Every time we’re afraid we’ve seen the last of Bernie Gunther, Philip Kerr comes through with another unnerving adventure for his morally conflicted hero. As you can tell from my description of the titles to date, one of the ongoing features of this series is the way Kerr shifts his attention around Bernie’s colorful biography! Occasionally he will foreshadow some event, suggesting that if he had known then what he came to know later he might have acted or spoken differently – but even in those instances he doesn’t reveal too much to the reader, leaving that lovely uncertainty as motivation for turning the page again and again. 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. I simply cannot read another noir cliché like, "Looking around the room, I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught.

One thing the books illustrate is the extent to which Nazism was a kleptocracy, in which anyone with a bit of power stole from stigmatized groups: Jews, of course, but really anyone who was not a staunch Nazi. uk/landing-page/quercus/quercus-company-information/">The data controller is Quercus Editions Ltd. Her hair, which she wore in a bun, was also sable-colored, and, I imagined, every bit as nice to stroke [as her sable coat].By the way, while Kerr has some interesting female characters, there is fair amount of objectivization in the great tradition of noir novels that women readers might take offense to. Any proximity to her pouting, cherry-red Fokker Albatross of a mouth would have been worth losing a fingertip or a piece of my ear. The first book take place in 1936: Hitler is on the rise, people like him, there are some weird laws, Jewish people are slowly trying to flee the country. By 1949 Bernie has shifted his quarters from Berlin to Munich, and after a terribly unsuccessful stint running a small hotel near Dachau, has resumed his private investigation business.

The Pale Criminal finds Bernie back on the force in 1938 on the edge of war when Berlin experiences the mad spree of a serial killer. When we first meet Bernie in March Violets he is 38 years old, a veteran of the Turkish Front (like Hitler, winning a Second-Class Iron Cross, but, as he says, “most of the first-class medals were awarded to men in cemeteries”), and an ex-policeman. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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.For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Let me tell you a bit about each of the titles in the series, originally published a year apart, and in so doing give you more of a sense of Bernie’s character and biography. It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance.

Who knows but Kerr weaves the minutiae of mundane daily life with the exciting plot developments very skilfully. 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. I stuck with it for more than a hundred pages but in the end, I wasn’t interested enough to continue.Before the war the Nazis and after the war the United States and the Soviet Union act as deux ex machina in these stories in a satisfying ways, showing the ubiquity of their control of their societies, government as a criminal conspiracy. He was best known for his Bernie Gunther series of 13 historical thrillers and a children's series, Children of the Lamp, under the name P.

It is a powerful exploration of the occult side of Nazism and a skillful evocation of the social tensions that pervaded prewar Berlin.

But on a seemingly straightforward stakeout, Bruno is killed, and Bernie suddenly finds himself tapped for a much bigger job. The fourteen Bernie Gunther novels written by Philip Kerr offer not only first-rate mystery plotting, atmospheric prose, and witty dialogue but also philosophical insights into the nature of ambition, loyalty, and identity. The first part, which is considerably longer than the second, takes place in Berlin in 1934, during the time that Bernie worked as a house detective at the Adlon Hotel. Bernie Gunther, who left the Kriminal Polizei because of politics taking precedent over justice, is the tough, wise-cracking P. He occasionally experiences flashbacks and recurring nightmares, both symptoms of posttraumatic stress.