Metropolis

Metropolis
© 2019 Phillp Kerr
384 pages

At the height of Weimar decadence, young Bernie Gunther is invited to join the Murder Commission. It’s a step up from Vice, and the department needs every watchful eye and quick wit it can get:  the city’s prostitutes and disabled veterans are both being methodically hunted and shot.   With the usual avenues of  investigation producing nothing,  Bernie takes to the streets as a legless victim of the Somme, hoping  he’ll hear words from a little closer to the ground – and from sources who wouldn’t go near the police.    Although this is the last Bernie Gunther novel (his creator having passed just over a year ago),  it’s also a prequel of a kind:  this Bernie still carries  a lot of  bruised, youthful naitive with him: he’s not the cool, jaded detective of the forties and fifties,  and it’s this case that will make him a little more weary of the world.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Kerr’s Gunther novels, I stopped reading them four years ago on the grounds that they were far too depressing.    Gunther’s report from his case in The Lady of Zagreb, for instance, was so gruesome that even Goebbels was unnerved by it.  Metropolis, despite its scalpings and cold-blooded murders, is not quite as morbid as the rest – although it’s definitely shaking for young Bernie, whose sub rosa inquiries take him into a bar popular with some of the most depraved souls in Berlin – and that’s saying something, given that Weimar Berlin  has become popular for the kind of sex tourism that now favors Thailand.    And yet there’s light in the darkness, as  Gunther finds a reason for climbing out of the bottle (he drinks like a Raymond Chandler lead at the beginning).

Like most of Kerr’s novels, Metropolis is not a piece to comfort the soul with warm fuzzies. It’s often disturbing, but the dark humor is here, too, and Kerr’s skillful pen makes even the grim go down sweet.

The Grid

The Grid
© 1995 Phillip Kerr
447 pages

Some modern architecture might make you want to kill yourself. Other modern architecture might try to kill you directly. The Yu Corporation's newest project in Los Angeles, derisively called "The Gridiron" by everyone except for its starchitect, is an example of the latter. The Grid is the pinnacle of not only the kind of architectural brilliance it takes to make viewers wish fervently for a good disaster to remove the eyesore, but of integrated computer technology. It is the world's first wholly "smart" building, in which every supporting system of the building -- even the physical structure of the building itself -- is controlled by a computer. It is a technocrat's greatest hope: people can't even use the elevators or enter doors without being authorized by the computer as having legitimate business within the building. And if they try to attend to their own 'personal' business -- using the restroom, for instance -- their leavings are automatically scrutinized, subjected to not only a drug test but health screenings. A system this complex is bound to go wrong, and it does: with less than a week to go before the grand opening, people start dying. At first it seems like a rash of bad accidents, but then the characters realize the building itself is trying to kill them -- but why? Did a deranged ex-employee sabotage its programming, or has it developed intelligence and decided to remove its internal carbon-unit infestation?

For someone accustomed to Kerr's historical mysteries set in Germany, this is startling different work. In terms of literary craftsmanship, Kerr has grown by leaps and bounds since penning this. Much of the dialogue is forced, like canned lines from a television show. The increasing tension itself carries the novel forward, as the true source behind the mysterious deaths is revealed. Of interest to modern readers is the technology, which -- astonishingly -- within our grasp if not already achieved today. No one can read this today without thinking of the rising "internet of things", although we have more to fear from outside sources hijacking those devices and using them against us than we have of our house trying to kill us. Readers from the 1990s may remember the Sandra Bullock movie, The Net: at times, the book has that feel, of the building being an entity that can do anything -- even interfacing with a police department's internal network and suspending two officers to keep them trapped in the building -- and the futurism has the occasional short-sighted pockmark, like the fact that people use film cameras despite living in a world of holograms. The increasingly frequent trips inside the 'building's brain grew tedious because of their weirdness, but on the whole I enjoyed this. It's not stellar, but still topical. Too bad Kerr has never tried to revisit techno-thrillers -- I'd like to see what a more experienced hand produces.

Related:
The Fear Index, Robert Harris

The Lady from Zagreb

The Lady from Zagreb
© 2015 Phillip Kerr
432 pages

            Bernie Gunther was an ordinary police detective in wild, wonderful Weimar until Germany’s economy collapsed and fringe parties swept into power. His police department absorbed by the SS, he wears the uniform of a party and of an ideology he loathes – and does a poor job of even pretending to tolerate. His antipathy for the Party makes a man of Bernie’s talents a useful tool, however, at least to Joseph Goebbels. With no career prospects or political ambition, the detective can be hired for a little bit of innocent work that the master of deceit would prefer to keep concealed from his rivals in evil miniondom, like Himmler.  For instance, Goebbels has his eye on a certain starlet who is waffling on cinema as a career prospect, despite being a Siren-like beauty who is sure to become the continent’s most popular actress.  Officially, of course, the chief of propaganda wants to keep her engaged making films to glorify the fatherland,  but he also has more intimate engagements in mind – the kind that married men have no business in making.   The problem is that the poor dear is distracted by her long-missing father, lost in war-torn Yugoslavia. What he’d like for Gunther to do is pop down to the most hellish place in Europe short of Auschwitz for a spell, find dear old dad, and then report back to Berlin.

Nothing is ever so simple, of course. Gunther has already encountered some soul-harrowing scenes since the Nazis took power in 1933;  he has seen massacres on both the Soviet and Nazi sides of the battle-lines, and  been exposed to the Final Solution in action.  Yugoslavia, however, is a bloodbath to be endured only with the native whiskey,:Gunther’s report makes even Goebbels blanch at the horror of it.  There,  the princes of hell on earth decorate their strongholds with skulls on pikes, and photographs of executions, like something out of a nightmare.  The usual psychological defenses – sarcasm, booze, and cigarettes – don’t quite do the trick. To survive, Gunther counterattacks: he falls in love. If the hormone rush from becoming infatuated with Germany's foremost sex symbol doesn't do the trick, then perhaps the thrill of chasing a girl who is not only married, but a mistress-potential for one of the most powerful men in the reich will.  Eventually the action moves to Switzerland,  where Americans mistake Gunther for a German general and hilarity ensues. Amid even more death, however, the piece of a puzzle which has lingered on Gunther's mind for a year finally falls into place.

The Lady from Zagreb is a very well-done detective novel,  putting its wartime Europe setting to good effect and linking several mysteries together. The humor is biting, as ever;  on learning that a fellow officer is writing yet another novel, Gunther comments that there will always be room in Germany for more novels, provided his countrymen keep burning them. In an early scene, a man is literally killed by Hitler; a bust of Adolf is used  as a bludgeon. Against the backdrop of both the Holocaust and the obscene carnage of Yugoslavia, however, even that humor fails to prevent this from being an utterly distressing novel, set in a land of desecration and filled with horror and manipulation. Not even Gunther's relationship with Dalia is free from the cloud of horror, unsurprising given Goebbels' close presence.  Certainly there's no fault in creativity or research; the book is littered with odd little details that must have been strange research finds, like a U-boat parked on the autobahn; one of Gunther's escapes is especially captivating.  As thrilling as it is, Zagreb is more than touch dispiriting on the whole, however.

If the Dead Rise Not

If the Dead Rise Not
© 2011 Phillip Kerr
464 pages

            Bernie Gunther would be your standard-issue world-weary detective were it not for the fact that he just killed a Nazi.  Gunther has no love for the Nazis, who took power in his beloved Germany a year ago, and have in the year 1934 managed to reduce it to a joyless place for those who enjoy fast talk and loose women. Gunther is especially fond of both. Having quit his position in the police department to avoid having to fuss with the cretins in power, Gunther became the house detective of Berlin’s grandest hotel.  As it turns out, however, he has by no means removed himself from danger, and when an obnoxious American gangster claims a Ming dynasty artifact was stolen from his room, Gunther meets a man whose schemes will see the wisecracking detective arrested, and hauled out into the open ocean to be killed.  Though the man Max Reles appears to be a boorish businessman with a few shady operations, in actuality he’s in bed with Hitler – or intent on making der Fuhrer his purse. The political intrigue doesn't stop with Hitler, as the last fifth of the novel takes place in pre-revolutionary Cuba. The odd coupling of time and place that also appeared in Field Grey works here as well. If the Dead Rise Not is in turns disturbing and spectacularly funny;  one of the reasons Gunther can’t avoid trouble is his tendency to shoot off his mouth, and the book features a rolling barrage of one-liners, mostly taking shots at the Nazis. There are the usual thrills, of course – chase scenes, murders, numerous points wherein he seems well and truly doomed – and the obligatory twist and turn of the plot. Disturbing comes with all of the characters tendency to live in moral grey ares; the villain, who by actions ought to be detested, is one of the most entertaining men to read. Even Bernie, for whom he is a principle villain, can’t help but be tempted by liking him.  Happily,  everyone reaps what they sow, and eventually Reles meets the usual end of people who work with those like Meyer Lanksy.

Quotations

"A Nazi is someone who follows Hitler. To be anti-Nazi is to listen to what he says." p. 70

"German history is nothing more than a series of ridiculous mustaches."  p. 73

"These days a considerate German is someone who doesn't knock on your door early in the morning in case you think it's the Gestapo." p. 86

"A German is a man who manages to overcome his worst prejudices. A Nazi is a man who turns them into laws." p. 88

Hitler's Peace

Hitler's Peace
© 2006 Phillip Kerr
464 pages

Willard Mayer has the strangest luck. How many people get to dine with FDR, talk about the worries of life with Winston Churchill, annoy Joseph Stalin, and shake hands with Adolf Hitler? And this after they've  been arrested several times for espionage given a string of bodies trailing behind them. Mayer's no murderer or spy, even if once in his impressionable youth he was a member of the Communist party and passed information to the Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD.  The year is 1943, and Mayer is a philosopher-turned-OSS agent who is accompanying FDR to an ultra top-secret conference as a German translator/intelligence strategist. The confidential conference in Tehran -- the one so concealed that everyone and their twitchy uncle knows about - is the first coming together of the Big Three: FDR,Churchill, and Stalin. But more will happen there than will ever be publicly known, for while some Germans are planning the assassinations  of the allied trio, others intend to entice them into an early peace.

Hitler's Peace is exciting from beginning to end, a bit of historical fiction that occupies a grey area between historical and alternate fiction. Although history is fundamentally unchanged, Kerr's plot explores facts considered odd and provides a highly speculative explanation. Truth is stranger than fiction, however; I was astonished to learn that some events within the novel which strained credibility actually occurred, like the string of calamities that beset the Willie D. Porter, one of the ships escorting FDR to the conference. Within hours, the ship backed into and destroyed another ship, saw a man vanish into the sea, blew a boiler, dropped a depth charge, and just for good measure, fired a torpedo directly at FDR's ship. "She's not what you would call a lucky ship", the baffled president noted shortly before ordering the ship to detach itself from the convoy and deliver its crew for total arrest at the nearest port.  The cast of characters is largely German (Mayer is the son of German immigrants),which is a refreshing change.  They're all antagonists who are neither sympathetic nor overtly villainous; the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity are not ignored, but neither are those of the Russians, and the revelation of several Soviet slaughters features as a plot point. The novel plays fast and loose with history, but touches on aspects of the war largely ignored (Soviet war crimes, for instance, or "Operation Long Jump"). I found it entertaining, though Mayer is only marginally more sympathetic than the book's 'baddies'.

Field Grey

Field Grey
© 2011 Phillip Kerr
384 pages

Bernie Gunther survived Hitler's Germany and a Soviet prison camp, so when he's forcefully detained by the American  Navy on the open seas and interrogated, he's not too much impressed by their attempt at viciousness. Sure,  he had the bad luck to be traveling with an attractive lady who happened to be wanted by the American government for assassinating a cop in Cuba and fomenting revolution, but he's had worse luck.  Back in the 1930s, he once saved the life of another cop killer who is now one of the most powerful men behind the Iron Curtain: Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi. Did I mention Gunther is a detective who actually doesn't like cop-killers?  The US Navy would like to know why Gunther was running around the Caribbean with an assassin and a lot of money -- and the Central Intelligence Agency is even more curious as to his association with the head of the Stasi.  Mockingly thrown into the very prison cell that housed Adolf Hitler, the man who destroyed his country and whom he hated, Gunther is made to tell his own story.

 Field Grey is a tangled political thriller set in  Germany as Hitler came to power and drove it to ruin, but set also in the Germany of the Cold War: a Germany divided by the victorious allies, now scheming against one another in equal measure.  Bernie Gunther is no Nazi, but neither is he a good communist or a reconstructed German: he's a proud, jaded Berliner, and the story he tells is one calculated to guard his most precious secrets from the treacherously friendly Amis.  Field Grey impresses with its pacing; the plot moves forward steadily with a few bends here and there until a hairpin at the end: it doesn't rely on confusing the reader to thrill. Although Gunther is your standard-issue world-weary cynical detective, he has a wicked sense of humor which he uses to good effect to irk enemies and allies alike.  Despite technically being a member of the SS (which absorbed criminal investigations), he's sympathetic yet realistic:  not a Nazi, but not a knight in shining armor, either.  Field Grey is one of numerous Gunther novels by Phillips Kerr, which I selected to read first because it ranged through so many years.  It will not be the last! Look for this if you've an interest in detective mysteries, historical fiction, and Cold War intrigue.

Oh!  And there's romance, naturally. Can't have a detective story without beautiful women..

Related:

• Fatherland, Robert Harris. Likewise a detective novel with a German lead,  this work is also one of alternate history, for it's set in a Europe where Hitler is celebrating his 70th birthday,  presiding in triumph over Europe and a broken Russia, hoping to reach detente with the Americans. Unfortunately for him,  a murder investigation leads to the facts of the Holocaust being unearthed.
• Garden of Beasts, Jeffery Deaver.  Gunther is a proud Berliner, claiming the city as his more readily than anything else, and Beasts is set in 1933 Berlin.  An American reporter shows up during the Olympics and realizes that Hitler is up to something other than building highways.