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

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Murder, politics and a very nice twist makes March Violets a very good start to a wonderful ride thru this dark part of history.

But the Berlin of Philip Kerr’s stories is a character in the books – a personality as complex and troubled as his private-investigator protagonist. The Pale Criminal finds Bernie back on the force in 1938 on the edge of war when Berlin experiences the mad spree of a serial killer. In the second chapter of A German Requiem, he’s riding the train back to Berlin from a trip to Potsdam. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.an investigation in which he finds himself exploring the crankier side of modern German medicine and psychotherapy. On a recent trip to the library, I saw that they were having a donated book sale - five for a dollar. But this series is full of humor, some of it quite ribald, much of it quite mordant, as you might expect, given that Bernie lives through some pretty ugly times.

For most novelists, the city where the action takes place is a backdrop or a stage set, nothing more than scenery. As a reader I was constantly being thrown out of the story by Kerr’s clumsy and overwrought metaphors. The title of this novel is a derogatory reference to people who decided to join the National Socialist Party right after Hitler had himself declared dictator by a vote in the Reichstag in late March 1933 – often as a form of profiteering. Bernhard Gunther, ex-cop, now a private detective mostly finds missing persons and there are lot of them in Nazi's Berlin.Like a damsel in distress, she enlists Bernie’s aid first with her errant but beautiful 19-year-old daughter Dinah, later with her boyfriend Alfredo Lopez, a dissident lawyer who runs afoul of Batista’s police. I could think of lots of things that made you free, but work wasn't one of them: after five minutes in Dachau, death seemed a better bet. And even after the war, amidst the decayed, imperial splendour of Vienna, Bernie uncovered a legacy that made the wartime atrocities look lily-white in comparison. Vincent van Gogh wasn’t the only fellow who could make that kind of heady, romantic sacrificial gesture. Over 10 years elapsed between the publication of the novels in the Berlin Noir set and the three stand-alone titles that complete the Bernie Gunther series to date.