal, is set two years later, when Bernie is forced by the Gestapo's Reinhard Heydrich to return to the Kripo to investigate the murders of teenage girls.

A Quiet Flame and If the Dead Rise Not are dual-narrative stories. One story takes place after the war, with Bernie having fled Germany after the war and living in South America (and, of course, getting into as much trouble there as he managed in Germany). The other narrative in A Quiet Flame takes us in flashbacks to 1932 Berlin, when Bernie was in the Kripo, investigating two murders that bear disturbing resemblance to murders happening in 1950 Argentina. In If the Dead Rise Not, the second narrative takes us back to 1934, after Bernie has been forced out of the Kripo and is a house detective at Berlin's famous Adlon Hotel.

The first two books in David Downing's John Russell series, Zoo Station and Silesian Station, take place in Berlin, just before Germany invades Poland in September, 1939. English journalist Russell has lived and worked in Berlin for 15 years. He hates the Nazis, but won't leave Berlin because it's the home of his son from his former marriage and his girlfriend, Effi. His personal life makes him vulnerable to pressure and persuasion from various intelligence services, and he finds himself playing the Russians, British, Americans and Germans off each other in an increasingly risky game.

In future posts about the World War II era, I plan to discuss espionage and crime fiction set in Europe, books set in the U.S. or featuring American protagonists, and books involving time travel or alternative history. I don't have plans to tackle books set in Japan or elsewhere in the Pacific Theater of Operations.

I can't hope to write a comprehensive summary of all the good World War II-era espionage and other crime fiction books, but I hope you'll let me know about other titles you'd recommend, starting here with the between-the-wars period. As we go along, with your help alerting me to other recommended titles, I'd like to develop a bibliography of WW2-era crime fiction.

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Note: Portions of this post are taken from book reviews posted on Amazon under my Amazon user name. I received a free review copy of Philip Kerr's Prague Fatale.