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    The Pale Criminal
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    The Pale Criminal
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    The Pale Criminal
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Pale Criminal

    Written by Philip Kerr

    Narrated by John Lee

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Hailed by Salman Rushdie as a "brilliantly innovative thriller-writer," Philip Kerr is the creator of taut, gripping, noir-tinged mysteries that are nothing short of spellbinding. In this second book of the Berlin Noir trilogy, The Pale Criminal brings back Bernie Gunther, an ex-policeman who thought he'd seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin-until he turned freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. Hard-hitting, fast-paced, and richly detailed, The Pale Criminal is noir writing at its blackest and best.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 6, 2008
    ISBN9781415946398
    Unavailable
    The Pale Criminal
    Author

    Philip Kerr

    Philip Kerr is the bestselling author of the Bernie Gunther thrillers, for which he received a CWA Dagger Award. Born in Edinburgh, he now lives in London. He is a life-long supporter of Arsenal. Follow @theScottManson on Twitter.

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    Reviews for The Pale Criminal

    4/5

    169 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      It must have been hard for the silent dissenters to cover their reluctance to adopt the Nazi salute. For the Germans of the late 1930s it was not a rebellious time, and Bernie has to overcome his he hesitation and just do it. There is this is one of moment in this book, "Heil Hitler", and now it is done.Hard-drinking, chain-smoking, Bernie Gunter is also cynical. With an eye for the beauty of women. The book has all the habitual components of the crime-noir genre, what sets it apart is the choice of place and time -- Berlin of 1938. Nazism is now enthusiastically embraced by the German nation, conformity is a form of patriotism, Hitler is agitating the nation towards its first invasion, that of the Sudetenland.Bernhard Gunter is summoned back into the police force, an offer he can't refuse, as a form of agreement he demands that he is given the rank of Kriminalkommissar. A persistent damaging case of serial killings demands action from the authorities. But 6 years of Nazi rule purged all competent detectives and the chief of the police is forced to recruit Bernie back.Besides the usual criminal scum of the genre working on the case reveals many less known sides of the life of the upper Nazi echelon.But life is hard."Survival, especially in these difficult times, has to count as some achievement. It's not something that comes easily. Life in Nazi Germany demands that you keep working at it. But, having done that much, you're left with the problem of giving it some purpose. After all, what good is health and security if your life has no meaning?"
    • 5/5
      Kerr does an excellent job of characterizing pre WW2 Berlin. His characters are aptly and archly drawn so that their interactions blend naturally into the blighted environment that he has created. Which scene is an ugly, gritty recreation of the evolution of the Nazi mentality as it poisons its own nest before spreading into the rest of Europe.
    • 5/5
      Very good, I believe I liked this better than the first, which was also very good. So I guess this was very, very good? Narrator was good as well!I will say that I thought the couple of sex scenes were a little creepy. A little too explicit for the needs of the book. Fabio is not on the cover.
    • 5/5
      The Pale Criminal is the second of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir series featuring private investigator Bernie Gunther. He's trying to make a living in pre-war Nazi Germany and avoid the Nazis, but that is just not going to be possible. While the first book of the series, March Violets, was set during the 1936 Olympics, The Pale Criminal is set at the time of the first wave of German invasions.

      Bernie has just been hired by a wealthy woman, who wants him to find out who is blackmailing her about her homosexual son. In a separate story line, Gunther is commanded by Reinhardt Heydrich to investigate the murders of several Aryan girls. The reader know the two plots inevitably will be tied together but it's done in a way that is very believable. The subject matter is not pleasant to read about but it's done in an accurate way, depicting the Nazi's hostility to both Judaism and Catholicism.

      Bernie Gunther is the epitome of a noir private investigator, and is the center of the novel in every respect. He's cynical and filled with foreboding about the future of Germany. The setting of 1938 Berlin is very realistic, and the author throw in plenty of details about the architecture and surrounding neighborhoods to make the story extremely vivid. This novel is both complex and chilling, and even if you don't like the subject matter, you can't stop reading. I'm looking forward to Book 3, German Requiem.
    • 3/5
      Second in the series featuring PI Bernie Gunther; in this volume WWII is well under way. Berlin is being plagued by a series of ritual murders of young Aryan women; the murders have routinely been pinned on Jewish suspects, but this practice is becoming an obvious nonsense since, despite the luckless Jews having been killed or banished to concentration camps, the killings have continued. Heydrich, aware that most of the cops under his command are incompetent political appointees, dragoons Bernie into rejoining the Kripo as a sort of consultant in order to find out who the real murderer might be. Soon attention is focusing on Julius Streicher, loathsome even by Nazi standards, who may be engineering the killings in hopes of fomenting pogroms.

      Simultaneously, Bernie is trying to aid a rich publisher who's being blackmailed over the homosexuality of her son -- something that, for obvious reasons, must be kept strictly a secret in Nazi Germany.

      I liked this book a lot better than its predecessor, March Violets, mainly because the obsessive wisecrackery of the previous volume has here been toned down a little; perhaps Kerr had a stricter editor this time around or perhaps he was responding to the comments of reviewers of the first book -- who knows? As with the earlier book, though, I was still unconvinced by Bernie's sex life -- he seems merely to have to say "Fancy a quick one?" to any woman he meets and, next thing, he's in the midst of Position #294 complete with live marmoset and tub of cold spaghetti. Something like that, anyway. This aside, the plot worked admirably and, as before, the sheer oppressiveness of the Nazi regime, and of the ubiquitous terror it deliberately instilled in even its supporters, is excellently conveyed.
    • 5/5
      Bernie’s investigations continue in The Pale Criminal. It’s a few years later and Hitler is about to move into Czechoslovakia. He is hired to find the blackmailer of a wealthy widow who owns a large publishing firm. Her son is being treated in a fancy sanitarium (psychotherapy has been ruled illegal by the Nazis — one of their few sensible actions) for his homosexual tendencies. As that persuasion has also been made illegal, he is a prime candidate for a concentration camp, so his mother is willing to make substantial payments to keep his secret. Heydrich, head of the SD, blackmails Bernie into returning to the Kripo (the regular German police), realizing that exdetective inspector Bernie is one of the few good detectives left in Berlin, the others having been liquidated from the force in favor of political appointees. Bernie also has no political or racial ax to grind, and someone in Berlin has been methodically killing teenage Aryan girls. The Jews who were routinely accused of the earlier crimes were in jail at the time of the later killings, so they could not have been responsible. Heydrich fears that if the news gets out, a general panic will result, making it look as if he cannot keep order. The evidence soon begins to point toward the complicity of Julius Streicher, hated Nazi mob boss and Bavarian bully. The killings all have a ritualistic element and Streicher’s sensationalist newspaper Der Stürmer has printed accusations and fake pictures of Jewish ritualistic murders that bear a striking resemblance to the real killings, details of which have not been released to the media. Bernie’s theory is that Streicher wants to incite a pogrom in Berlin against the Jews by blaming them for these horrid killings.