Reviewed by DAVID VINEYARD:          


PHILIP KERR – If The Dead Rise Not. Putnam, hardcover, March 2010. Penguin, trade paperback, April 2011. First published in the UK by Quercus, hardcover, 2009.

   Combine the worlds of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene with that of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and you begin to have something that resembles the world of Philip Kerr’s Berlin private eye and ex-cop Bernie Gunther, whose mean streets are those of Nazi Germany and the Post War world.

   Bernie made his debut in what by now is the almost legendary Berlin Noir trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, The German Requiem) about a private eye in Nazi era Berlin. While Bernie’s voice echoes that classical American eye in the tradition of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer, Bernie is something more than a lonely knight in a violent broken world, his mean streets meaner and more dangerous, and it is not always enough to be a good man; at times it is even a disadvantage. He is a complex man, surviving in a complex world, his muscular prose reflecting a morally gray world and a layer of sophistication and depth rare to the thriller, certainly these days.

   Bernie is too self-aware for his own good, and his passion for justice can be inconvenient to say the least in the world and time he inhabits. Cynical one liners and a pure heart won’t even buy a cup of coffee, much less keep him alive.

   The book takes its title from a passage in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer: “…if the dead rise not again? Let us eat, and drink, for tomorrow we shall die.”

   It was a warm day, almost the end of September, when a word like “summer” made me think of something precious that was soon to be forgotten. Like freedom and justice.

   It is 1934 and in Berlin the Nazis have taken hold of both government and the public imagination. Only a handful of people dare to speak of the madness to come, and they are too dangerous to be around. Berlin is readying itself for the 1936 Olympiad, the centerpiece of Adolph Hitler’s great vision of the Third Reich, and with Avery Brundage, head of the Olympic committee, there is a conspiracy of silence about the parties anti-Semitism designed to make sure the games are well attended and not boycotted.

   A Jewish boxer has been murdered, and Bernie is encouraged to quietly find the culprit before it becomes complicated, which leads him to American crime figure Max Reles, currently in Berlin. He also meets an attractive American journalist of Jewish heritage, Mrs. Noreen Charalambides:

   Her hair, which she wore in a bun, was also sable-colored and, I imagined, every bit as nice to stroke. Nicer, probably, as it wasn’t as likely to bite. All the same I wouldn’t have minded being bitten by Noreen Charalambides. Any proximity to her cherry-red Fokker Albatross of a mouth would have been worth losing a fingertip or a piece of an ear. Vincent Van Gogh wasn’t the only fellow who could make that kind of heady, romantic kind of gesture.

   It proves a messy murder case and an even messier conclusion and Bernie has to let the killer go in order to save Noreen. Max Reles walks and Noreen gets out of Germany safely and Reles promises to keep her that way in return for Bernie’s silence and Bernie has to live with how and why.

   â€œSo am I making myself clear. You want that I should tell the kid to bury the bitch alive like Bill Shapiro?”

   Nothing subtle about Max Reles.

   Twenty years later Bernie is in Havana, Cuba. His welcome wore out in Buenos Aires, and Havana is a good place to be. Among other things Bernie ended up in the SS in Russia through no fault of his own, and if not a war criminal isn’t entirely welcome either. Fidel Castro is in prison, Hemingway is in his last days of greatness, Batista, with CIA help, has just seized power, and the American mob has a strangle hold on the gaming industry burgeoning there, and Bernie Gunther isn’t the sort to settle in too peacefully no matter how much he tries. When Noreen Charalambides shows up and old feelings are stirred it gets complicated because Max Reles is back as well. Max Reles who murdered a good man in 1934 Berlin, and threatened Noreen’s life to buy Bernie’s silence …

   Bernie’s victory, or sorts, makes for a suspenseful and dark novel that relishes that ‘poetry of violence’ and an authentic voice from the darkness.

   Some of us die in a day. For some, like me, it takes much longer. Year’s perhaps. We all die, like Adam, it’s true, only it’s not every man that’s made alive again… If the dead rise not then what happens to a man’s spirit? And if they do, with what body will they live again? I didn’t have the answers. Nobody did. Perhaps if the dead could rise and be incorruptible, and I could be changed forever in the blinking of an eye, then dying just might be worth the trouble, or killing myself.

   If you want something that echoes the stark beauty and dark revelation of the noir style, you won’t do better than Philip Kerr or Bernie Gunther. This was his sixth outing, and there were more to follow, and you could do much worse than to find and read all of them. I can say with conviction I haven’t read a hard-boiled novel that effected me this much since James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, certainly not in this century. Philip Kerr and Bernie Gunther are both someone lovers of the hard-boiled school of mystery fiction should get to know.