The One from the Other

This is classic Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett noir featuring a hard boiled, hard luck detective with a smart mouth. But instead of crooked cops and ruthless gangsters hunkered in the dark alleyways of LA we find our protagonist Bernie Gunther in post WWII Germany. He's following his own moral compass, trying to shake off the horrors of the Third Reich.

It's 1949 and Bernie's life as a hotel-keeper has reasonably bottomed out in the town of Dachau. He finds himself assigned to track down a missing Nazi, and the ostensibly simple request explodes into a dazzling, if not somewhat improbable, series of escalating fiascos.

It's filled with the pulpy argot of detective noir that is deliciously distinct. “There was a sort of twinkle in his iris that came off his eyeball like the point of a sword” or “The fog was back. It rolled in like steam from a sausage kitchen on a cold winter's day.” It's the readerly equivalent of the Sunday TV matinees of my youth that never let any sense of probability get in the way of a rousing tale.

Heard about this author on NPR and became interested in this strange genre of early aftermath of war Germany mystery and thriller literature. I couldn't get the more famous Berlin Noir series by the author at any local bookstores so gave this one a try.

I wanted to quit about half way through. The Gunther character is so painfully implausible.

The necessity to have the dry sarcasm in almost every exchange is what we might expect from a detective in a Law & Order episode or Han Solo, but seemed so bizarre for a character of Gunther's background.

I also got tired of him reminding the reader (via dialog with every character he meets) how the former Waffen-SS detective is not an anti-Semite and disapproved of the many atrocities of National Socialism. It was as if the character felt obligated to stop the action and turn apologetically to the reader periodically.

The book is well written and well researched, but most of the characters felt like they belonged in 1920s Chicago instead of 1945 Germany. The plot of this one wandered and the final setup so suddenly unraveled and implausibly assembled that I feel no compulsion to read any more of Kerr's Gunther works.