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. Continue reading If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr →