FEATURES

PICKETT’S CHARGE, THE SOUTH, & WILLIAM FAULKNER

In his 1948 novel Intruder In The Dust, William Faulkner tells of a black man accused of a murder he did not commit. Eventually, due to the efforts of a white teenager and an elderly lady, the real killer is identified. Along the way, Faulkner attempts to explain – but not apologise for – the residual bitterness felt by white people in the South, so many decades later, about the outcome of the Civil War. General Robert E Lee is a heroic figure in Southern mythology. He came close to winning the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, but on the third day of the battle his hopes hinged on what we now think of as a military blunder. Confederate forces, under General George Pickett, made a full frontal assault on Union forces holding high ground. The charge was a disaster, and although Lee won later battles, that afternoon is known as The High Watermark of The Confederacy. Faulkner’s character voices what remains one of the finest short pieces of prose in the English language. It is the ultimate “what if?”

February 15, 2025 0

TED LEWIS . . . A Lincolnshire perspective

Alfred Edward Lewis was born in Stretford, Manchester on 15th January 1940, but in 1946 the family moved to Barton upon Humber. Five years later, Lewis passed his 11+ and began attending the town’s grammar school. There, he was fortunate enough to come under the influence of an English teacher called Henry Treece. Treece was born in Staffordshire, but had moved to Lincolnshire in 1939, and although he ‘did his bit’ as an RAF intelligence officer, he was able to make his name during the war years as a poet.

Ted Lewis excelled at both Art and English, and when it came to leaving school, he was desperate to go to Art School in Hull (now the Hull School of Art and Design). His parents thought this idea frivolous and a waste of time, and were determined that he should get ‘a proper job’ locally. Henry Treece interceded on Lewis’s behalf and was able to persuade his parents to let the young man cross the murky waters of the Humber to study.

After leaving the college, it seemed that Lewis was going to make his way as an artist and illustrator, and a book written by Alan Delgado, variously called The Hot Water Bottle Mystery or The Very Hot Water Bottle, can be had these days for not very much money, and the description on seller sites usually adds “Illustrated by Edward Lewis”. That was the first serious money Ted ever made. He moved to London in the early 1960s to further his prospects.

His first published novel was All the Way Home and All the Night Through (1965) and it is a semi-autobiographical account of the lives and loves of art students in Hull. I remember borrowing it from the local library not long after it came out and, looking back, it was a far cry from the novels that would make Lewis’s fame and fortune.

Five years later, Lewis was getting regular script work in television, but now his second novel was published. Its original title was Jack’s Return Home. I believe that to be a reference to a mock Victorian melodrama of the same name, that featured in a Tony Hancock episode called The East Cheam Drama Festival. In Lewis’s book, the main character is Jack Carter, a London gangster returning to his home town to investigate the death of his brother. Re-badged as Get Carter, it was made into one of the finest British films ever made. It was released in March 1970, and Lewis is credited, along with director Mike Hodges, with the screenplay. Incidentally, a hardback first edition of JRH can be yours – a snip at just £3,250 (admittedly with a hand-written note by the author)

Although the film is clearly set in Newcastle, the action in the book takes place in the far less glamorous setting of a ‘steel city’ much closer to where Lewis grew up – Scunthorpe, obviously. Sadly, the town was already regarded as a metaphor for somewhere awful, and the butt of many jokes, so setting Lewis’s story there would probably have been box office suicide.

Lewis wrote more novels, none achieving quite the success of Get Carter, although he returned to the character in his penultimate novel Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (1977). By this time, however, Lewis was in a self induced spiral of decline, mainly due to alcohol abuse. His final novel, which many critics believe to be his finest was GBH, published in 1980. Here, he unequivocally returns to Lincolnshire, and a bleak and down-beat out-of-season seaside town which is obviously Mablethorpe. The central character is George Fowler, a mobster who has made a living out of distributing porn movies, but has crossed the wrong people, and needs somewhere to hide up for a while. Rather like his creator, Fowler is in the darkest of dark places, and the novel ends in brutal and surreal fashion on a deserted Lincolnshire beach, with the wind howling in from the north sea as Fowler meets his maker in the remains of an RAF bombing target.

With his marriage over and career in ruins, Lewis returned home to Barton, to live with his mother, but his health had gone, and the Grimsby Evening Telegraph ran this melancholy story on 30th March 1982. There is something deeply sad about a man who had the world at his feet, immensely gifted as a writer and artist, and a man whose literary legacy would prove to be immense, being taken by ambulance from a modest semi in Ferriby Road to a ward in Scunthorpe hospital, where he would die a few days later.

So what was the legacy of Ted Lewis? Some critics have dubbed him ‘England’s Albert Camus’. I don’t buy into that, for any number of reasons, one of which is that I have never knowingly been captivated by any book written by the French existentialist, while GBH, to name but one of Lewis’s books, gripped me by the throat and never let go until I had reached the final page. Another description of Lewis is that he was the ‘Godfather of English Noir.’ There isn’t time here to go into what is and isn’t ‘Noir’ in books and films, but let’s settle for a few descriptions, in no particular order: bleakly pessimistic; realistic; violent; deeply flawed characters; full of dark humour.

The more sharp-eyed of you will see that the cover of GBH bears the legend ‘with an afterword by Derek Raymond.’ Raymond (aka Robin Cook) was also self destructive, but he managed to survive until 1994, and left a catalogue of brutal, compassionate and disturbing crime novels, perhaps the best of which is I Was Dora Suarez. There is no evidence that Raymond was influenced by Lewis, but he clearly recognised a kindred spirit. But this article is about Lincolnshire. Lewis’s life – and his greatest novels – are book-ended by the county. He described the grimy and frequently corrupt world of a town dominated by a thriving steel industry (Scunthorpe) in Jacks’ Return Home and – when his personal life was in total disarray – he made his last words play out in GBH, resonating over the often bleak seashores around Mablethorpe, a place he must have visited with his parents when he was young. For George Fowler, however, there was not to be the long walk from the railway station to the beach; no arcades with penny slot machines, not a sniff of the intoxicating sweetness of candy floss, no jingling of bells from the donkey rides, and not a hint of the itchy reassurance of Mablethorpe sand between his toes. All that remained was an almost surreal death, which Lewis described brilliantly, while making sure we readers were never certain about what was real and what was not.

The good folk of Barton upon Humber have, perhaps rather belatedly, chosen to honour their two most famous literary sons. There is a Ted Lewis Centre, and his mentor from back in the day is acknowledged with a blue plaque. For a more detailed account of Ted Lewis’s life, I can recommend Getting Carter by Nick Triplow.

December 28, 2023 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep was published in 1939, but the iconic film version, directed by Howard Hawks, wasn’t released until 1946. Are the dates significant? There is an obvious conclusion, in terms of what took place in between, but I am not sure if it is the correct one. The novel introduced Philip Marlowe to the reading public and, my goodness, what an introduction. The second chapter, where Los Angeles PI Marlowe goes to meet the ailing General Sternwood who is worried about his errant daughters, contains astonishing prose. Sternwood sits, wheelchair-bound, in what we Brits call a greenhouse. Marlowe sweats as Sternwood tells him:

“I seem to exist largely on heat like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?”
“Not particularly.”
“They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.”

The General can no longer drink alcohol, but he enjoys watching men who can:

“The old man licked his lips watching me, over and over again, drawing one lips slowly across the other with a funereal absorption, like an undertaker dry-washing his hands.”

“I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it.”

Sternwood has two daughters. The elder, Vivian, was married to a an ex-IRA bigshot called Rusty Reagan, a man much admired by his father-in-law, but he has disappeared. The younger girl, Carmen, has gone off the rails completely, and has been sucked into a world of drugs, vice and pornography.

Initially, Marlowe’s brief from the General is to find out what is going in with Carmen. He soon discovers that she is involved with a pornographer called Geiger. He goes to Geiger’s house, and sits in his car outside, the rain teeming down.

“As the darkness folded back on it and ate it up a thin tinkling scream cried out and lost itself among the rain drenched trees. I was out of the car and on my way before the echoes died. There was no fear in the scream. It had a sound of half pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, overtone of pure idiocy. It was a nasty sound. It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow courts with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.”

Forcing his way into the house, Marlowe finds an interrupted photoshoot:

“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead. She was wearing a pair of long Jade earrings. They were nice earrings and had probably cost couple of hundred dollars. She wasn’t wearing anything else.”

The drugged Carmen Sternwood had clearly been in the middle of a pornographic photo shoot and beside her is Geiger – shot dead. After taking Carmen back to the Sternwood mansion Marlowe returns to Geiger’s house, where he has left his car. He finds that Geiger’s body has gone and the crime scene has been interfered with. Wondering who has taken the corpse, he makes the celebrated comment:

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

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The plot then becomes something of a whirling dervish pirouetting in the California dust, sometimes moving so fast and in such unexpected directions that it is not easy to keep track of what is going on. We meet Joe Brody, a small-time spiv who is trying to muscle in on Geiger’s pornography racket. He is shot dead by Geiger’s homosexual lover, and then Marlowe becomes aware of a much more sinister figure – gangster Eddie Mars, who is connected to Vivian Sternwood. This mad dance however is subsidiary to the poetry of Marlowe’s view of the dark world he inhabits. Chandler’s genius portrays Marlowe as a man trying to keep his footing while tiptoeing along the crumbling rim of a volcano, gazing down into the furnace below and doing his best to avoid being scorched.

In the end, as in all great novels it comes down to who we as readers care about. We don’t care too much for Carmen. We don’t care at all for the scattering of underworld figures who populate the book. We care about Vivian, who is damaged but perhaps redeemable. We care about the dying general still trying to protect his daughters and his legacy. Another cruel irony for the old man is the fate of Rusty Reagan, his corpse long since dumped in one of oil wells that have brought the family their immense wealth Above all, however, we care about Marlow and the bruises – mental and physical – he sustains while trying to do his job.

The book began with an optimistic Marlowe:

“I was wearing my powder blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.”

It ends with him making a bitter deal with Vivian, that she will take Carmen as far away as possible from the moral cesspit she has been bathing in, and that the fate of Rusty Reagan will be kept from her father.

“Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Reagan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as grey as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Reagan, would be sleeping the big sleep.”

The edition I read for this review was published by Penguin, and is part of their recent series of ‘Green Penguin’ crime classics. It is paired with Farewell My Lovely, and is available now.

November 14, 2023 0

THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BERNIE GUNTHER

Over the thirty years and fourteen books of the series, Philip Kerr’s wonderful antihero Bernie Gunther was never afraid to speak his mind, both to us as readers, and often to the real-life characters – as diverse as Reinhardt Heydrich, William Somerset Maugham and Eva Peron – who peopled the stories. Sometimes he could be profound, sometimes savagely funny, but always observant. Here is a selection of his best lines.

Most of us who love great novels were aware that Philip Kerr was ill, and it was a moment of great sadness when we learned of his death in March 2018. We could not grieve in the full sense of the word. That was for his family. But we could only dream of what other adventures PK could have dreamed up for his magnificent creation, had he been granted more years. As it was, Metropolis – ironically, the book featuring Bernie at his youngest – was published posthumously. The Gunther books will be read as long as people have the desire to learn about 20thC history and the people who – for good or ill – shaped it. Also, as long as there are readers who enjoy a well-turned insult and a melancholy gaze into the human soul, Bernie Gunther will live for ever.

August 18, 2023 0

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT . . . Lisa Towles

Lisa Towles is an innovative and inventive author from California who writes thrillers which share a common characteristic – each takes a well-worn plot-line or narrative within the genre, and gives it a distinctive twist.

CHOKE (2017)

Screen Shot 2023-07-09 at 09.15.17 Kerry Stine’s plan to rebuild her life goes into freefall when a patient vanishes from San Francisco General Hospital on her watch, thrusting her down a rabbit hole that leads to a past from which she can no longer escape. Out of work, terrified and running from the police, she trust no one and every step pushes her further away from logic and reality. 3000 miles away scientist Adrian Calhoun has developed a cigarette that cures lung cancer and he’s hellbent or distributing his miracle cure before the nig pharma mafia gets to him first. Kidnapped by his pursuers he is held prisoner in exchange for the chemical formula to his invention. His path crosses that of Kerry, and when the threads finally knit together Kerry discovers that what she and Adrian Calhoun have in common will return to her pieces of her past she never knew she’d lost.

THE UNSEEN (2019)

Ancient scrolls discovered by Rachel Careski threaten the power of the church. Descendants, of Pope Theopolis sworn to protect Christianity, believe Soren Careski took possession of them after Rachel disappeared, but he is dead. 40 years later Soren’s son Alex Careski receives an email from a dead man, he is fired from his job, shot at, his car is rammed and his wife Simone is kidnapped. In London meanwhile, two rare books go missing from the British Museum. The director of antiquities disappears, her colleague is murdered and her would-be lover is caught up in the intrigue. Soren left boxes of diaries in Alex’s cell: will they help unravel the truth about the disappearances of Alex’s wife father and aunt? Desperate for answers, he travels to Italy where he is kidnapped along with an enterprising young woman who is also embroiled in the deadly mysteries of the ancient scrolls.

NINETY-FIVE (2021)

Troubled University of Chicago student Zak Skinner accidentally uncovers evidence of an on-campus organised crime scam involving drugging students, getting them to commit crimes on camera and blackmailing them to continue their misdeeds under the threat of expulsion. Digging deeper, Zak discovers that the university scam is just the tip of the iceberg as it’s connected to a broader ring of crimes, themselves linked to a darkweb underworld. Following clues, Zak is led to a compound within Chicago’s abandoned Steelworker Park only to discover that he is being hunted. While trying to find his way out alive, Zak discovers that there is something much more personal he has been running from – his past. And now he has nowhere to hide.

HOT HOUSE (2021)

Former CIA operative and private investigator Mari Ellwyn teams up with seasoned investigator and former detective Derek Abernathy to look into the wrongful death of Sophie Michaud, a mentally ill college student whose murder is linked to Mari’s missing father. Two journalists – one dead, one missing – were writing a story on the dead college student with allegations about her connection to a federal judge. The two investigators must uncover the truth about Sophie Michaud before her killer makes them the next target. More importantly, Mari needs to find her missing father and reconcile her broken past and family.

THE RIDDERS (2022)

Screen Shot 2023-07-09 at 09.21.05 Brock “BJ” Janoff and his older brother Jonas run a private investigation firm in Venice California. BJ is randomly approached by a stranger on the street with a proposition he cannot refuse – $1 million to deliver a single envelope to a hotel lobby. They pay him upfront which sounds good on the surface, but now BJ’s life is in danger if he he doesn’t deliver the envelope in time. Obsessed with the envelope’s contents, BJ follows clues to investigate the people behind what he believes is an organised crime scam. When an act of brilliance changes the balance of power, the safety of everyone he loves is in jeopardy. The more he digs, the closer he gets to truths he cannot bear to face about the elusive Biderberg Group, his missing father and about the fate of his friends and family.

SALT ISLAND (2023)

The private investigation team of Mari Elwyn and Derek Abernathy are tested to the extreme with two new cases involving high-stakes corporate espionage and eco – terrorism. Someone is trying to sabotage billionaire CEO Jack Darcy’s reputation and – to complicate matters – his glamorous wife has gone missing. THRYVE, Darcy’s high-profile environmental start-up is lauded by investors as one of the best innovations of the decade, but a journalist has learned Darcy’s dirty little secret and is hellbent on exposing it to investors and the world at large. In a separate case Derek heads to the central valley to investigate two suspicious deaths from an explosion on a local farm. The deeper he digs, more questions emerge about what the murdered farm workers may have witnessed – toxic chemical dumping linked to an oil and gas company. A shadow witness is gathering evidence, but disappears before Derek can get to her. As Mari considers her next move in the Darcy case, her partner has gone undercover to find the missing witness and now he’s off grid. Mari must reckon with powerful ghosts from her past – a missing father and the truth about his double identity and secret agenda. She embarks on her own investigation to the British Virgin islands, one of her father’s secret haunts during his time as a CIA man. She uncovered details too painful to bear about her father herself and her future.

July 9, 2023 0

TWO MEN IN BERLIN . . . Bernie Gunther and John Russell (part two)

In part one of this feature I looked at the two fictional characters Bernie Gunther and John Russell and what happens in the novels, by Philip Kerr and David Downing, both series being rooted in Berlin. There, I dealt with the two series separately, and here I look at what divides them, and what common ground they share

In an imaginary world the two men might have met but, of course, they never did, despite Gunther being House Detective for the celebrated Adlon hotel (below), an establishment sometimes patronised by Russell.

Both men fought (for opposing sides) in the Great War and, in theory, coul have faced each other on opposite sides of No Man’s Land. Both have indelible memories of comrades being blown away by artillery and their tunics smeared with the brains of best mates. Both have an almost umbilical connection with Berlin, its parks and rivers, its tram and railway stations and its monumental architecture.

Gunther is on nodding terms with such Nazi luminaries as Joseph Goebbels, Rheinhardt Heydrich and Arthur Nebe. In contrast, John Russell operates well below this elevated level of the Nazi heirarchy, although he references such monsters as Beria and Himmler, and does have face to face meetings with Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (left).

John Russell is, largely, lucky in love. True, he has a failed marriage behind him but Paul, the son conceived and born when he was still married to Ilse, is a huge part of his life. He is also madly in reciprocated love with a prominent German actress, Effi Koenen. In the final novel, Masaryk Station, they are married. Effi is safe and well in Berlin – albeit in a Berlin being carved up between the Americans, the British, the Russians and the communist Germans who would go on to rule East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall. John and Effi have an adopted daughter Rosa, and Paul, who served as a teenager with the Wehrmacht, has survived the cataclysm of Hitler’s strategic blunders in the last two years of the war, and by 1948 he is living in London.

Gunther, in contrast, has known nothing but trauma in family terms. His wife dies in tragic circumstance and then his girlfriend – whi s regnant with his child – dies in one of the most infamous acts of WW2 – the sinking (by a Russian submarine) of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945. This account, detailed in The Other Side of Silence (2016) is, for me, the most compelling part of any of the Gunther novels:

The Wilhelm Gustloff was a cruise liner pressed into service as a military transport vessel, and in January 1945 it attempted to sail across the Baltic from Prussia. It was overloaded with some 10,000 personnel, mostly Germans fleeing the advance of the Red Army. The Soviet submarine S-13, captained by a maverick drunk and against orders sent three torpedoes into the side of the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship sank killing 9,400, and is the worst maritime disaster in history.

Gunther is not a sexual predator, but beds women when they they present themselves, wherever and whenever. Russell remains resolutely faithful to Effi, but as she is an improbably beautiful film star with a healthy sexual appetite, we should not be placing the martyr’s crown on Russell’s head just yet, but he always has someone to fight for – Effi and Rosa, and his son Paul. By contrast Gunther is mostly only fighting for himself and his tarnished ideas of what is right and what is wrong. When he dies, he suspects that there will be few mourners as his coffin is laid in earth.

As far as Berlin is concerned, the two series run on parallel tracks. They share the final decadence of the Weimar years, the descent into Nazi rule, the devastation after the spring of 1945, and the finger-on-the-trigger tensions of the 1960s.

Russell’s geographical stamping grounds are tight: his domain is Europe – Prague, Triest, Belgrade, Danzig, occasionally London but – of course – always Berlin. Gunther goes where the job – or his pursuers – send him. In the novels, we see him operating all over the world – Argentina, Cuba, Greece, the South of France and Russia. Neither David Downing nor Philip Kerr waste time on political posturing, but both remind us that no known measurement – not even the thickness of the proverbial Rizla cigarette paper – separates the degeneration of Hitler and Stalin. This is never more prominent than in A Man Without Breath in which Gunther is sent by Goebbels to Smolensk. His task? To prove that it was the Russians who murdered thousands of Polish officers and flung their corpses into deep trenches. In the real world, it was not until the 1990s that Russia admitted its guilt.

Gunther is – first and last – a cop. He is physically imposing and familiar with violence. Russell is – at least in his day job – a freelance journalist, and avoids physical confrontation if he possibly can. Stylistically, the novels are also chalk and cheese. We share Gunther’s world through his own voice while we learn what John Russell is up to via the invisible third party. There is another important difference in the way the two series sit in what could be called a family tree of thrillers. Philip Kerr shapes his man more in the image of Philip Marlowe, albeit a Marlowe much more enthusiastic about using his fists (or any other available weapon). Gunther also echoes Marlowe’s bitter poetry, and talent for memorable descriptions. This is Bernie Gunther on Heidrich:

“Tall, skeletally thin, his long, pale face lacking expression, like some plaster of Paris death mask, and his Jack Frost fingers clamped behind his ramrod-straight back, Heydrich stared outside for a moment or two, saying nothing to either of us.”

David Downing portrays the world of espionage in a way familiar to readers of John Le Carré; this world is undeniably dangerous and fatal to those who make mistakes, but it it is less overtly dramatic, and – although more subtle – nonetheless deadly. John Russell is – in his heart – a socialist, but one who despairs of the direction taken by post 1945 communist regimes. Bernie Gunther is resolutely German and someone who has suffered grievously at the hands of the Russians, but a man who has gazed into the depths of evil plumbed by Hitler and his minions and realises that there are four combatants in his particular battle – the Germans, the Russians, the Anglo-Americans – and himself.

David Downing’s series ends with John Russell and Effi, like tens of thousands of other Berliners, becoming engulfed by the total Russian shut-down of land access to the city in 1948 – the act that precipitated the legendary Berlin Airlift. Philip Kerr’s premature death in 2018 means we shall never know if Bernie Gunther eventually enjoyed his retirement, but David Downing is – happily – still with us, and an eighth novel, Union Station, is due in 2024, and jumps forward to 1953, with Russell living in California.

June 23, 2023 1

TWO MEN IN BERLIN . . . Bernie Gunther and John Russell (part one)

Bernie Gunther is the anti-hero of fourteen novels by the late Philip Kerr. Berlin cop, turned private investigator, sometime employee of Goebbels and Heydrich, and finally an international pariah, Gunther’s exploits span post Great War Germany to international intrigue in the 1950s. John Russell is an Anglo American journalist who begins the series of seven books by David Downing based in Germany. The books are all named after railway stations and span the years 1938 – 1948.

BERNIE GUNTHER

Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir series was published between 1989 and 1991, and introduced the world to Bernie Gunther. Strangely, it wasn’t until 2006 that the books March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem were followed up with The One from the Other, and until his death the Edinburgh-born author brought us regular episodes from the life of his tough, resourceful and compassionate hero. The final novel in the series, Metropolis, was published in 2019 after Kerr’s death and, ironically, is set in the earliest part of Gunther’s career.

To begin with, Gunther has survived two world wars and seen death in all its forms. However, what makes the series fascinating is the challenge he faces, which is to keep his moral compass steady. Uniquely amongst fictional detectives, Bernie has to operate during the dark and savage days of the Third Reich.

Having returned from the trenches of The Great War, Gunther becomes a member of Kripo (Kriminalpolizei), the investigative branch of the Berlin police. During the turbulent years of the 1930s, he tries to steer an even and honest course between the rival political thuggery of the Nazis and the Communists, and when Hitler seizes power he eventually finds himself forced to join the SD (Sicherheistdienst), the intelligence division of the SS. Sent to Ukraine as part of an extermination group but having no stomach for this, he is shunted into the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, and is captured by the Russians. After the War, his ambiguous record makes him a person of interest to the Americans, the Russians and the leadership of the GDR, and he leads a dangerous existence among Nazi refugees in Cuba and South America.

Like John Lawton and George Macdonald Frazer, with their respective Freddie Troy and Flashman series, Kerr places fictional characters within real events and alongside celebrated or notorious historical figures. And, he manages to do so in a fascinating and totally plausible way. Assuming that Gunther was born in the mid-to-late 1890s, he can still be at work in the mid 1950s, albeit a heavier, slower and more breathless version of his former self – a latter day Ulysses.

“Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield,” writes Kerr of his hero.

The author’s style, particularly his use of dialogue, set him apart from most contemporary writers. His books were genuine literature, although I suspect written without literary pretension. In Prague Fatale, he described Gunther meeting an American war correspondent in a Berlin blackout:

“His Old Spice and Virginia tobacco came ahead of him like a motorcycle outrider with a pennant on his mudguard. Solid footsteps bespoke sturdy wing-tip shoes that could have ferried him across the Delaware….his sweet and minty breath smelled of real toothpaste and testified to his having access to a dentist with teeth in his head who was still a decade off retirement.”

In his toughness, moral strength and cynical view of the world, Gunther is very much the heir of Philip Marlowe. His descriptions, sarcasm and one-line put-downs can be very funny. This is a line from A Quiet Flame, which came out in 2008:

“The isosceles of muscles between her chin and her collar-bone had stiffened, like something metallic. If I’d had a little wand I could have used it to tap out the part for triangle in the Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin.”
For more on Bernie Gunther, click the link below

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/bernie-gunther/

JOHN RUSSELL

Russell is an English journalist with an American mother. Until 1927 he was a member of the Communist Party but, like many others, he fell out of love with the kind of socialism being espoused by Stalin and his acolytes. After serving with the British army in The Great War, he moved to Berlin, married Ilse, and they had a son – Paul. The marriage didn’t last.

In terms of the actual time setting, Wedding Station (2021) gives us the earliest glimpse of John Russell.It is just months after Hitler’s rise to power, and Russell watches the Reichstag burn. Four weeks after Hitler’s accession, brownshirt mobs stalk the streets and the press prints what the Party tells it to.

In the first book (in publication terms) in the series, Zoo Station (2007) we are are introduced to Russell. It is 1939, Berlin, and Russell is an accredited American journalist, safe (for now) from the excesses of Hitler’s government. He has a glamorous girlfriend in Effie Koenen, who is a rising star in German cinema, but he still has a relatively civilised relationship with Ilse – and her new husband – and has regular access to Paul.

His communist background, American passport and fluency in both Russian and German make John Russell a unique target for the intelligence services of all the major powers and, almost like a serial bigamist he becomes wedded to the Sicherheitsdienst, the NKVD, the Abwehr, and the OSS. He plays each one off against the other, more or less successfully and, along with Effie and son Paul, survives the war, but finds ‘the peace’ post 1945 just as traumatic. In Masaryk Station (2013) set in 1948, Russell is told by a Soviet stooge that there is still a war, but that it is different:

“That war is over. It’s time you realised that another struggle – one every bit as crucial – is now underway.”

One of the main anxieties in Russell’s complex life is his son Paul. As the boy reaches his teens he becomes – like millions of other German lads – a member of the Hitlerjugend, and this threatens to drive a wedge between father and so. In Stettin Station (2009) we are in November/December 1941, and a famed German air ace of WW1, Ernst Udet is dead. In fact, he shot himself, disillusioned with Luftwaffe chief Goering, and the general conduct of the war, but for the purposes of national solidarity the official story is that he died in a plane crash. As his elaborate funeral cortege passes their viewing point, Paul chides his father for not making the Seig Heil salute with enough reverence. Russell dreads the day when Paul is conscripted to the army and sent to fight on the Eastern Front.

John Russell’s contact with senior Nazi officials is limited, but he does occasionally come face to face with Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German army. One of Russell’s many uneasy allegiances is to the Abwehr which, in fiction if not in fact, has been seen as the acceptable face of the Third Reich. This is perhaps born out by the fact that Canaris was executed for treason on 9th April 1945, in the dying days of Hitler’s regime.

Russell’s connection with Joseph Goebbels is more distant, and it is through Effi Koenen. She is probably the most ‘box office’ star of German cinema, and Goebbels – as propaganda minister – has absolute control over what films can be made, and what message they send out. As such, Effi is much sought after. Again in Stettin Station David Downing presents us with the bitter irony that Effi – pale, dark haired and sexually vibrant – is required to play a Jewish woman in a film with a vehemently anti-Jewish screenplay. For full reviews of Silesian Station and Wedding Station click the link below.

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/david-downing/

IN PART TWO OF THIS FEATURE
I will examine the differences – and similarities between Bernie Gunther and John Russell.

June 18, 2023 0

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER . . . 1953 – 2023

Christopher Fowler has died, and my heart is full.

He never made any secret of his illness, but kept friends and admirers up to date via his blog and Twitter messages. We all know that cancer is an absolute bastard, and its worst trait is that it is a death by a thousand cuts, Give a little – take a little bit more.

Grief is a strange thing. Too strong a word to use when someone you have never met in person dies? I remember being appalled and left feeling empty on that December morning in 1980 when people in Britain woke up to the news that John Lennon had been murdered. Sorry if this sounds about me, but I am simply trying to show that one can grieve for the death of someone – never met – when that person has been a substantial stone in one’s cultural wall. Lennon and The Beatles were the soundtrack to my late teens. With The Beatles, Hard Day’s Night, Revolver – scratched vinyl LPs taken from party to party, played endlessly as one tried to engineer a “slow” with some willowy teen girl, long since a grandmother. Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May books were, for me, equally iconic. Full of silly gags about long-forgotten brand names, comedic echoes of George and Weedon Grossmith, a knowledge of arcane London streets and alleys fully equal to that of Iain Sinclair (but more comprehensible) and – above all – a glorious distillation of the essence of what it is to be English that stands alongside the perceptions of John Betjeman and Philip Larkin. Never triumphant or xenophobic, mind you, but always with a poignant sense of the people who walked those London streets long before we did.

I never met Christopher, but we exchanged messages on social media, and I remember one lovely email from him about a review I had written of a B & M book, and he was as pleased as punch that I “got” what he was on about. We had an informal and indefinite arrangement to have a pint at some stage in The Scotch Stores on Caledonian Road. Sadly, that pint will remain undrunk.

When dear old Arthur Bryant ‘died’ at the end of London Bridge is Falling Down, I felt as one with the of thousands of grateful readers, people who loved the sounds and smells of hidden London, appreciated the jokes, chuckled quietly at the nostalgic product placing contained in the depths of Arthur’s coat pockets, and shared the poignancy of those moments when the two old gentlemen gazed down at the river from their special place, Waterloo Bridge – the final eleven words of the biblical quote known as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men will resonate as long as there are books to be read, jokes to be shared and dreams to be dreamed.

But these were merciful men whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.

March 3, 2023 0

AUTHOR PROFILE – Kirk Alex

The Tucumcari Press is based in Tucson, Arizona, and they have kindly sent me a couple of books by Kirk Alex. So who is he? He can tell us:

“I was born in Sarajevo in 1951. My family moved to Brussels when he was eight. I loved Brussels and wanted to stay on. Had the French language down in no time and wished to remain in Europe, at the least. But no, my parents felt like moving again, and there we were, two years later, U.S.-bound. Chicago, to be exact.

After finishing out my two-year military bit returned to Chicago in pretty sorry shape, dealing with bad dreams and a general state of numbness; I was dead inside. Got myself a slave-wage job not far from the Loop, picked up a typewriter for thirty bucks (on layaway; they had layaway back then) and started writing short stories. Got nowhere. After six months of that, tossed what few possessions I had (some paperbacks and clothes) into the used convertible I owned at the time, and headed west. Thought that’s what I had to do, go along with the Pull of the Mythical West, to pursue a dream or two.

I was young and naive, didn’t realize I could just as easily have remained in the Windy City like the great Nelson Algren and written my ass off right there. Live and learn. Instead, ended up in a vicious pit called L.A. for too many years to count.

In L.A., unless you have the flashy car, luxury apartment, good paying job, you can forget about having a woman in your life to be with, any of that; so yeah, we hung in there alone. What doesn’t break you makes you stronger, so they say.

Was a furniture mover, delivered phone books door-to-door, drove a taxi, was a movie extra, did factory work, painted apartments, did TV repos even, sold rebuilt mattresses to Sunset Strip prostitutes and out-of-work Hollywood actor types. Kept writing and reading. Amassed my share of rejection slips.

Bottom line: My olivetti/LETTERA provided the only light at the end of the tunnel. Granted it may have been a weak light, still, it was the only lifeline available. Without books/writing, I might easily have ended up in a straightjacket in a rubber room somewhere, or dead.

Found myself in the jungles of ‘Nam at nineteen, ducking sniper fire and mortar shrapnel, when I wasn’t busy burning leeches off my testicles and side-stepping snakes and boobytraps.”

Kirk Alex’s novel Lustmord: Anatomy of a Serial Butcher was a finalist in the Kindle Book Review’s Best Book Awards of 2014. He is also the author of Zook, Fifty Shades of Tinsel, the story collection: Ziggy Popper at Large, and the Love, Lust & Murder series:

So what about the Edgar ‘Doc’ Holiday books? You might meed to be a fan of Westerns to get the nickname. The LA private eye’s near namesake (there’s an extra ‘L’) wasn’t a doctor at all, but an infamous gambler and gunfighter, who happened to be a dentist. He was a chum of Wyatt Earp, and took part in the legendary shoot-out at the OK Corral in Tombstone. One thing is for sure, the Edgar ‘Doc’ Holiday books are long – the two I have run to 573 and 631 pages respectively. Alex is also an admirer (as am I) of one of the all-time geniuses of crime fiction, and he includes a couple of quotes from the great man in the frontispiece to the books.

To give you an idea of Alex’s prose style, there’s a vivid scene (probably not for pet lovers) in Hard Noir Holiday where the detective ends up at an Arizona dogfight as part of his investigation.

“The MC waved his arms and the killers were released. NightDemon’s lunge was so fierce and carried so much force that the black pit bull not only knocked the other down, but was already plowing his jaw back into the other’s snout. He was tearing away at the left side of Max Pain’s mouth. The tan pit bull attempted to pull away and only managed to lose a chunk of his snout in the process.”

With characters called Biffle, McCrud, Jack Spot and Ilsa Goth, there is no mistaking that we are deep in Noir territory, and this novel is clearly not for the faint of heart, or those who like their fictional crime committed in sleepy English villages. I intend to make a start on these books as soon as I can fit them in around blog tour commitments, but for now, they are available on Amazon.

April 7, 2022 0