What’s New for the 20th of August: Some favorite mysteries; jazz, country, RT, and a musical grab bag; a hoedown, a big dragon, Hellboy, and of course ice cream! This is the kind of assignment that gives a man a reputation he can’t live down for the rest of his life! The three cases he deals with are interesting and I liked him as a character (he is not so "destroyed" as main characters of crime novels usually are). Boldly asking for the temporary rank of Kommissar, Gunther finds that a murder hunt for a perverted criminal soon escalates beyond all his predictions.

We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts. Vincent van Gogh wasn’t the only fellow who could make that kind of heady, romantic sacrificial gesture.However, not even Gunther can avoid being embroiled in cases peopled by the likes of Himmler, Goebbels and Heydrich. In the bitter winter of 1947, as the Russian Zone closes around the ruined city, Berliners live on fear and dubiously earned PX goods. And they practiced the same sort of theft in the countries they occupied; Nazism was more like an organized crime syndicate running a government than what we think of as a government.

It is 1938 and Bernie Gunther is back on the mean streets of Berlin with his new partner, Bruno Stahlecker, another ex-police officer.The two parts of the story are connected by a woman Bernie loved and a man he despised back in 1930s Berlin. Lucky Bernie gets impressed into re-joining the Kripo just so he can investigate a serial murder case for Heydrich. The Pale Criminal finds Bernie back on the force in 1938 on the edge of war when Berlin experiences the mad spree of a serial killer.

Since the late eighties, Philip Kerr had been redefining crime fiction with his justly-lauded Bernie Gunther sequence. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. One thing the books illustrate is the extent to which Nazism was a kleptocracy, in which anyone with a bit of power stole from stigmatized groups: Jews, of course, but really anyone who was not a staunch Nazi. Downing’s main character John Russell and Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel are both news reporters, not detectives, so the sensibilities are different.Since then he has written and published ten universally lauded Bernie Gunther novels, and is currently working on his eleventh.

Maybe she still had a few clients, but I thought it was a better bet that I’d see a Jew at the front of a Nuremberg pork-butcher’s queue (p. Murder, politics and a very nice twist makes March Violets a very good start to a wonderful ride thru this dark part of history. Noreen wants to investigate the debate that followed the decision of the International Olympic Committee to hold the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.The first part, which is considerably longer than the second, takes place in Berlin in 1934, during the time that Bernie worked as a house detective at the Adlon Hotel. Communism is the new enemy, and with the Nuremberg trials over, some strange alliances are being forged against the Red Menace - alignments that make many wartime atrocities look lily-white by comparison. March Violets", the first book in the set is set in Berlin in 1936 a dangerous place that's coming under increasing Nazi control when Bernard Gunther, a cynical, damaged, well-intentioned, wise-cracking, ex-Berlin-Kripo-cop-turned-private-detective and Marlowe-esque anti-hero hero, is engaged by a wealthy industrialist to investigate the murder of his daughter and SS officer son-in-law in an apparent burglary.