In the fourth mystery in Philip Kerr’s New York Times bestselling series, Bernie Gunther—a former policeman and reluctant SS offier—attempts to start over in the aftermath of World War 2 and quickly learns that the past is never far behind you…Berlin, 1949. Amid the chaos of defeat, Germany is a place of dirty deals, rampant greed, and fleeing Nazis. For Bernie Gunther, Berlin has become far … Gunther, Berlin has become far too dangerous. After being forced to serve in the SS in the killing fields of Ukraine, Bernie has moved to Munich to reestablish himself as a private investigator.
Business is slow and his funds are dwindling when a woman hires him to investigate her husband’s disappearance. No, she doesn’t want him back—he’s a war criminal. She merely wants confirmation that he is dead. It’s a simple job, but in postwar Germany, nothing is simple—nothing is what it appears to be. Accepting the case, Bernie takes on far more than he’d bargained for, and before long, he is on the run, facing enemies from every side.
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Perhaps the only thing more noir than pre-war Nazi Germany is post-war Germany at the dawn of the Cold War. So it makes sense that ex-cop, ex-SS-member, and full-time cynic Bernie Gunther makes his return in this dark and cynical tale of war criminals, CIA agents, deception, murder, and historical whitewashing.
Gunther, a private investigator, has moved to the barely de-Nazified Munich of 1949 to scratch out a living chasing down missing people. There are still millions of vanished people four years after the end of WWII — some gone through circumstance, others by plan. When a pretty young frau enlists Gunther to make sure her Nazi-war-criminal husband is really dead, he thinks little of it. Of course, he discovers that nothing is as it seems.
The strengths that Kerr demonstrated in Berlin Noir are repeated here: his Furstian command of setting, the sights and sounds of a city chaotically rebuilding, the streetcar system, the newspapers, the flash and sizzle of the occupying Americans, the veiled brooding of the defeated Germans. Gunther inhabits Munich in the same way he inhabited Berlin, with knowing references to the districts and landmarks, the streets and bars and brothels. It’s all atmosphere all the time. The wised-up dialog remains as crisp as a new Deutschmark, full of period slang and sounding just so coming out of 1949 mouths. It also captures the coded language once used to slip past the Nazis and now turned against the occupiers. The plot ably keeps the twists and turns coming (though some aren’t as opaque as the author likely intended).
In this story, Gunther is even more obviously the German edition of Marlowe. His world-weariness and drollery is interchangeable with Chandler’s smart-assed, cynical private dick; if you switched characters in midstream, it might be a while before the readers notice. He insists on provoking people who can do him serious harm and ends up paying the price for it over and over, but it’s hard to sympathize. It’s once again a lost opportunity to show us how a P.I. might operate in a society that isn’t our own and in circumstances far different from those of 1940s Los Angeles.
In my review of Berlin Noir, I wished that Gunther would end up with a Nazi true-believer as a client so he’d have to deal with someone whose thinking was alien to him. I got my wish, in spades: Gunther is virtually wallowing in war criminals in this story. Don’t look for a good or admirable character here because there aren’t any, not even our hero. When they die (as many do, and that’s not a spoiler), we feel relief more than regret or outrage. We end up in Gunther’s corner mostly because he’s the least-bad figure in the story, not because we especially admire him or hope he wins.
If you come to this book after the Berlin Noir omnibus, you already know what you’ll get, plus some. If you don’t, go back to Berlin Noir and start from there; characters and events from the previous three novels come back to haunt Our Antihero in this one, just as the past keeps coming back to haunt Kerr’s Germany.
The One from the Other doubles down on the darkness and cynicism of the previous three installments, to its detriment. Its world is so black, corrupt and hopeless that it leaves the reader with hardly anyone to root for or much satisfaction in its resolution. For the story alone I’d give it 3.5 stars, but the virtuosity of the prose hoists it up half a star.
This noir tale took a while to warm up, but I’m loath to give up on a book once I start, and in this case, at least, it paid off. Enjoyable in an unexpected way. Like all good noir detectives, the protagonist is a grouchy fellow: battered by life but determined to wear his bruises with something approaching pride.
It takes time to get to know people worth knowing, and this book will repay your investment in full.
With vacation on the way I quickly got the fourth novel of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series to read on the plane. I hadn’t intended on finishing it so soon but my plane got a two hour delay so along with an almost two hour plan ride I was able to finish it with no problem. It’s 1949 and Bernie is living in Munich with his wife Kirsten (yes they are still married). However, Kirsten had been hospitalized due to being depressed following the death of her father, who left them with an inn just a few miles away from Dachu concentration camp. Not an ideal vacation spot. Bernie has grown weary of the hotel business and sells the place to return to being a private investigator. He soon is recruited by a young Catholic woman who’s husband, Friedrich, is a notorious war criminal. He operated a concentration camp and tortured many Jewish inmates. Since the war is over Friedrich has ditched the city and his wife can’t find him. She wants to remarry but the Catholic Church won’t allow her to remarry unless she has proof her old husband is dead. Soon Bernie begins to suspect something is not right with this case and it only becomes worse when he befriends two peculiar doctors. Soon things turn to the worst. Like the book before (“A German Requiem”) this book was average but again it wasn’t as good as the second novel (“The Pale Criminal”). Bernie is still fantastic and the book had some interesting points but i didn’t like the ending and it left me wanting more. Now it’s time to move onto the fifth novel. Here’s hoping the next the novel will return to the second novel’s glory.