Berlin Noir: The First Three Bernie Gunther Novels

Philip Kerr is an excellent best-selling British author of over thirty books. He was born in 1956 and is the winner of the Historical Dagger Award. Twelve of his thirty books focus on Bernie Gunther, an ex-German-policeman who is now a private detective who needs to stay ahead of the Nazi SS and Gestapo. Berlin Noir is his most popular book. It has in it three of Bernie Gunther's first novels. The Bernie Gunther books contain good mysteries that occur in Germany while the country is being managed by brutal Nazis. Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals disappear daily, including Bernie's love, a woman who is not Jewish, a gypsy, or lesbian. Jews are forced to sell their possessions for far less than their value in the hope to get enough money to escape Germany. Philip Kerr's latest book is Prussian Blue, his 12th Bernie Gunther thriller, published in 2017. There is a good four-page review of the Bernie Gunther books in the July 10 & 17, 2017 edition of The New Yorker.The first novel in Berlin Noir, for example, is called March Violets. It is 1936. In it Bernie is hired to find a very valuable neckless by the very rich father of a woman who was murdered together with her husband when the necklace was stolen. But things are not what they seem. More than a necklace was stolen. The rich man’s wife thinks Bernie was hired to find out who she is sleeping with and has sex with Bernie hoping to persuade him thereby to stop his investigation. During his investigation, several people are killed, and Bernie falls in love with a woman, who as I mentioned previously, disappears. Also, during the investigation, Bernie is forced by Hitler’s Prime Minister Hermann Goering to allow himself to be imprisoned in the Dachau Concentration Camp where he is to find an inmate who knows where certain papers are and force the prisoner to reveal where the papers are so that Goering can use them to blackmail people to do what he wants them to do.

I don't really provide any spoilers below, but I do talk about the thematic development over the course of the three novels. I don't want to spoil anyone's fun, so I'm warning you that I do reveal some plot developments below, but I don't describe how any of the novels end.I found all three novels interesting and absorbing. First, the negatives. It's noir fiction, and it suffers from the usual limitations of the genre. There has to be a hook, there has to be a twist, there has to be a femme fatale. There have to be gruesome, disguting murders. There have to be certain mannerisms that grow tiresome. The protagonist is constantly taking out two cigarettes and "lighting us both." He must smoke a thousand cartons in the course of the three novels. I found myself wincing toward the end of the third novel at such cliched scenes.It's also necessary to make the protagonist a strange character indeed. He was a police officer, and then an officer in the SS, and then defied the SS when he was ordered to participate in the Holocaust, and rather than facing execution, he was sent to a front-line combat in Russia. Then he managed to survive the fighting, conceal his identity as an SS officer during captitivy, survive the captitivy, and return home physically intact. All of that stretches the credulity. It was necessary; Kerr wants a protagonist who can take certain moral stands, and his experiences are involved in that. But it stretches the credulity.In spite of these limitations, the stories are engrossing on their own merits, and beyond that, I was fascinated to read the author's take on Germany before, during and after the war. I can't say how qualified he is to build a picture of that Germany (or those Germanys), but many things resonated with the other reading I've done in the past. The author's attention to detail is sometimes superb, and allows him to throw ironic contrasts against the noir genre. For instance, in the third novel, the hard-boiled detective has to shout instructions through his door to help a visitor get it open, because the building was damaged during the war. It's hard to imagine Humphrey Bogart yelling, "OK, you have to sort of push at the top, and then give it a kick at the bottom, and then I'll pull."As the stories progress, a certain theme emerges: Terrible things have been done in Germany, but morality and guilt are not always black and white. The behavior of the occupying powers after the war contradicts their sanctimonious judgments levelled against the German nation and German individuals.Some people will find that theme odious and annoying, and reject the books as a result. There were times when I myself found the protagonist's reasoning a bit skewed toward the range of "Everyone's guilty, so no one can judge anyone." In the third novel, he continues to insist that a former colleague, though admittedly guilty of unconscionable mass murder during the war, should nevertheless not be executed for a crime for which he has been framed. The author skewers the reader exquisitely. Do you believe in the rule of law, regardless? Or do you, much like the occupying powers, talk about the rule of law, and then hand out arbitrary judgments against people who clearly deserve punishment, but not for the crimes of which they stand accused? Should a mass murderer go free because the appropriate judicial evidence against him can't be found? Or should the desire for vengeance win out over judicial integrity?It's only toward the end of the third novel that all of this comes into sharp focus, and you realize that Kerr has been building his theme all along. These are by no means just noir fiction novels. He's constructed an elaborate moral dilemma that serves as an analogy for the war, post-war Germany, the occupation...and for the world today.