The Shot - Philip Kerr

 What a range Philip Kerr had!   The best 'good Nazi' series ever, with Bernie Gunther, supernatural, sci fi, and, with The Shot (1999), perhaps the best Kennedy conspiracy thriller of all time.

Sam Jefferson is an assassin, America's finest.   He has carried out hits for the CIA, FBI and even the Mafia, but he doesn't work for any of them.   He is independent.   Or perhaps, after being a POW in the Korean War, he answers to different masters.

In late 1960 the mob brings him down to Miami to take out Castro and enable them to recoup their Cuban assets.   Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli are collaborating, informally, with the CIA.   Giancana has just delivered the crucial Chicago vote which enabled John F Kennedy to defeat Nixon in the presidential election.   Sam's deal with Kennedy's crooked father Joe is that the Kennedy administration will lay off the Mob.

Sam Jefferson heads for Havana and scopes out the Castro hit.   He has no problem moving around the city because he is half Cuban himself.   He delivers the feasability study to Johnny Rosselli and promptly absconds with Sam Giancana's money.   Giancana therefore hires local FBI man Jimmy Nimmo to track Jefferson down.

Sam meanwhile is working with another Miami FBI staffer Alex Goldman.   Together, they are planning to assassinate the president-elect.   Why? - I'm not going to say.   However, one suggestion is that Sam wants to kill JFK because a mob guy 'accidentally' played him a tape of Kennedy having sex with Sam's wife, who is one of his election staffers.   Mary ends up dead soon after.   Sam has disappeared, emptying the house of clues.

But Sam has other residences, other names.   Franklin Pierce is one of the names he goes by in New York.   Sometimes he's Marty van Buren.   He has other women in his life, women from Central America.

Attention moves to Jimmy Nimmo's investigation.   Nimmo is a likeable character.  He tracks down Jefferson's NY apartment.   He figures out that Sam is planning to take out Kennedy before the swearing-in on January 20 1961.   The question inevitably arises for the reader: We all know when Kennedy was actually taken out, November 22 1963; so how can this fictional version be satisfactorily resolved?   BY the supremely capable Philip Kerr, that's how.   I didn't fully twig even as it played out on the page in front of me.   And I absolutely love it.

Potsdam Station - David Downing

There seem to be countless novels on the market dealing with 'good' people involved in Nazi Germany. Of the cuff, for example, there is Alan Furst, Volker Kutscher and, of course, Philip Kerr. Then there is the sub genre (see C J Sansom, Len Deighton and Robert Harris) of what-if-the-Nazis-had-won fiction. Downing belongs to the former school and classes with Furst in the degree of detail. I would not have classed him with Furst in literary achievement, having previously read the first of his second series, Jack of Spies (also reviewed on this blog), which is set in the lead-up to World War I. Potsdam Station is the fourth in his series featuring John Russell and Effi Koenen and went a long way to changing my mind.

Russell is an Anglo-American journalist and spy. He is also a somewhat disillusioned communist. Effi is his girlfriend, a former German movie star, now living undercover and helping to get Jews out of Berlin. At the start of this novel Russell and Effi have been apart for almost four years. Russell is trying to tag along with the Soviet Army as it closes in on Berlin in the final days of the war. He also wants to find his son Paul, who is serving with what remains of the German army.

Russell succeeds, thanks to his old communist associates. He is sent ahead of the army as part of team trying to recover as much information about the Nazi A-bomb project as humanly possible. Meanwhile Effi is entrusted with an 8 year-old Jewish girl and Paul becomes detached from his unit. Thus the three key participants move through the increasingly battered city, slowly closing in on one another. It is a fairly common storyline but Downing's command of detail lifts the story well above the ordinary. His writing here is better than I remember in Jack of Spies. Perhaps it is simply a matter of him having more affinity with World War II.

Whilst I didn't hate Jack of Spies, I couldn't recommend it. I have no such problem with Potsdam Station, which is a cracking read. I have an ebook of the first in the series, Zoo Station, which I still haven't read. Must crack on.

The Man From Berlin - Luke McCallin

The Man From Berlin is Luke McCallin's first novel and the first in the Gregor Reinhart series. The second, The Pale House, is out now. Gregor Reinhart is a reluctant captain in the Abwehr, a decorated veteran of the First War and a former detective in the Berlin police. So far, the parallels to Philip Kerr and the Bernie Gunther series are apparent. What McCallin adds to the mix, however, is that his novels thus far are set in occupied Yugoslavia, specifically in this first case Sarajevo. Reading it, I got the distinct sense that McCallin was an expert on the former republic who made himself an expert on the various tangled strands of Nazi military police. Whether or not that is correct, the expertise in all aspects is completely convincing - so convincing that I can only presume it is completely accurate.


The characters, too, are distinctive. Reinhart is not a chancer like Gunther. He is a gentleman detective who uses his mind, never his fists. He is not a natural Nazi, albeit he would have been forced to join to continue with his police career. His life has been turned upside down by the death of his wife and he has lost contact with his son, an enthusiastic Nazi who has been embroiled in the endless siege of Stalingrad. Reinhart is not a drinker, but he toys with the idea of suicide late at night in his billet.


But then a fellow military policeman is found dead in the home of a celebrated local celebrity film maker and performer. The star herself lies butchered on the bed. Hidden behind a mirror is the mini studio from which she films some of her more exotic performances. The film itself, which is thought to have recorded her murder, is missing. The murder of the star, Marija Vukic, is a case for the local police and Reinhart is forced to liaise with the brutal Inspector Padelin. The murder of the officer, Stefan Hendel, is a matter for the Abwehr. The two cases are evidently linked but there are niceties to be observed in occupied territory, particularly so in the ethnic maelstrom of Sarajevo.


The investigation is expertly handled by McCallin, with dozens of well-drawn characters crossing Reinhart's path as he moves further up the chain of command in search of the high-ranking officer who shared Vukic's last night. McCallin is especially good at showing the tensions between the ethnic groups, some of whom are natural Nazi sympathisers and even serve in the Nazi coalition, and the various police groupings. The bizarre titles some of the officers sport is always a problem for English language authors writing for the modern reader who wasn't brought up with them. McCallin is absolutely on top of the problem and even provides a table of equivalents.


My only criticism, in fact, is that at the beginning of Book Three, when Reinhart has to travel to the front line, McCallin's research got the better of him and we had three fairly short chapters of travelogue, which I felt could easily have been cut down to one. Other than that - indeed, despite of it - The Man From Berlin is a great debut novel and Reinhart's future caseload will be essential reading for those of us who followed the late Mr Kerr.

Prayer - Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr died, too young, a month ago. He is best known for his exemplary Bernie Gunther novels, several of which have been reviewed on this blog. I had only read one of his non-Gunther novels, the unimpressive sci fi Gridiron (1995). Prayer (2013) is very different. It is, I suppose, a splice of supernatural suspense and a police procedural.  Giles Martins, originally from Scotland, is now with the FBI in Houston, Texas. His marriage to Ruth is on the rocks because 'Gil' has lost his faith in God. Meanwhile more famous sceptics - authors of anti-theistic books - are dying in very unusual, even terrifying circumstances. Because this might be some form of domestic terrorism, Gil is assigned to investigate.


I don't really want to go any further with the synopsis because Kerr's novels are so brilliantly plotted there is always the danger of giving too much away. I very much like the typical Kerr twist - just as Bernie Gunther is the oxymoronic 'Good Nazi', so Prayer is fundamentally the testing of Gil's lack of faith. As such it works very well. You either roll with the premise or you don't. My lack of belief is as solid as these things get yet I was happy enough with the stages of Gil's purification. Kerr has always had a gift for characterisation and is almost as good with women characters as he naturally is with men. Ruth, the Christian wife, is a bit of a pain but Sara Espinosa, Gil's romantic interest, and especially the enigmatic Gaynor Allitt are strong enough to carry novels of their own.


Kerr has always been at home with first-person narration. Prayer is no exception. That said, I was less comfortable with the various chunks of reported prose, written by others, the style of which seemed always the same. I did not take to the villain and I find thrillers always work better if the villain is as charismatic on the page as he or she is said to be in the action.


Not Kerr's best book, then - he came out of the gates with his best material, the so-called Berlin Noir sequence - but well worth reading for its own sake. I might try and get hold Hitler's Peace next, a non-Gunther Nazi novel.

The One From the Other - Philip Kerr

After the great disappointment of the last Bernie Gunther novel I read (Prague Fatale, see below), I can happily say that this, despite the horrible title, is one of the very best.  Written in 2006, it was Kerr's return to Bernie after 15 years, and leads straight into its successor, A Quiet Flame, which I really rated.

The plotting is brilliant, the theme (nobody is who they seem) maintained throughout, and there is the essential element of extreme jeopardy for our hero.  It's set in 1949 and finds Bernie running a hotel overlooking the Dachau concentration camp.  He is hooked in to the conspiracy by, as usual, an attractive woman and the story spirals out from there.  I certainly didn't see any of the twists coming.

There is also a long prologue set in Berlin and Jerusalem in 1937.  I kept wondering how this was relevant.  But then, brilliantly, it was.

Fiercely recommended.

Prague Fatale - Philip Kerr

The latest Bernie Gunther exercise in Nazi Noir turns out to be something of a disappointment.  For all the fascination of the context, it is nothing more than a locked room mystery in the Agatha Christie mode, and once you've recognised that it's easy to guess who done it on the traditional Christie least-likely model, complete with hopelessly overwrought 'motive'.  Even the writing, normally the saving grace of any Kerr novel, stands in sore need of editing.  There is a terrible misstep somewhere near the middle when Gunther becomes a mere mouthpiece for Kerr who has decided to stray in post modern irony.  All in all, the book is far too long for what is at best a literary caprice.  I'm sorry I disliked it so much because I was delighted with the other Gunther novels I've read recently (A Quiet Flame, If the Dead Rise Not), and I will certainly look out for the next, A Man Without Breath.  On that score, a word of congratulation to Kerr and his publishers.  I really don't like the modern practice of banging a preview of the end of every book.  Kerr/Quercus have come up with a much better idea - log on to his website, sign up for his newsletter, and read it there.

If the Dead Rise Not - Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr is on great form with this 2009 Bernie Gunther thriller, the sixth of eight thus far.  Kerr hops back and forth in the Gunther sequence but in this case he encompasses Berlin 1936 and Havana 1954 in one protracted case.  I've never seen anyone attempt it quite as Kerr does.  For quite a while you feel a bit cheated, simply abandoning the 1936 story at a live-or-die moment, but it really pays off when Kerr delivers the knockout twist at the very end.  I certainly didn't see it coming.

Anyway, Bernie is in his hotel detective phase, haunting the corridors of the Adlon Hotel having been purged from KRIPO for not being a Nazi.  It's the year of the Berlin Olympiad and Avery Bundage is in town to approve the Nazi games on behalf of the International Olympic Committee.  There's a fat dead guy in one of the rooms.  Looks like his heart gave out while entertaining a joy girl.  A routine chore for the staff, except that this particular fat guy was a prime bidder for the Olympic stadium contract.  Then there's a circumcized ex-boxer in the canal.  The two can't possibly be linked.  Can they?

Drop-dead gorgeous American writer Noreen Eisner Charalambides visits the Adlon and soon Bernie is ferrying her round town in her quest to unearth the unpalatable truth about the Hitler Olympiad.  A lot of the unpleasantness seems to hover around Chicago entrepreneur Max Reles.  Too much, in fact...

Then we're in Havana, eighteen years later.  Bernie is hiding behind his 'Carlos Hausner' persona (first encountered, by me at least, in A Quiet Flame), Reles is running a hotel and Noreen is staying at Ernest Hemingway's place.

If the Dead Rise Not won the 2009 CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical crime fiction.  And I'm not a bit surprised.  Essential reading for fans of the genre.