Berlin Noir: March Violets; The Pale Criminal; A German Requiem | Philip Kerr

Berlin Noir: March Violets; The Pale Criminal; A German Requiem | Philip Kerr | Simply Fantastic

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Berlin Noir: March...

	Berlin Noir: March Violets; The Pale Criminal; A German Requiem Philip Kerr Penguin (Non-Classics), 1994 - 848 pages average customer review:based on 61 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Now published in one paperback volume, these three mysteries are exciting and insightful looks at life inside Nazi Germany -- richer and more readable than most histories of the period. We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines. (For a review of Kerr's latest novel, The Grid, see our Thrillers section.)

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Nazi Germany crime noir

What a fertile setting for some great crime noir drama. Germany at that time was being seduced by Nazi nationalism and we get a sense of the people's different reaction to this period of history. Our guide is a hard boiled ex-cop private eye who knows the ins and outs of the landscape. I recommend this series.

Simply Fantastic

I enjoy reading historical fiction, and from all the positive reviews of the book I gave it a shot even though I don't normally read detective stories. The first few pages read almost like a cliche detective story and I was afraid I made a mistake in purchasing. My doubts were quickly erased as the story unveiled a well written book with fantastic characters and gripping plots. Kerr really opened my eyes to how life was for non-nazis in germany and the historical aspects of the book were a great learning experience. How the three books are setup to be pre-war, during the war and post-war was fascinating as well, you really get a well rounded sense of the times.

Overall, amazing read and I personally look forward to re-reading this sometime in the future. Kerr has certainly made a fan of me.

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Great read

This is the best book around. I've recommended it to all my friends and they love it too. It takes the hard-nosed PI thriller and turns it 360 degrees. If Raymond Chandler was a German in WWII, this is what he would have written. Buy this book, read it, and be thoroughly entertained.

Good, but hmmm...

Berlin Noir is made of three books that have the same "hero", Komissar Bernhard Gunter. The title is a little bit missleading, for the last book is staged in Vienna.

"March Violets" is the best of the three. Bernie is here cynical and a delight to read about. The plot is typical for a "noir" story. For some reason, Kerr is killing everyone in the story one after the other, using deaths to tie lose strings of the story. I would wish for the writer to rethink this method that is making the story a little bit shallow.

"The Pale Criminal" is a bit dissapointing. It reads like Kerr wrote the book in mid'30s German (Berlin) slang and then "tried" to translate it to everyday english. In this case Kerr should keep the original German Slang words (and don't translate "nagel" to "nail"). A very typical whodunnit with nothing much of twists and turns. And at the end all that SS related stuff doesn't help the story at all.

"A German Requiem" is more a spy novel than a noir story. It has spies, girls, even casinos. The vodka is cold and straight. The only line missing is "my name is Gunter, Bernhard Gunter". The story starts in Berlin but very soon moves to Vienna. It moves from a murder investigation to a spy story, where you cannot trust anyone and everyone is corrupted. All that "bad commies vs good amis using some nazis" is just bad propaganda.

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too much of a good thing

How many metaphors can you cram into a single sentence? Read this book to find out. How many Berlin street names do you really need to know? NOT this many. The atmosphere of prewar Berlin under the Nazis rings true, but the story is as far fetched as the character. It IS good enough to keep you reading to the end, but that's about all.

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