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CRITIQUE:

Into the Groove

The second volume of Scottish author Philip Kerr's "Berlin Noir" trilogy (later expanded to 14 novels) is an immaculately conceived and executed homage to the pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler that deserves praise as a work of literature in its own right.

The main difference between the originals and this volume of the homage is that the setting is transposed to 1938 Nazi Germany in the summer months leading up to

Like the first volume, the writing is word-perfect. There's enough wise-crackery and sexual bravado for the private investigator Bernard Gunther to remind you of Philip Marlowe, while the Nazi context gives you an insight into corruption and abuse of power in the early Third Reich, before the commencement of the Second World War.

Gunther is nearing 40 years of age and has retired from Kripo in order to set up business as a private investigator in partnership with a friend.

Apart from these differences, the plot quickly gets into a reassuringly familiar stride, like a wheel in a groove (if that's not a mixed metaphor).

The Summer of Bestiality

As with Philip Marlowe, Gunther's love life becomes an amusing, if slightly chauvinist and frustrating, sub-plot. He complains that it leaves a lot of women to be desired (but no more). He even thinks he knows the reason for his lack of success:

"There was one woman a couple of years ago. I was in love with her, only she disappeared. Well, that happens to a lot of people in this city [Berlin] ... Whatever the reason, my urge to procreate is nothing short of bestial, which of course women see in your eyes, and then leave you well alone."

He adds that "in the long hot summer of 1938, bestiality was callously enjoying something of an Aryan renaissance."

Converging Plots

And so begins the narrative, of which there are two strands: one concerns an attempt to blackmail a wealthy publisher, who engages Gunther to ascertain the person or persons responsible; and the other sees him coopted back into Kripo to investigate the serial murder of a number of teenaged girls.

It turns out that the latter crimes are part of an anti-Semitic plot by rogue elements of the German SS. The plot is designed to arouse suspicion that the murders have been committed by a Jew, so that a pogrom can be launched against the Jewish population of Berlin.

The plots soon converge in a whirlwind of brandy, cocaine, pyschotherapy, paganism, superstition, occultism, propaganda, racism, anti-Semitism, perversion and brutality.

Delayed Gratification

Gunther meets some new women, who appeal to him, despite their differences. However, he must wait almost the whole of the book for consummation.

The first woman (chapter 6) is Frau Kalau vom Hofe, a psychotherapist who is "an acknowledged expert on that unfathomable little mystery that we refer to as the Criminal Mind."

"My eyes looked and licked at the creamy woman...," but she gives him some text books to read at home (including Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal"). After some logistical conversation with Gunther and his associates, "I smiled, appreciating her cool resilience, as well as the fine breasts which strained at the material of her blouse."

They retreat to a bar for a drink, but their conversation is largely confined to the books, as well as Goethe's poetry (which Gunther read in school). He suspects that they might be intellectually incompatible. It seems that she is too brainy for his taste.

The next is Hildegard Steininger, the wealthy, widowed step-mother of one of the murdered girls.

He doesn't describe her physically at their first meeting, but at their second (chapter 16), he says, "There was no mistaking that golden head and those well-sculpted legs...She looked as though she lived in a beauty parlour."

By chapter 17, her legs are long. "In her beige wool bolero, dotted foulard blouse and burgundy wool skirt, she looked like a year's war reparations."

Hildegard might be too expensive for him to maintain.

By chapter 18:

"I figured that she probably preferred the kind of man who could think of himself as little more than a blank sheet of writing paper. And yet, almost in spite of her, I continued to find her attractive. For my taste she was much too concerned with the shade of her gold-spun hair, the length of her fingernails and the state of her teeth, which she was forever brushing. Too vain by half, and too selfish twice over."

Besides she can't cook.

Sex Spoiler

Nevertheless, when they have sex (which they inevitably do - her vanity isn't enough to deter him from the allure of her legs), "it was too rough to be polite, to be tender," and "her long thighs trembled wonderfully as we played out our noisy pantomime to its barnstorming denouement."

This was almost enough to compensate for the cancellation of the 2020 Bad Sex in Fiction Award, even if the novel wouldn't have been eligible.

Gunther rightly concludes that Hildegard is out of his league, and the last time he visits her home, he finds her entertaining a young, good-looking SS major. She's moved onward and upward in the social ranking of Nazi Germany, and has left Gunther well alone, albeit with an apology.


EPILOGUE:

"Once was doubt evil, and the will to Self. Then the invalid became a heretic or sorcerer; as heretic or sorcerer he suffered, and sought to cause suffering.

But this will not enter your ears; it hurteth your good people, ye tell me. But what doth it matter to me about your good people!

Many things in your good people cause me disgust, and verily, not their evil. I would that they had a madness by which they succumbed, like this pale criminal!

Verily, I would that their madness were called truth, or fidelity, or justice: but they have their virtue in order to live long, and in wretched self-complacency.

I am a railing alongside the torrent; whoever is able to grasp me may grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not.�

Thus spake Zarathustra."

Friedrich Nietzsche