I have to tell you, this one hurts. Being sucker-punched by someone you trusted always smarts, and my great admiration for Philip Kerr’s writing makes my disappointment—I could have said feeling of betrayal—on reading Field Gray all the more painful.

Kerr’s continuing character, World War II era Berlin-based detective/cop/soldier Bernie Gunther, is a splendid literary achievement. He’s a relatively decent man in an insanely indecent situation. He tries to do what he sees as right, but is constantly undercut by history. He’s Philip Marlowe on a meaner street, facing challenges Raymond Chandler knew nothing of.

He hates the Nazis and the Communists equally, he informs us. That suited me just fine. But what I didn’t realize (though I should have guessed from heavy hints in the last novel, The One From the Other) is that there’s one group he hates even more.

The Americans.

You see, the Americans have committed unforgivable crimes. They eat too much. They think they won the war. They see the world in black and white. They don’t always live up to their principles, which makes them hypocrites, and thus far worse than mere mass murderers. They treated Bernie real mean, arresting him in Cuba at the beginning of this book, beating him up (under the impression he was a fugitive war criminal), and imprisoning him for a while at Guantanamo (GUANTANAMO!!!!!), where it was hot and there were mosquitoes. Compared to that his treatment by the Communists, who merely put him in a death camp, mining radioactive pitchblende, obviously pales.

There is one passing reference to the Berlin Airlift in this novel. Bernie brushes it aside. Obviously the Americans did it “for themselves.”

And so he chooses a Communist agent, a murderer who has tried to murder Bernie himself in the past, over a group of American agents who have done him no harm at all. Because they’re just “Amis,” while a German, you know, is a German. Apparently it comes down to “Deutschland über alles” after all.

I’m sure Philip Kerr doesn’t want any of my filthy American money, and he may rest assured I won’t spend any more on his books.

Field Gray is a superbly written novel that I do not recommend at all.

Those of us who read both secular and Christian fiction tend to employ a double standard. There’s a full-out “excellent” category in the secular field, and then there’s “excellent for Christian fiction,” which is understood to be not quite as good as the secular stuff, but better than the average CBA fare.

(As a corollary, I find that I also have a counterbalancing prejudice. When I encounter really good Christian fiction, I think I sometimes depreciate it a little, just out of defensive critical snobbery. Something I need to watch out for. I may have done it with this book.)

J. Mark Bertrand, in his first police procedural novel, Back on Murder, shows himself qualified for a place on the shelf alongside successful mystery writers in the secular market. Perhaps not up in the highest rank (at least yet), but definitely big league.

The hero of Back On Murder is Roland March, a Houston police detective near the bottom of his profession. Once he was a star, the cop who solved a dramatic case that got turned into a best-selling book. But a personal tragedy took the heart out of him. Now he’s a time-server, the “suicide cop”–the cop who gets stuck with the unenviable job of investigating when other officers kill themselves. He’s the subject of pity and derision at headquarters. His marriage is strained.

But at the beginning of this story he finds himself, uncharacteristically, at a crime scene, a house where several gang members have been shot to death. By accident, he notices a detail that changes the whole investigation—someone has been tied to the bed in the house, and that someone is not there anymore. Suddenly March is “back on homicide,” and energized by an investigation for the first time in years. Then he’s transferred to a task force investigating the high-profile disappearance of a teenage girl. He’s disappointed until he grows convinced that the two cases are linked—the missing person on the bed, he believes, was that girl. Working with an attractive female missing persons cop, he enters the unfamiliar world of the girl’s church and faith life, puzzling like an anthropologist over the odd customs and mores of these bizarre evangelicals. Continue reading Back On Murder, by J. Mark Bertrand →

Will this book have the same visceral effect on other readers as it does on me? Perhaps not to the same extent.

Altamont Augie is, in the first place, a book about my own coming of age years—the late ʹ60s. The main characters are about four years older than me.

On top of that, the bulk of the action takes place on my home turf—Minneapolis and its environs. Mostly the University of Minnesota, where I did not attend, but visited often. I could easily have bumped elbows with these people. The main female character comes from the suburb of Robbinsdale, my present home.

The somewhat confusing title of the book is a double reference. “Altamont” means the Altamont Free Concert at Altamont Speedway in northern California in 1969, where four people died in the terminal delirium of the Woodstock Era. One of those dead remains unidentified to this day—a young man who climbed a fence and jumped into an aqueduct where he drowned.

“Altamont Augie” is the speculative name hung on that unfortunate man by the novel’s fictional narrator, a young Californian named Caleb Levy. It’s a reference to Saul Bellow’s novel, The Adventures of Augie March. Continue reading Altamont Augie, by Richard Barager →

When writing a review of Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, it’s almost obligatory to quote the first line, often considered one of the best in English literature:

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.

(I added the second line as a bonus, because I’m in a generous mood.)

Rafael Sabatini is chiefly remembered today as the author of Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, which had the good fortune to be turned into classic movies starring Errol Flynn. Scaramouche has been filmed twice, once as a silent with Ramon Navarro, and once in sound and technicolor with Stewart Granger. Granger isn’t quite up to Flynn’s standards as a swashbuckler, and the film is pretty radically telescoped from the book’s plot, but I understand it’s not bad. Haven’t seen it myself in a while.

“Scaramouche” is not the hero’s real name, but the name he takes on when he joins a traveling comedy troupe. Stage comedy in those days, only slightly evolved from the Italian Commedia del Arte, was kind of like a TV situation comedy, if there were many networks and they all broadcast the same series, just with different casts playing the roles. The stock characters, recycled from plot to plot, became familiar types. We still speak of Harlequin and Pantaloon today, and occasionally you may even dig up a reference to Peirrot and Columbine. Scaramouche was another such character, a shifty, black-clad figure who was constantly devising plots and conspiracies. The trick of this novel (and Sabatini carries it off very well) is that his hero, Andre-Louis Moreau of Brittany, is a Scaramouche in real life as well as on stage. And the book’s plot is clearly based on a standard comedy plot of the time. Even the climax is technically right out of the Comedie Francais, except that it’s handled with far greater restraint and ambiguity.

Andre-Louis becomes an actor in order to hide from the law, after he delivers a revolutionary speech in the city of Nantes which (to his own surprise) becomes one of the sparks that sets off the French Revolution. He gives the speech, not because he’s a revolutionary himself, but as a sort of tribute to a friend who has just been murdered in duel by a nobleman, the arrogant Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr. Andre-Louis has vowed to promote his friend’s ideas and to kill the Marquis.

He finds that he has a natural gift for acting, and before long becomes not only the star, but the business manager, of the theater company. But a disappointing romantic interlude with the other manager’s daughter, plus a further brush with the Marquis de la Tour d’Azyr, causes him to leave the theater and become a fencing master’s assistant. Eventually, once he has perfected his swordsmanship, he goes into politics, sitting on the left side of the National Assembly, in order to get his final revenge on his mortal enemy.

The whole thing is rather preposterous, in the best tradition of the picaresque novel, but Sabatini carries it off with great style. As old books are wont to do, Scaramouche starts a little slow, but the longer I read the more fascinated I grew. This is a classic adventure story, well worth re-discovering.

Recommended for anyone old enough to understand the grammar.