Dark Passages: The Holocaust-Era Gumshoe

My newest Dark Passages column at the LA Times looks at the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr (most recently A QUIET FLAME, which is published next week here though it's been out in the UK for a year already) and stakes the claim for their importance by stressing the marriage of entertainment and education. Here's how it opens:

At the moment, the current contretemps in American letters revolves around "The Kindly Ones," Jonathan Littell's mammoth, translated-from-French novel about the horrors of the Holocaust that's divided critics around the world considerably since its initial 2006 publication. Is it, as legendary editor Michael Korda would have it, "a world-class masterpiece of astonishing brutality, originality, and force," or, as per New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani's verdict, "willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent"?

Others are better equipped to solve this polarizing conundrum, but I bring Littell up because he attempts -- successfully or otherwise -- to tackle Nazi atrocities head-on, consciously aiming to write a great work of fiction and relegating the reader's entertainment to mere afterthought. That approach may work for a select few, but eschewing the didactic in favor of embedding the lessons of this monstrous time in history through the prism of the classic entertainment trope of a wisecracking, archly ironic private detective has served British author Philip Kerr extremely well since the three novels that constitute his "Berlin Noir" (Penguin: 836 pp., $20 paper) trilogy first appeared, between 1989 and 1991. In roughly the same number of pages, "Berlin Noir" does exactly the opposite of "The Kindly Ones" -- examining the Holocaust through the prism of what transpired before and after -- and, as a result, the trilogy (and two subsequent sequels) stands a better chance of literary permanence.

Read on for the rest.

Comments

[Rich Rennicks]

Thanks for the review, Sarah. I'll look these up.

Have you read David Downing's two Berlin novels: Zoo Station & Silesian Station (Soho)? They focus on a British journalist determined to remain in Berlin in the very-late 1930s. He's divorced from a German woman, so he wants to remain near his son. His work gets him access to the political figures of the time, so British, Russian & German intelligence all want him to spy for them.

They're really interesting, atmospheric period mysteries, very well researched.

[Eileen Kavanagh]

Sarah,

Good review. Not only have you described these books so that I want to go out and get them, you have shown that a reviewer can describe the essence of a book, give the reader a flavor of it, without giving away important plot points. I have now completely given up on Marilyn Stasio after her review this week of The Tourist. The NYT should put a spoiler alert at the beginning of each of her reviews. So thanks for the lead to what sounds like a fascinating series, and thanks for your craft in writing it.

Eileen Kavanagh

[Charles Finch]

Berlin Noir is for me the best genre fiction ever about WW2. Including Furst etc....thanks for writing about him.