1940s

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

THE NIGHT RAIDS . . . Between the covers

Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, Jim Kelly’s 1940s Cambridge copper returns for his third case, in The Night Raids. Those readers who met Brooke in The Great Darkness and The Mathematical Bridge (the links will take you to my reviews) will know that he is cultured, educated, but afflicted with an aversion to bright light as a result of horrific treatment by his Turkish captors during The Great War. One consequence is that he must wear spectacles with special lenses; another is that finds sleep both difficult and troubled, in that when he when he can find repose, his dreams are stark and threatening. He lives in Cambridge with his wife Claire and two grown up children, of whom Joy is a nurse like her mother, while Luke is in the army. We learn that he is currently training with Special Forces. Because of his condition, Brooke is something of what used to be called a night owl. He is most at ease when he is outside, enveloped in the still watches of the night, and he has regular ports of call such as an all-night tea stall, a friend who is an air-raid observer, and a college porter.

Cambridge sits on the Western edge of the Fen Country – formerly a vast expanse of freshwater peat bog, meres and ever-changing rivers. By the time in which the book is set, the Fen had long since been tamed by numerous arrow-straight drainage channels and sluices, but in the Eden Brooke stories it sits out there, beyond the lights of the town, like a huge dark and silent presence. Water is, in fact, an essential theme of these novels. Brooke himself swims in the river for exercise and contemplation; it is also a place where people die, sometimes by their own hand, but also at the hands of others.

In Night Raids we see some of the story through the eyes of a crew of a German Heinkel bomber. Their mission is to destroy an essential bridge over the river; the bridge, crucially, carries the railway taking vital men and munitions to the east coast, where invasion is a daily expectation.The bombers come over at night, and have so far failed to destroy the bridge. What they have done, however, is unload some of their bombs on residential areas of the town, and inside one of the terraced houses wrecked by the raid, Brooke finds the body of an elderly woman. Her death is clearly attributable to Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe, but the fact that her left ring finger and middle finger have been removed with a hacksaw cannot, sadly be laid at the door of the Reichsmarschall.

When one of the dead woman’s granddaughters goes missing, along with her naturalised Italian boyfriend, Brooke can only look on in frustration as the case becomes more complex, and threatens to spin out of control. In what seems to be a totally unconnected incident, Brooke has discovered that someone – either intentionally or by accident – has released a pollutant into the river, possibly as a result of black market skullduggery. Once again, the river itself becomes a key element in the story. A body is discovered submerged near a fish farm which breeds pike, a delicacy served at High Table in some of the colleges. Bodies in rivers are commonplace in crime fiction, but this is as haunting and macabre as anything I have ever read:

“Boyle bent down to see if he could feel her breath between the blue lips, but the slightly bloated flesh, and the glazed eyes, told Brooke that she’d been dead for several days. The still-flowing blood told a lie. The pike had nibbled at the flesh but these wounds were puckered and bleached. The blood ran from black leeches which dotted her neck and legs, secreting their magic enzyme, which had stopped the blood from clotting. They stood back in silence as the cold corpse bled.”

Jim Kelly is one of our finest writers. Were I ever to be asked what my Desert Island third book choice would be, after the Bible and a complete Shakespeare, it would be a complete works of Jim Kelly. In The Night Raids he conjures up a narrative tour de force which combines the Cambridge murders, an exploitative criminal gang and the malevolent intentions of the Luftwaffe – into a dramatic and breathtaking final act. The Night Raids is published by Allison & Busby and is out now.

FOR MORE ON JIM KELLY CLICK THIS LINK

February 28, 2020 0

PLENTY UNDER THE COUNTER . . . Between the covers

his 1943 novel by Kathleen Hewitt is the third in the excellent series of Imperial War Museum reprints of wartime classics, but couldn’t be more different from the first two, From The City, From The Plough and Trial By Battle. Whereas they were both literary novels shot through with harrowing accounts of men in battle, Plenty Under The Counter is an almost jolly affair, a conventional murder mystery set against the trials, tribulations and financial opportunities of civilian life in wartime London.

A jolly murder? Well, of course. Fictional murders can be range from brutal to comic depending on the genre, and although the corpse found in the back garden of Mrs Meake’s lodging house – 15 Terrapin Road – is just as dead as any described by Val McDermid or Michael Connelly, the mood is set by the chief amateur investigator, a breezy and frightfully English RAF pilot called David Heron on recuperation leave from his squadron, and his elegantly witty lady friend Tess. He is from solid county stock:

“There was his Aunt Jane, enduring the full horror of only having two servants to wait on her. There was an uncle, retired from the Indian Army, now clinging like a cobweb to the musty armchairs in his club.”

eaders will not need a degree in 20^th century social history to recognise that the book’s title refers to the methods used by shopkeepers to circumvent the official rationing of food and fancy goods. More sinister is the presence – both in real life and in the book – of criminals who exploit the shortages to make serious money playing the black market and for whom deadly violence is just a way of life.

Hewitt gives us plenty of Waugh-ish social satire on the way, partly courtesy of David’s friend Bob Carter, a young man with what they used to call ‘a dodgy ticker’. Turned down from active service he expends his energy on extracting donations from rich people in order to open a bizarre club, where he hopes that people of all nations (barring Jerry, the Eyeties and the Nips, of course) will mingle over a glass or two and thus further the cause of nation speaking unto nation. There is also the grotesque Annie, who serves as Mrs Meake’s maid of all work. Annie is painfully thin, a little short of six feet tall, and the first thing that most people see of her when she enters a room is her teeth.

he ingredients simmering away in the pot of this murder mystery are exotic. There is Mrs Meake, matronly now in her middle age, but still dreaming of the days when she was a beauty in the chorus line on the London stage; her daughter Thelma, a thoroughly spoiled brat who has movie aspirations above her ability; also, who was the swarthy seafaring man trying to sell a fancy-handled knife in the local pub? David’s fellow residents at 15 Terrapin Road are a study in themselves – Cumberbatch, the retired rubber planter with a secret in his room; Lipscott, the Merchant Navy man besotted with a waif-like girl, and the misanthropic Smedley, with his limp and a sudden need for £100.

The story rattles along in fine style as the hours tick by before David has to return to the war. He has two pressing needs. One is to buy the special licence which will enable him to marry Tess, and the other is to find the Terrapin Road murderer. Hewitt (right) is too good a writer to leave her story lightly bobbing about on the bubbles of wartime champagne (probably a toxic mix of white wine and ginger ale) and she darkens the mood in the last few pages, leaving us to ponder the nature of tragedy and self-sacrifice.

September 20, 2019 2

THE MATHEMATICAL BRIDGE . . . Between the covers

“Detective Inspector Eden Brooke trudged into Market Hill, the city’s great square, as snowflakes fell, thick and slow, each one a mathematical gem, seesawing down through the dead of night. Every sound was muffled, a clock striking the hour out of time, the rhythmic bark of a riverside dog, the distant rumble of a munitions train to the east, heading for the coastal ports. The blackout was complete, but the snow held its own light, an interior luminescence, revealing the low clouds above. Brooke stopped in his tracks, his last crisp footstep echoless, and wondered if he could hear the snow falling; an icy whisper in time with the sparkling of the crystals as they settled on the cobbles, composing themselves into a seamless white sheet.”

“Begin as you mean to go on” says the old adage, and Jim Kelly sets himself a hard task with the brilliant and evocative first paragraph of The Mathematical Bridge. The beautiful use of language aside, Kelly’s first 126 words convey a wealth of information. A country at war. Midwinter. A city preparing for an attack from the air. A policeman out and about when honest men are abed.

Eden Brooke first appeared in The Great Darkness (2018) and you can read my review by clicking the blue link. A copper in the university city of Cambridge, he is a war veteran, not of the Western Front, but of the desert campaign, one of ‘Allenby’s Lads.’ We join him in that first winter of the Second World War, when German bombers have yet to inflict their terror on the houses and streets below them. Tragedy strikes when a boy, evacuated from his London home to the relative safety of a Roman Catholic community in Cambridge, is feared drowned in the fast-freezing River Cam. His body is eventually recovered, but not before Brooke has unearthed a plot to bring death and destruction to the streets of Cambridge.

The conspirators are not Germans but people from much nearer home who firmly believe that their enemy’s enemy is their friend. With two Irish republican conspirators sitting in a Birmingham jail, sentenced to death for a 1939 bomb atrocity in Coventry, Brooke realises that the next potential target for the IRA is Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, younger brother to the King. Henry is due to make a morale-boosting visit to Cambridge to boost the war effort, and Brooke is desperate to find the link between the dead boy in the river and the Irish community who worship at St Alban’s church.

Eden Brooke is an engaging character. Blighted by vision problems and chronic insomnia – both the result of his wartime treatment at the hands of brutal Turkish captors – he goes about his work with a steely intensity, much to the despair of his wife and daughter. Kelly’s portrait of provincial England in the first months of WW2 is mesmerising, more so given the added piquancy of our knowledge of what will happen, contrasted with the uncertainty of the characters in the novel.

Give Jim Kelly a landscape, a town, a city, an isolated village, and he will mobilise and send it off to war. Fans of his Philip Dryden novels will know the dramatic chiaroscuro he paints that shows how the comfortable middle-class cathedral city of Ely sits surrounded by dark and broken hard-scrabble villages out in the Fen. His Norfolk copper, Peter Shaw, knows only too well the contrast between the rough estates of King’s Lynn and the Chelsea-On-Sea second homes further up the Norfolk coastline. Eden Brooke’s Cambridge is a vivid and vital character in The Mathematical Bridge. Kelly makes it, despite the murders, an island of relative calm and rationality, for beyond it, out there in the flat darkness, lies The Fen.

This is writing of the highest quality. Not just with the lame caveat ‘for a crime novel’ but writing with a touch of poetry and elegance gracing every line. Even when the crime is solved, the perpetrators are behind bars, and the delightfully complex contradictions of the plot have been explained, Kelly (right) still has the emotional energy to give us a last scene which manages to be poignant but, at the same time, life-affirming.