I was looking for an excuse to buy more of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther books. The acquisition of a Kindle provided it. Glad I did, though The One from the Other
The Bernie Gunther novels, in case you’re not familiar with them, are classic Hardboiled mysteries in the Raymond Chandler tradition, except that they’re set in Germany, beginning in the 1930s. Bernie, the hero, is a sometime policeman and sometime private detective, a decent man living a life of quiet desperation, trying to retain both his pulse and his integrity in an increasingly Kafkaesque environment. His success at the latter has been mixed, at best.
After a flashback prologue, The One From the Other opens in 1949. Bernie is attempting, with no success, to run a hotel in Dachau. After a strange encounter with an American CIA agent, he admits he’s in the wrong business and moves to Munich, to set up shop as a detective again. He moves his wife, who is institutionalized with clinical depression, to that city as well, where she soon dies.
He is hired by a beautiful woman to look for her husband, a fugitive war criminal. A Catholic, she wants to remarry and needs proof of his death. This sets Bernie on a convoluted trail that leads him to discover dead bodies, get beaten up and shot at, and lose a finger. Gradually a complex conspiracy is revealed, involving a secret organization of ex-Nazis, the CIA, and the Catholic Church.
Frankly, I thought Kerr leaned too much on plot clichés this time out. Sinister CIA and Roman Catholic conspiracies have been done to death, and have (frankly) gotten offensive. He might have tried to surprise us a little.
But all that is redeemed, for me, by the interesting character of Bernie Gunther and the remarkable hard-boiled prose, such as this:
Starnberg itself was a smallish town built in terraces at the north end of the Würmsee…. The sapphire blue water was studded with yachts that shone like diamonds in the morning sunlight. It was overlooked by the ancient castle of the dukes of Bavaria. “Scenic” hardly covered it. After only a minute of looking at Starnberg, I wanted to lift the lid and eat the strawberry crème.
As I said, not the best Bernie, but an entertaining read nevertheless. Cautions for language and adult themes.
Tried to start reading this but found it very slow and hard to get into. Thumbs Down from me.