John's Reviews > March Violets

This is the first of Kerr's series about ex-cop-turned-PI Bernie Gunther, here trying to solve a case (he's hired by a plutocrat to track down an expensive item of jewellery missing from the safe of the plutocrat's murdered daughter and son-in-law) while coping with the everyday horrors and bureaucratic complications of Nazism in pre-WWII Berlin.

A problem the novel has is that this latter aspect is often far more interesting, and far more effectively portrayed, than the noirish plot itself; I came away from the novel with a real sense that Nazism was soul-destroying in a far more wholesale manner than simply its policies of mass murder (barely getting into action by the time of this book), with not just the obvious victims of its viciousness being brutalized but also all the Germans who either obeyed mindlessly or -- the "March violets" of the title -- went along with the "disappearances" and other atrocities for reasons of terrified or mercenary self-interest.

A second difficulty is the writing style. Yes, it's refreshing that Kerr should put into Gunther's narration the kind of sardonic wisecracking similes that Raymond Chandler and other writers of the hardboiled era deployed to such spectacular effect, and sometimes it works. At other times, though, it becomes wearisome either because a particular simile stretches laboriously over two or three lines or simply because there have already been far too many similes over the past couple of pages.

Overall, then: moderately enjoyable, and in some places powerfully affecting. I read the novel bound up in an omnibus (Berlin Noir, 1993) with the next two in the series, and so was happy enough to keep reading. If I'd read it as a solo title, however, I'm not sure I'd have troubled to do so.