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Hailed by Salman Rushdie as a "brilliantly innovative thriller-writer," Philip Kerr is the creator of taut, gripping, noir-tinged mysteries that are nothing short of spellbinding. In this second book of the Berlin Noir trilogy, The Pale Criminal brings back Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman who thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin--until he turned freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. Hard-hitting, fast-paced, show more and richly detailed, The Pale Criminal is noir writing at its blackest and best. show lessTags
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The Pale Criminal is the second of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir series featuring private investigator Bernie Gunther. He's trying to make a living in pre-war Nazi Germany and avoid the Nazis, but that is just not going to be possible. While the first book of the series, March Violets, was set during the 1936 Olympics, The Pale Criminal is set at the time of the first wave of German invasions.
Bernie has just been hired by a wealthy woman, who wants him to find out who is blackmailing her about her homosexual son. In a separate story line, Gunther is commanded by Reinhardt Heydrich to investigate the murders of several Aryan girls. The reader know the two plots inevitably will be tied together but it's done in a way that is very show more believable. The subject matter is not pleasant to read about but it's done in an accurate way, depicting the Nazi's hostility to both Judaism and Catholicism.
Bernie Gunther is the epitome of a noir private investigator, and is the center of the novel in every respect. He's cynical and filled with foreboding about the future of Germany. The setting of 1938 Berlin is very realistic, and the author throw in plenty of details about the architecture and surrounding neighborhoods to make the story extremely vivid. This novel is both complex and chilling, and even if you don't like the subject matter, you can't stop reading. I'm looking forward to Book 3, German Requiem. show less
Bernie has just been hired by a wealthy woman, who wants him to find out who is blackmailing her about her homosexual son. In a separate story line, Gunther is commanded by Reinhardt Heydrich to investigate the murders of several Aryan girls. The reader know the two plots inevitably will be tied together but it's done in a way that is very show more believable. The subject matter is not pleasant to read about but it's done in an accurate way, depicting the Nazi's hostility to both Judaism and Catholicism.
Bernie Gunther is the epitome of a noir private investigator, and is the center of the novel in every respect. He's cynical and filled with foreboding about the future of Germany. The setting of 1938 Berlin is very realistic, and the author throw in plenty of details about the architecture and surrounding neighborhoods to make the story extremely vivid. This novel is both complex and chilling, and even if you don't like the subject matter, you can't stop reading. I'm looking forward to Book 3, German Requiem. show less
The Pale Criminal is the second novel in Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy featuring the private investigator, Bernie Gunther. Set in 1938 in the midst of the crisis precipitated by Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland, Gunther finds himself called into the service of the Berlin police force where he is under the direct supervision of arch-Nazi Richard Heydrich. Gunther has a single case to solve. Teenaged girls which conform to the Aryan ideal are being murdered in Berlin and all the evidence points to a Jewish killer. As Gunther tries to discover the truth he faces the corruption and brutality of his fellow police officers and finds himself confronted with Heinrich Himmler and a cabal of SS officers who are attempting to frame the Jews in show more order to bring a pogrom to Berlin.
This was another expertly written Kerr thriller. His knowledge of the city of Berlin and German history underpins a plot which is complex and full on incident and surprises. The character of Gunther is further fleshed out from the first in the trilogy and the pen portraits of Heydrich and Himmler, the architects of the Holocaust are chilling, Casual violence underlaid with brutal ambition and superstition are presented as drivers of these evil men and Kerr cleverly finds a way for Gunther to come up with results that they didn't want, and yet still stay alive. show less
This was another expertly written Kerr thriller. His knowledge of the city of Berlin and German history underpins a plot which is complex and full on incident and surprises. The character of Gunther is further fleshed out from the first in the trilogy and the pen portraits of Heydrich and Himmler, the architects of the Holocaust are chilling, Casual violence underlaid with brutal ambition and superstition are presented as drivers of these evil men and Kerr cleverly finds a way for Gunther to come up with results that they didn't want, and yet still stay alive. show less
While I really enjoyed the first book in the series, March Violets earlier this month (review), I can't say I felt quite the same about this one. We are now in the Berlin of 1938 and Bernie Gunther is asked to rejoin the police force to work on a serial murder case. Several young girls have gone missing and been found defiled in the most gruesome manner: raped, tied by their feet and drained of their blood exactly like slaughtered pigs. All the girls were around 15, blonde and blue-eyed; the perfect Arian stereotype. Another private case has him uncovering a man blackmailing a wealthy widow, a publisher whose son is a homosexual who (inadvisedly in this age of Nazi power) kept up a correspondence with his lover, some of those letters show more now being in the hands of the blackmailer. Two very different cases, and no apparent link to the question of the oppression of the Jews in this year which is marked by Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass, an organized attack against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and Austria which took place on the 9th and 10th November 1938. But of course we eventually learn that no crime in this time and place could occur without the aim of further oppressing the Jews.
While I liked the way the case started resolving itself two-thirds of the way in, I've developed a serious dislike for forms of entertainment which centre on serial rapes and murders of women, and the details in this case were truly horrendous. Perhaps because of this, I focused more on little things that bothered me with the first book; endless questionable similes and a main hero who is a typical macho male, which is accurate enough for the period portrayed and amused me the first time around, but here set off against the background of these female victims was distasteful to me. Is that reverse sexism on my part? All the same, solid writing overall (except those similes—why?) and a crime story which places the reader firmly in the heart of Nazi Germany just before WWII. I'll be reading (or listening to) the third book to see what trouble Bernie gets into next. show less
While I liked the way the case started resolving itself two-thirds of the way in, I've developed a serious dislike for forms of entertainment which centre on serial rapes and murders of women, and the details in this case were truly horrendous. Perhaps because of this, I focused more on little things that bothered me with the first book; endless questionable similes and a main hero who is a typical macho male, which is accurate enough for the period portrayed and amused me the first time around, but here set off against the background of these female victims was distasteful to me. Is that reverse sexism on my part? All the same, solid writing overall (except those similes—why?) and a crime story which places the reader firmly in the heart of Nazi Germany just before WWII. I'll be reading (or listening to) the third book to see what trouble Bernie gets into next. show less
I am finding that I have some guilt about enjoying a detective mystery series with this setting. And yet the deeply weird SS spiritualism subplot deserves a genre rendition. Nowhere to shelter in Berlin at this time.
Bernie’s investigations continue in The Pale Criminal. It’s a few years later and Hitler is about to move into Czechoslovakia. He is hired to find the blackmailer of a wealthy widow who owns a large publishing firm. Her son is being treated in a fancy sanitarium (psychotherapy has been ruled illegal by the Nazis — one of their few sensible actions) for his homosexual tendencies. As that persuasion has also been made illegal, he is a prime candidate for a concentration camp, so his mother is willing to make substantial payments to keep his secret. Heydrich, head of the SD, blackmails Bernie into returning to the Kripo (the regular German police), realizing that exdetective inspector Bernie is one of the few good detectives left in show more Berlin, the others having been liquidated from the force in favor of political appointees. Bernie also has no political or racial ax to grind, and someone in Berlin has been methodically killing teenage Aryan girls. The Jews who were routinely accused of the earlier crimes were in jail at the time of the later killings, so they could not have been responsible. Heydrich fears that if the news gets out, a general panic will result, making it look as if he cannot keep order. The evidence soon begins to point toward the complicity of Julius Streicher, hated Nazi mob boss and Bavarian bully. The killings all have a ritualistic element and Streicher’s sensationalist newspaper Der Stürmer has printed accusations and fake pictures of Jewish ritualistic murders that bear a striking resemblance to the real killings, details of which have not been released to the media. Bernie’s theory is that Streicher wants to incite a pogrom in Berlin against the Jews by blaming them for these horrid killings. show less
Second in the series featuring PI Bernie Gunther; in this volume WWII is well under way. Berlin is being plagued by a series of ritual murders of young Aryan women; the murders have routinely been pinned on Jewish suspects, but this practice is becoming an obvious nonsense since, despite the luckless Jews having been killed or banished to concentration camps, the killings have continued. Heydrich, aware that most of the cops under his command are incompetent political appointees, dragoons Bernie into rejoining the Kripo as a sort of consultant in order to find out who the real murderer might be. Soon attention is focusing on Julius Streicher, loathsome even by Nazi standards, who may be engineering the killings in hopes of fomenting show more pogroms.
Simultaneously, Bernie is trying to aid a rich publisher who's being blackmailed over the homosexuality of her son -- something that, for obvious reasons, must be kept strictly a secret in Nazi Germany.
I liked this book a lot better than its predecessor, March Violets, mainly because the obsessive wisecrackery of the previous volume has here been toned down a little; perhaps Kerr had a stricter editor this time around or perhaps he was responding to the comments of reviewers of the first book -- who knows? As with the earlier book, though, I was still unconvinced by Bernie's sex life -- he seems merely to have to say "Fancy a quick one?" to any woman he meets and, next thing, he's in the midst of Position #294 complete with live marmoset and tub of cold spaghetti. Something like that, anyway. This aside, the plot worked admirably and, as before, the sheer oppressiveness of the Nazi regime, and of the ubiquitous terror it deliberately instilled in even its supporters, is excellently conveyed. show less
Simultaneously, Bernie is trying to aid a rich publisher who's being blackmailed over the homosexuality of her son -- something that, for obvious reasons, must be kept strictly a secret in Nazi Germany.
I liked this book a lot better than its predecessor, March Violets, mainly because the obsessive wisecrackery of the previous volume has here been toned down a little; perhaps Kerr had a stricter editor this time around or perhaps he was responding to the comments of reviewers of the first book -- who knows? As with the earlier book, though, I was still unconvinced by Bernie's sex life -- he seems merely to have to say "Fancy a quick one?" to any woman he meets and, next thing, he's in the midst of Position #294 complete with live marmoset and tub of cold spaghetti. Something like that, anyway. This aside, the plot worked admirably and, as before, the sheer oppressiveness of the Nazi regime, and of the ubiquitous terror it deliberately instilled in even its supporters, is excellently conveyed. show less
Kerr does an excellent job of characterizing pre WW2 Berlin. His characters are aptly and archly drawn so that their interactions blend naturally into the blighted environment that he has created. Which scene is an ugly, gritty recreation of the evolution of the Nazi mentality as it poisons its own nest before spreading into the rest of Europe.
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El antiguo policía Bernie Gunther creía que ya lo había visto todo en las calles de Berlín de los años treinta. Pero cuando dejó el cuerpo para convertirse en detective privado, cada nuevo caso lo iba hundiendo un poco más en los horribles excesos de la subcultura nazi. Después de la guerra, en medio del esplendor imperial y decadente de Viena, Bernie incluso llega a poner al show more descubierto un legado que, en comparación, convierte las atrocidades cometidas en
época de guerra en un juego de niños... show less
época de guerra en un juego de niños... show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Pale Criminal
- Original title
- The Pale Criminal
- Original publication date
- 1990
- People/Characters
- Bernie Gunther
- Important places*
- Berlijn, Duitsland; Wenen, Oostenrijk
- Important events
- Munich Conference (1938); Kristalnacht (1938)
- Epigraph
- Much about your good people moves me to disgust, and it is not their evil I mean. How I wish they possessed a madness through which they could perish, like this pale criminal. Truly I wish their madness were called truth or l... (show all)oyalty or justice: but they possess their virtue in order to love long and in a miserable ease.
—Nietzche - Dedication
- To Jane
- First words
- You tend to notice the strawberry tart in Kranzler's Cafe a lot more when your diet forbids you to have any.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)But always there were more, and more still, so that the burning middens seemed never to grow any smaller, and as I stood and watched the glowing embers of the fires, and breathed the hot gas of deciduous death, it seemed to me that I could taste the very end of everything.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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