Rating: 
Summary: Ugly Good
Review: (Couldn't say "Pretty Good" about the Nazis.) I liked Kerr's atmospheric description of the 1936 Berlin setting, inhabitants, slang, and notorious characters, even though it is written over 40 years later. The cover photo of a dark and foggy street is redolent of the infamous Nazi policy of Nacht und Neble, what we now call "Disappearance" in today's tiresome totalitarianisms. Ex-"bull" PI Gunther makes a career of finding the missing. He is on the outs with everyone (except a couple of drop-dead gorgeous women), but is inexorably sucked into the sewer of National Socialism as he pursues an ostensible murder and theft in MARCH VIOLETS. For some reason Kerr puts great emphasis on tracking him through precise street addresses and intersections (but doesn't provide a map). I'm a bit put off by Gunther's bouts of hardboiled flippancy--this too-obvious Chandler/Hammett gambit (even Goering is a fan!)--that for me recurrently broke into the spell of the oppressive ambiance of random fear built up in the novel. The plot ramifies aimlessly for a good part, until two revelatory plot reversals shook my carefully nurtured beliefs and pulled the threads together. However, by then the obsessive (and historically accurate) intrigue among the Nazi heavies had me mistrusting anything, even the author! The ending seems coincidental and strangely inconclusive, leaving Gunther's love life particularly hanging, perhaps for the sequel. Or perhaps the ending is just hush-hush (the creepy Gestapo might be watching US, don't you know?).
Rating: 
Summary: One of the absolute best HB detective novels
Review: Although his other work never really hits the mark, this trio of hard boiled detective novels set in nazi germany (pre,post,and during) are truly great fiction. I have recommended this book to a wide variety of readers and everyone of them has loved it.
Rating:
Summary: Fantabulous
Review: An absolutely staggeringly great book. Loved by all I recommended it to. It's a great shame that his subsequent novels were so much flimsier.
Rating:
Summary: Worth a second read.
Review: Ater having just returned from Berlin, I am rereading "Berlin Noir". The book holds up even better a second time. Kerr has done his homework in depicting Germany before, during and after the war and the three stories he uses to showcase the extensive research are nothing less than spectacular.
Rating:
Summary: More Bernie Gunther Please Mr Kerr.
Review: Berlin Noir contains the three novels in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther trilogy. The first two are set in pre war Nazi Germany the third in post war Berlin and Vienna. Bernie Gunther is an ex Kripo (The German Police's Detective Division) officer, who has left the force, before the Nazis threw him out, and is now a private eye. Hardbitten and cynical, Gunther,whose main job is tracking down missing Jews for their families, becomes embroiled with historical figures like Goering and Heydrich.
Kerr's idea is take Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe and set him down in Nazi Germany. The idea works and Kerr can follow it through with good writing and plotting. He creates a believable pre and post war Berlin and although I am not sure how accurate his Berlin slang is, it does not matter as you believe it to be true.
The first novel, March Violets, also features the Rings, German criminal organisations which controlled crime in pre war Berlin. Smashed by bigger and more murderous criminals, that is the Nazis, the Rings also feature in the film M.
All in all an good idea and a good read. More Bernie Gunther please Mr Kerr.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and haunting
Review: Bernie Gunther is perhaps the greatest detective ever to see print. And I learned more about pre and post Nazi Germany than any history book could ever teach. I was steered to this trilogy by Amazon.com. I read the novels of Alan Furst, and they suggested I'd like this, as well. Thanks, Amazon!
Rating:
Summary: Chandleresque prose. Don't believe me? Listen.
Review: Chandler's opening style is widely imitated. Here's a conscious tribute which goes Chandler one better by putting this voice into Hitler's Germany. Here he parodies the opening of THE BIG SLEEP, and does it deliciously. Only Barry Fantoni does Chandler as well. "Circling the courtyard was an ambulatory, with a roof supported by thick beams and wooden columns, and this was patrolled by man with a pair of evil-looking Dobermanns. There wasn't much light apart from the coachlamp by the fron door, but as far as I could see the house was white with pebbledash walls and a deep mansard roof--as big as a decent-sized hotel of the sort I couldn't afford. Somewhere in the trees behind the house a peacock was screaming for help." This paragraph is also brilliantly constructed, but what especially appeals to me is the self-effacing joke about the size of the house and the last sentence, the sort of telling detail that mirrors the sardonic attitude of the narrator toward the Nazi rich. Next paragraph: "Closer to the door I got my first good look at the doctor. Since he was at least fifty, I suppose you could say he was distinguished looking. Taller than he had seemed sitting in the back of the car, and dressed fastidiously, but with a total disregard for fashion. He wore a stiff color you could have sliced bread with, a pin-striped suit of a light-grey shade, a cream-colored waist-coat and spats; his hands were gloved in grey kid, and on his neatly cropped square grey head he wore a large grey hat with a brim that surrounded the high pleated crown like a castle moat. He looked like an old suit of armor." A typical Chandleresque paragraph with the short summation sentence at the end like a punchline. Next paragraph: "He ushered me towards the big mahogany door which swung open to reveal an ashen-faced butler who stood aside as we crossed the threshold and stepped into the wide entrance hall. It was the kind of hall that made you feel lucky just to have got through the door. Twin flights of stairs with gleaming white banisters led up to the upper floors, and on the ceiling hung a chandeleir that was bigger than a church-bell and gaudier than a stripper's ear-rings. I made a mental note to raise my fees." "Another Chandleresque paragraph with the trade mark existenialism in the last sentence. He's not political, let alone communist, but the contrast between rich and poor is never far from the narrator's mind." Next paragraph: "The butler, who was Arab, asked to take my hat. "I'll hold onto it if you don't mind," I told him, feeling its brim between my fingers. "It will help me to keep my hands off the silver."
Rating:
Summary: Chandleresque prose. Don't believe me? Listen.
Review: Chandler's opening style is widely imitated. Here's a conscious tribute which goes Chandler one better by putting this voice into Hitler's Germany. Here he parodies the opening of THE BIG SLEEP, and does it deliciously. Only Barry Fantoni does Chandler as well. "Circling the courtyard was an ambulatory, with a roof supported by thick beams and wooden columns, and this was patrolled by man with a pair of evil-looking Dobermanns. There wasn't much light apart from the coachlamp by the fron door, but as far as I could see the house was white with pebbledash walls and a deep mansard roof--as big as a decent-sized hotel of the sort I couldn't afford. Somewhere in the trees behind the house a peacock was screaming for help." This paragraph is also brilliantly constructed, but what especially appeals to me is the self-effacing joke about the size of the house and the last sentence, the sort of telling detail that mirrors the sardonic attitude of the narrator toward the Nazi rich. Next paragraph: "Closer to the door I got my first good look at the doctor. Since he was at least fifty, I suppose you could say he was distinguished looking. Taller than he had seemed sitting in the back of the car, and dressed fastidiously, but with a total disregard for fashion. He wore a stiff color you could have sliced bread with, a pin-striped suit of a light-grey shade, a cream-colored waist-coat and spats; his hands were gloved in grey kid, and on his neatly cropped square grey head he wore a large grey hat with a brim that surrounded the high pleated crown like a castle moat. He looked like an old suit of armor." A typical Chandleresque paragraph with the short summation sentence at the end like a punchline. Next paragraph: "He ushered me towards the big mahogany door which swung open to reveal an ashen-faced butler who stood aside as we crossed the threshold and stepped into the wide entrance hall. It was the kind of hall that made you feel lucky just to have got through the door. Twin flights of stairs with gleaming white banisters led up to the upper floors, and on the ceiling hung a chandeleir that was bigger than a church-bell and gaudier than a stripper's ear-rings. I made a mental note to raise my fees." "Another Chandleresque paragraph with the trade mark existenialism in the last sentence. He's not political, let alone communist, but the contrast between rich and poor is never far from the narrator's mind." Next paragraph: "The butler, who was Arab, asked to take my hat. "I'll hold onto it if you don't mind," I told him, feeling its brim between my fingers. "It will help me to keep my hands off the silver."
Rating:
Summary: Simply Great Writing
Review: David Mamet wrote that some of the best writing and storytelling exists in the genre category, i.e. detective or spy fiction. Mamet referred to LeCarre's Smiley books and the Patrick Ryan sea-faring novels and intimated that they beat the literary daylights out of most contemporary "serious" fiction. The Bernie Gunther novels are in the same category. The writing is superior. I recall completing some of Kerr's sentences, stopping, then re-reading them and thinking, "How does someone craft a sentence that good?" The scene in "March Violets" where Bernie contemplates the German actress swimming naked in the mountain stream after he finishes talking to her on the telephone comes to mind. Funny, human, brilliant. Gunther is a well drawn character, different from George Smiley but just as human. He's no saint, but he's a good man trying to get by in a country that's gone mad. In a way, I liked the last one the best, perhaps because it gave me the sense that Bernie survived it all. Anyway, it's some of the best fiction, the best writing, that I've read in ten years.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent 1930 detective stories
Review: Detective stories are by nature very cynical, but as these stories are set in Nazi Germany, the cynicism goes off the page here. Private Eye Bernie Gunther is trying to make a living in Nazi Germany and has to walk a fine line between the SS, the Party, visits to Prinz Albertstrasse (the Gestapo) and his clients. Kerr know Nazi Germany very well, and he hits the nail on the head in depicting Nazis of all ranks. Every couple of pages, he makes just the right phrases about that period in history. Heydrich is the Reich's "Crown Prince of terror", Chamberlain is "that idiot with the umbrella" etc. You can feel the terror of some characters whenever threatened with being sent to a "KZ" or concentration camp. Kerr, if you're reading this, please give us some more stories of Detective Gunther. For students of German History, I highly recommend these stories.
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