Marion Wood Books/Putnam, 528 pages, $27
Bernie Gunther, now known as Christof Ganz, has managed to survive World War II in Nazi Germany without himself becoming a Nazi or carrying out heinous crimes on their behalf. He is to be applauded for his political juking ability, much like a top-notch soccer player runs a zigzag pattern in order not to be caught.
It is now 1957 and Bernie has had to change his name in order to return to live in Germany. In order to get to 1957 in one piece, he has been a hotel worker in France and a political prisoner in Russia. He has worked for Nazi high command here and there and the police in Berlin. He has solved murders but most successfully managed to not get murdered himself, executed, or wantonly used and thrown away. Oh, wait, maybe not the latter.
In 1957 Munich, Bernie is a mortuary attendant. It’s a humble but pleasantly quiet life. He talks to the corpses and none of them give him lip back. It’s a paradise compared to a Russian prison. Alas, all good, quiet things must come to a loud end. It comes in the form of a police acquaintance from way, way back. Criminal Secretary Schramma recognizes Bernie and blackmails him into “helping” him extort money. It’s a convoluted set-up and Bernie is the wary but inevitable patsy. But Bernie didn’t survive WWII on just luck. He manages to cotton to the game Schramma is playing and extricates himself in spectacular fashion.
Bernie is aided by another old, old acquaintance, Max Merton, lawyer of dubious distinction, and, boy, does Max have a job for him. Soon Bernie is making lots of marks working for Munich RE, an insurance company, as an adjuster/investigator. In another convoluted situation — this is why the book is 528 pages long — Bernie is sent to Greece to “adjust” a maritime claim. Bernie knows bubkis about maritime loss, but he is given the assistance of a Greek liaison, Achilles Garlopis.
A boat has sunk. It was both the workplace and home for Siegfried Witzel, a German who lives in Greece and films underwater movies and hunts for antiquities in the Mediterranean depths. Bernie smells a rotten octopus and secretly follows the taciturn claimant after a meeting. He is rewarded with a dead body. Then he is cursed by a Greek detective who threatens Bernie in order to get him to find the murderer.
Bernie attracts odd characters who are interested in his investigation, including the lovely Ellie Panatoniou. If I would criticize the author for padding (excuse the expression) his book, it would be in his overblown (again, excuse the expression) and interminable descriptions of Ms. Panatoniou’s lusciousness, voluptuousness, and general anatomical excessiveness. If books could slobber, this one would produce buckets of the stuff. Oh, by the way, she’s also a lawyer. One who doesn’t appear to do any work. She could be putting poor Bernie through his paces, however, only to ka-boom him in the end with some traitorous, self-aggrandizing agenda. If that were so, it would serve him right for never raising his eyes further than her mighty bosoms.
What is it about Philip Kerr’s writing and his wonderful character, Bernie Gunther, that I will miss? Kerr could tell a story and he could tell it with style. Not too many people could write humor into Nazi Germany, but Bernie is, too, Kerr’s darkly comic, wise-cracking creation. Bernie may be hard-boiled and Berlin may be noir, but Kerr presented them in his own idiosyncratic way.
Here are Kerr’s last words in Bernie’s voice:
And to mark where I had been and to testify to what I still had in me to accomplish, I needed only that place in the new moral order offered by the bandit queen [another terrifically eccentric character], where a drifting ghost like me could feel like something real again and breathe the dream of true atonement.
Vale, Philip and Bernie.
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