I’ve briefly mentioned already that these novels are written in the first person, entirely from Bernie’s point of view. Yes, although A Quiet Flame ends with our hero bound for Uruguay, he didn’t tarry long there, but instead washed up on the shores of Cuba, during the time when that island nation was ruled by the dictator Fulgencio Batista in cahoots with several members of the American Mafia. Before this novel ends, Bernie gets the crap beat out of him by people in the employ of Heinrich Muller, a Gestapo leader who disappeared after the Fall of Berlin. The idea of a 'gumshoe' in (and before and after) the Nazi era seemed a bit odd, but the more I read, the more I adapted to the style and the idea and by the end of the 3rd book, I was in.

This one struck up with The Great Elector’s Cavalry March and set off at a lick towards the Brandenburger Tor.The Bernie Gunther novels are first-class, as stylish as Chandler and as emotionally resonant as the best of Ross Macdonald.

However, I work with a woman who likes this sort of thing and I keep my eye open for books to recommend or get for Xmas gifts. But then he went freelance, and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi sub-culture. I stuck with it for more than a hundred pages but in the end, I wasn’t interested enough to continue.

As head of Kripo, the Gestapo, and the SD (the Security Police), Reinhard Heydrich was Arthur’s immediate supervisor and a man who had distinguished himself by his ruthless suppression of all dissent during the 1936 Summer Olympics. Noreen wants to investigate the debate that followed the decision of the International Olympic Committee to hold the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Once you are already familiar with the noir genre and Nazi-era Germany, the two books which follow March Violets can offer you no real new insight. Since the late eighties, Philip Kerr had been redefining crime fiction with his justly-lauded Bernie Gunther sequence.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Because of course the Argentines have a complete file on Bernie, so they know who he really is and what he’s done (or what someone thinks he’s done) that brought him to South America under an assumed name. There wasn't much light apart from the coachlamp by the front door, but as far as I could see the house was… as big as a decent-sized hotel of the sort that I couldn't afford. I would be more interested in a non-fiction work that examined how the feelings of Germans toward the Party evolved in the run up to the war. When an enigmatic Russian colonel asks Bernie Gunther to go to Vienna, where his ex-Kripo colleague Emil Becker faces a murder charge, Bernie doesn't hesitate for long.Kerr's private detective Gunther is to World War II Berlin what Martin Cruz Smith's Inspector Arkady Renko is to post-Soviet Moscow -- broody antiheroes whose ethics and personal loyalties forever place them at odds with the me-first-morality of their respective environments.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. A serial sex murderer is killing Aryan teenage girls in Berlin - and what's worse, he's making utter fools of the police.He is only in Argentina for a few weeks when he receives an invitation from the head of President Peron’s secret police to investigate a murder that looks a lot like two unsolved murders he investigated back in Berlin in (when else but? And following several trips to Germany - and a great deal of walking around mean streets of Berlin - his first novel, March Violets , was published in 1989 and introduced the world to the iconic tough-talking detective Bernie Gunther. Gunther is forced to accept a temporary post in Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich's state Security Service, with a team of men underneath him tasked purely with hunting the killer. We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.