Philip Kerr. If The Dead Rise Not

As a well known author of historical crime fiction and as the inventor of Bernie Gunther, a homicide detective in the deteriorating Germany of the Nazis, every new episode is evoking curiosity again. Up to which measure will Philip Kerr succeed to create a new criminal action interesting enough to get entangled in the deep network of political interest?

In this case action is taking place firsthand in Berlin 1934, in prospect to the Olympic games of 1936. The main frame is about sports, corruption and, of course, violent death. The deeper motive of the Nazis is to avoid an international boycott of the games driven by the USA. It would have meant a deep psychological crisis for the new awaking Germany and a sustainable damage of its reputation as a new player in international policy. And of course there was no better ground for lunatic, ruthless and gambling characters on all sides involved.

As usual, Bernie Gunther, after his demission from the suicide squad of Alexanderplatz because of his republican attitude, is dragged in a nasty story about corruption and murder as a detective of the Adlon Hotel. He falls in love to an attractive Jewish American writer who wants to collect material against the Nazi race politics. At the bitter end Gunther lets the gangsters go to save the live of this extraordinary woman.

More than 20 years later they meet again in Havana, Cuba, and the protagonists of Berlin 1934 act in a very stereotype epilogue, and again with a murder driven by love. The real head of action, Bernie Gunther, who has seen the Nazis rise an fall, who was witness of the Russian murders to polish military elite in Katyn, who survived past war Vienna as a snitch of the CIA and who hunted Nazis in Buenos Aires, Bernie Gunther is reflecting the sense of human existence and surviving at the end of a particularly too dense of clichés shaped book. If the dead rise not, yes, than every individual will be responsible for it ´s own deeds!