Philip Kerr - March Violets

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Readable but flawed

This is a decent detective story and a pretty good read much of the time, but I did have some quite strong reservations.

Bernie Gunther is a private detective in 1936 Berlin; the Nazis are well established in power and the Olympics are about to take place.  Gunther is hired to investigate the theft of some papers and jewels, during which two murders were committed.  It's a good, well plotted story, and the historical background is well done.  I found the period detail convincing and the portraits of people like Goering and Heydrich seemed convincing.  This was enough to keep me interested and largely enjoying the book.

However, I found find the style quite hard to take in places.  Kerr has drawn heavily on Chandler's style in the first person narrative voice, with plenty of one-liners and "hard-boiled" attitudes  Some entire scenes even felt very familiar – Gunther's arrival at the mansion of his rich client bore more than a passing resemblance to the opening of The Big Sleep, for example.  Kerr is a decent writer but he's no Chandler.  The dialogue is over-peppered with smart one-liners from almost everyone, and the "snappy" similes are often terribly laboured and sometimes just nonsensical; "she gave me a smile that was as thin and dubious as the rubber on a secondhand condom", "he was about as cool as a treasure chest in fifty fathoms of water",  "the place was about as quiet as the sap in a gift-wrapped rubber tree" (er…what?) and so on.  It became very wearisome very quickly, as did Gunther's view of women.  Obviously, feminism was not exactly rife in Nazi Berlin, but even allowing for the prevailing attitudes, Gunther is often quite repellently lecherous and also deeply unpleasant about women whom he doesn't find attractive.  I found a needlessly nasty undertone to it.  I also didn’t like a very contrived episode with Gunther in the Dachau Concentration Camp, which seemed unnecessarily exploitative in the context and was crammed with implausibilities.

This was Kerr's first Gunther novel; I will try another because there's enough here to hope that things will improve as he hits his stride, but I can only give March Violets a qualified recommendation.