The One from the Other

This is classic Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett noir featuring a hard boiled, hard luck detective with a smart mouth. But instead of crooked cops and ruthless gangsters hunkered in the dark alleyways of LA we find our protagonist Bernie Gunther in post WWII Germany. He's following his own moral compass, trying to shake off the horrors of the Third Reich.

It's 1949 and Bernie's life as a hotel-keeper has reasonably bottomed out in the town of Dachau. He finds himself assigned to track down a missing Nazi, and the ostensibly simple request explodes into a dazzling, if not somewhat improbable, series of escalating fiascos.

It's filled with the pulpy argot of detective noir that is deliciously distinct. “There was a sort of twinkle in his iris that came off his eyeball like the point of a sword” or “The fog was back. It rolled in like steam from a sausage kitchen on a cold winter's day.” It's the readerly equivalent of the Sunday TV matinees of my youth that never let any sense of probability get in the way of a rousing tale.