Writers, especially lady writers from New York, were thin on the ground at the Adlon that month. It probably had a lot to do with the fifteen-mark-a-night room rate. This was slightly cheaper if you didn’t have a bath, and a lot of writers don’t, but the last American writer who’d stayed at the Adlon had been Sinclair Lewis, and that was in 1930. The Depression hit everyone, of course. But no one gets depressed quite like a writer.

Such delightful passages as this show up pretty regularly in Philip Kerr’s novels, and (in my opinion) If the Dead Rise Not offers more than the average. I liked it. A lot. Not only for the writing, and the fascinating narrator, soul-weary German detective Bernie Gunther, but for something else I think I detect in the text. A spiritual element.
Of course I have to be cautious in saying that. I knew a man once who saw God, not only in every leaf and flower, but in every book he read and movie he saw. All the writers, he was convinced, must be Christians, because he saw Christian messages in all their stories, and it wasn’t possible they’d meant something else altogether and he’d taken it wrong.
But still there’s something here… I think.
If the Dead Rise Not is a two-part story, beginning with a long narrative (more than half the book) set in Berlin in 1934, when Bernie is house detective in the luxurious Adlon Hotel. He discovers a guest dead in a room, with indications that he’d died in… embarrassing circumstances. In the course of his investigations he agrees to help a sympathetic police detective in the (secret) investigation of the death of a Jewish worker who’d been laboring (illegally) on the facilities for the 1936 Olympic Games. He also investigates the theft of a valuable Chinese box from the room of an American gangster, and he meets (and falls in love with) a glamorous American writer, Noreen Charalambides.
Noreen is a very intriguing creation, as fairly obvious hints make it clear she’s based on Lillian Hellman, who was Dashiell Hammet’s long-time lover (though Hellman was never nearly as beautiful as Noreen is described to be). This gives him an excuse for the occasional homage to Hammet, like this speech of Bernie’s to Noreen:

“You talk about the truth like it means something. But when you throw the truth in my face, it’s just a couple of handfuls of sand. It’s not the truth at all. Not the truth I want to hear, anyway. Not from you. So let’s not fool ourselves, eh? I won’t play the sucker for you, Noreen. Not until you’re prepared to stop treating me like one.”

The second part of the story finds Bernie in 1954 Havana, where he has relocated after his expulsion from Argentina at the end of A Quiet Flame. Bernie is living an idler’s life, negotiating (under an assumed name) to be a cigar company representative in Berlin, which would allow him to go home at last. By chance, he runs into Noreen Charalambides again. She is staying at Ernest Hemingway’s house, and she asks him to come to a dinner party there. She explains, after some delays, that she has an adult daughter who is dating, of all people, the same gangster Bernie met at the Adlon Hotel in 1934. She wants Bernie to try to find a way to convince the girl she’s making a huge mistake. He ends up taking a job with the mobster, managing his Havana hotel and casino. Then murders happen, and Batista’s police get involved.
I have to admit I figured out whodunnit, but frankly I don’t care. I don’t read mysteries for the puzzles. I read them for the striptease that reveals human character, the forensics performed on the problem of evil. Bernie, who confronts (much against his will) both Nazis and Communists, along with garden variety malefactors of all kinds over the course of his career, offers a more eclectic education in crime than the average private eye. And in the hands of a writer like Kerr, the stories ascend the heights of the genre.
But there’s one thing more, the matter I mentioned near the beginning of this review. Bernie was never a Nazi (though he was dragooned into joining the SS), and he never committed a serious atrocity by World War II standards. But he has plenty on his conscience, and he does not spare himself. The very end of this story has Bernie thinking seriously, and sadly, about questions of redemption, damnation, and resurrection of the dead.
I make no assertions about author Philip Kerr’s beliefs. I’m just saying he’s asking the right questions.