People lie to me, people try to kill me, people punch me in the face, people tell me I shouldn't ask questions about things that are none of my business and me and my broken jaw just have to find a way around that in the best way I can.
Bernie Gunther in Philip Kerr's Prussian Blue (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2017)
This is Kerr's twelfth novel about Bernie Gunther, a detective of various sorts in Nazi Germany. Last we saw Bernie he was playing bridge with Somerset Maugham in 1950's France. Now he is told by the Stasi, the East German secret police, tha he has to kill someone in England, after which he knows his own life will not be worth much. So he escapes and heads for Germany, the novel alternating chapters between 1956 and 1939, when he is hired by Reinhard Heydrich (portrayed as Hitler's Madman in Douglas Sirk's 1943 film of that name; I wrote about it 12/20/16) to investigate a murder at Hitler's Bercthesgaden retreat that has to be solved before Hitler shows up for his 50th birthday party, though Heydrich also wants to get dirt on Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann.
A detective story that uses real people is a tricky and uneasy business that Kerr handles adeptly. The classic detective part does not fit too well into Nazi Germany --though Heydrich, Bormann, et al. are portrayed somewhat successfully as characters -- but the 1956 chase through France and Germany is vivid, reminding one of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, 1939, made into the film Man Hunt in 1941 by German émigré Fritz Lang.
I perceived how history was nothing more than an accident, a fluke, a matter of a few centimeters here or there, a head turned, a sudden gust of wind, a dirty gun barrel, a misfired cartridge, a breath held for a second too long or too little, an order misheard or misunderstood, an itchy trigger finger, a second's delay, an instant's hesitation.
---Bernie Gunther.
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