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The
March of Violets / Ulysses in San Juan
by Mike Baker
Phillip Kerr’s THE MARCH VIOLETS, a derogatory reference to
people who joined the Nazi Party in Germany after Hitler became dictator in
1933, opens in 1938 Germany, a week before the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The
authorities are busy scrubbing the city clean of criminals, vagrants, and any
sign of the city’s rabid antisemitism. Bernie Gunther is a former Berlin cop
now working as a private detective when he’s hired by a rich German
industrialist to find a necklace stolen from his daughter’s apartment—but not
the person who burned her and her husband’s bodies after their apartment was
robbed and they were murdered.
Bernie
isn’t alone in his search, because the son-in-law was in the Gestapo. The SS
also wants the killers, and because the son-in-law’s job was rooting out
corruption and sending the guilty to concentration camps, assorted other sordid
types want the papers that are coincidentally also missing from his safe.
Post-Weimar Republic, pre-World War II shenanigans ensue. That’s a mouthful.
This
is a complicated book to like. Phillip Kerr was a solid writer of muscular
prose, but all the characters are loyal Germans, half of whom are Nazis. To
quote the existential philosopher Jake Blues, I hate Illinois Nazis. Kerr uses
a device called “saving the cat” in cinema. You take an obvious villain and
have him do something kind or selfless, and voila! You have a sympathetic
villain.
It’s
clear that Bernie will die for his country, but fuck the Nazis. They’re morons
and thugs—very dangerous morons and thugs. He’s tough as nails, healthy as
barbed wire, etc., but it’s their pillow fight, so like a good servant of the
Reich, he knows when to bow and scrape. Kerr wrote a bunch of Bernie Gunther
books before his untimely death, each moving Bernie through history, German and
otherwise. I’ve not read them, but this one is almost as good as Chandler in
its hardboiled toughness, as Bernie navigates a post-Weimar Nazi underworld
that is one thin thread apart from the Nazi power machine.
One
reviewer, a former cop, had two criticisms* of
the book, and one was that Kerr was trying to out-hardboil the masters, which
made me wonder if he’d read much hardboiled detective fiction, as Kerr never
goes to the places with action or dialogue that those guys did—ever. He does
work in lots of German slang, and Bernie is a wise-ass, but never to the levels
of Ed Noon or Philip Marlowe. As I said, he’s a bit cowed by the current regime’s
willingness to kill and torture, or torture and kill, the poor souls who
mistakenly step out of line—a line sometimes impossible to predict.
The
way Kerr approached writing the Bernie Gunther books over 40 years reminds me
of Barry Sadler’s Casca books, without the supernatural twist,
throwing Bernie into the world’s historical and espionage timeline. Considering
the Allies’ willingness to utilize Nazi “talent” post-atrocities, this is
actually closer to believable than we might be comfortable admitting.
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I also read ULYSSES IN SAN
JUAN by
Robert Friedman, which concerns itself with Wolf, a Holocaust survivor who
moved from the 1972 Bronx in New York City to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he
now runs a jewelry store for tourists in the Old City. He collects strays,
giving them jobs in his store—botched and broken Nuyorican refugees returning
to Puerto Rico to escape New York City’s cold streets for something else. I’m
not sure what. I’m not 100% sure Friedman knows either.
That
probably reads like criticism, but really, Friedman understands the
unexplainable nature of the human soul, and while he sheds some light on the
terrain, he leaves much murky and unexplained. There’s Stevie, a young man
desperately trying to avoid the fomenting revolution, Puerto Ricans who want
the Yaquis out, as he writes a novel about a Puerto Rican cabin boy on an
English sailing ship, constantly weaving his strange life in broken San Juan
into a Conradian naval adventure. There’s Doris, who is drinking herself to
death, tormented by her broken stateside marriage to a sociopathic lawyer whose
abuse she found sexually arousing until it nearly killed her.
But
the main action is the Holocaust survivor Wolf, still haunted by his wife being
dragged away to a Nazi pleasure camp and his 8-year-old daughter murdered right
before his eyes by Nazi train guards. He takes up with a Puerto Rican junkie
whore named Carmen, who he helps get off smack. She becomes a surrogate for his
lost wife, his lover, and somehow also his murdered child. Carmen’s cousin
Manny, who’s also her drug dealer, wants her back in his stable, and mucho
hardboiled shenanigans ensue. It’s book three in the Puerto Rico Trilogy, but
the other two books tell independent stories, so they can be read out of order.
It
reminded me of those 50s paperback originals whose action sat on the cusp of
being action novels but never seemed to get there, yet remain hardboiled to the
core. This book has action and darkness, and is definitely hardboiled—but don’t
come to it expecting Executioner-style vengeance or a Whittington
protagonist-crushing twist plot. Friedman is a realist, so the book bends
toward noir**,
with an ending as subtle as it is inevitable, but still surprising.
____________________
* The other criticism was that Bernie does
some detection, but mostly uses the time-honored private detective method of
being a really good guesser.
** A
reader of a review I wrote about William Burroughs’ Junkie said I
was wrong in calling it a noir, because his definition included a level of
toughness that Burroughs’ effeminate protagonist lacked.
____________________
BONUS: Hardboiled vs. Noir
I used to love the “what is hardboiled and
what is noir” discussion until I discovered that the term hardboiled refers
to the grammar from a speech by Mark Twain: “...a hundred million tons of
A-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar...” Scholars claim
this was a reference to a period joke, something like, “a hardboiled egg is
hard to beat.” After much overuse, the term came to mean whatever the writer
wanted it to mean, regardless of what any dictionary had to say.
Noir is
worse. It comes from the Gallimard imprint Serie Noire, named for
the black card stock Gallimard used for cheap efficiency. They had previously
used yellow covers until they ran out of that paper. While some of the authors
they published, like Jim Thompson and Charles Williams, were truly noir, they
also published James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney, who weren’t noir or
hardboiled at all. Noir has suffered the same fate as hardboiled, becoming
whatever the writer wants it to mean.
More
interesting to me is that many of the “translators” who wrote the translations
of these books for Gallimard had a poor handle on English—or none at all—like
Boris Vian, who translated Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep by
having his wife read a section, describe it to him, and then old Boris would
just riff, like the Norwegian guy who read Dracula, hated the
ending, and re-wrote it to his satisfaction, creating the first known fan
fiction ever.
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