After serving with death squads in the Ukraine, Bernie Gunther is back in Berlin and working as a police detective. Even more disillusioned with the Nazi regime, consumed with self-loathing, and unafraid to express his cynicism and critique, he survives through bullish good police work, cunning and connections. When a Dutch foreign worker is found stabbed to death on rail tracks, he’s assigned to the case. Shortly after he rescues a beautiful woman, Arianne Tauber, being attacked at a darkened station. The man runs off only to be hit by a car in the blackout. The following day the man is found dead, identified as a suspected Czech resistance agent. Whilst Gunther investigates the case further, he falls for Arianne, who’s working a good-time girl in a high class jazz club. As the case starts to stall, he gets summoned to Prague by his nemesis, Reinhard Heydrich, the new Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia. Some of Heydrich’s Nazi colleagues seem to be plotting his murder and he wants Gunther to be his bodyguard and detective. On a large estate just outside of Prague, Heydrich has gathered a motley collection of senior military figures to celebrate his new appointment. But rather than Heydrich being murdered, it is his adjutant that is found shot dead in a room locked from the inside. With Arianne sight-seeing around Prague, Gunther has the task of solving the case with a house full of military personnel who nearly all out-rank him, and Heydrich playing his usual games.
The four great strengths of Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series is the historicization within the Nazi regime, a strong noir voice, the lead character - a self-loathing, cynical, cantankerous cop with a moral core - and well constructed stories.
Prague Fatale delivers on the first two of these in spades. Kerr drops us into Berlin and Prague in 1941, the politics, the power-games within the Nazi regime, the suffering, the resistance. He evokes a very strong sense of place and time. The prose and dialogue are excellent, as usual. The novel is slightly let down, however, by the latter two. Kerr’s other Gunther novels use movement through time and space as a means to develop the main character and drive the story.
Prague Fatale is a fairly static book, divided into two, and there is a linear time narrative with the story set over a few weeks. The first part is set in Berlin and provides the set-up, the second, longer part, in Heydrich’s estate just outside of Prague. It is a locked room mystery, with a notable nod to Agatha Christie. The characterisation as a whole is good, and the story is full of real-life senior Nazis, however we learn very little new about Gunther. And whilst the story is historically embedded in what was happening in Berlin and Prague at the time, it is somewhat long-winded and lacking pace compared with the earlier books (and probably double the length of Christie’s locked room mysteries). In my view, the Prague section of the story would have benefitted from losing a good thirty to fifty pages or more. And part of the ending was telegraphed from a very long way out. That said, this is still a good, entertaining read, just not quite up there with the other Gunther books in my mind. As ever, though, I look forward to the next in one of my favourite series.
The third installment of the Jimmy Kiley series was published today on Shotgun Honey - Infrared Dead. The first two can be found at:
After serving with death squads in the Ukraine, Bernie Gunther is back in Berlin and working as a police detective. Even more disillusioned with the Nazi regime, consumed with self-loathing, and unafraid to express his cynicism and critique, he survives through bullish good police work, cunning and connections. When a Dutch foreign worker is found stabbed to death on rail tracks, he’s assigned to the case. Shortly after he rescues a beautiful woman, Arianne Tauber, being attacked at a darkened station. The man runs off only to be hit by a car in the blackout. The following day the man is found dead, identified as a suspected Czech resistance agent. Whilst Gunther investigates the case further, he falls for Arianne, who’s working a good-time girl in a high class jazz club. As the case starts to stall, he gets summoned to Prague by his nemesis, Reinhard Heydrich, the new Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia. Some of Heydrich’s Nazi colleagues seem to be plotting his murder and he wants Gunther to be his bodyguard and detective. On a large estate just outside of Prague, Heydrich has gathered a motley collection of senior military figures to celebrate his new appointment. But rather than Heydrich being murdered, it is his adjutant that is found shot dead in a room locked from the inside. With Arianne sight-seeing around Prague, Gunther has the task of solving the case with a house full of military personnel who nearly all out-rank him, and Heydrich playing his usual games.
Having invested in the Kindle, I've now invested in some collections of short stories. So far, I've bought five. They're listed below along with the stories I've read so far. I'm going to dip in and out of them. I also managed to read a couple of other online stories, as well.
It's been a strange old week. I've spent most of it writing dictionary entries for the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography. I'm now up to L. I spent parts of Thursday evening and Friday doing media work in relation to the tragic death of a young boy on an unfinished estate. A truly awful accident. Hopefully the government will now step up their action in dealing with the health and safety issues relating to such estates. I also purchased a Kindle and started into the world of ebooks. My plan at the minute is to only buy ebooks I can't easily get as paper books. So far I've downloaded a couple of novels and collections of short stories. I've been dipping into the latter. Based on only reading the first couple of stories, an early favourite is Old School by Daniel B O'Shea, a collection of 14 stories in three parts: middle age, the golden years, the afterlife. Here's the blurb:
Chief Inspector Max Camara works for the homicide division in Valencia. On a hot afternoon he’s asked to stand in as the judge of a bullfight in which Spain’s most famous matador, Jorge Blanco, is starring. Camara is no lover of bullfighting and has to rely on advice to appropriately recognize the matadors’ exploits. Afterwards he accepts an invitation to go to a bar with some of the key players in the event. The bar is disturbed by anti-bullfighting protestors, then word comes that Blanco has been found dead in the ring. Camara is assigned to the case in atmosphere charged by the run up to a mayoral election in which the incumbent mayor has promised to ban the sport and the impeding festival of Fallas. Shortly afterwards Blanco’s manager is found murdered by a lake, killed in a similar fashion. Camara, already under pressure due an incident with another officer, starts to feel the heat as various interests try to disrupt his investigation.
I blame the new Kindle, but last night I engaged in a bit of scattergun reading. I managed a couple of chapters of the excellent book I was already reading, Prague Fatale by Philip Kerr. I topped that off with a short story from Patti Abbott's collection, Monkey Justice, the first fifty pages or so of Gerard Brennan's, The Point, the opening section to A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle, and the opening chapter of Tollesbury Time Forever by Stuart Aylis. It was like drowning in a sweet jar of tasty words. I'm going to try and get myself a bit more ordered tonight, though it's going to be a toughy to work out the order I'm going to chew my way through those. I also need to write a couple of reviews. Expect one of Or the Bull Kills You by Jason Webster tomorow.
