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    March Violets
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    March Violets
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    March Violets
    Audiobook9 hours

    March Violets

    Written by Philip Kerr

    Narrated by John Lee

    3.5/5

    ()

    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 set in Nazi-era Berlin that are nothing short of spellbinding. The first book of the Berlin Noir trilogy, MARCH VIOLETS introduces listeners to 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, MARCH VIOLETS is noir listening at its best and blackest.

    "Echoes of Raymond Chandler but better on his vivid and well-researched detail than the master"-Evening Standard



    From the Compact Disc edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 8, 2008
    ISBN9781415946367
    Unavailable
    March Violets
    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 March Violets

    3.5/5

    375 ratings24 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Had its moments, but the stylized prose, mixed with our narrator's tedious objectification (in that same terrible corkscrew English) of literally every female character he meets, got real tiresome.
    • 4/5
      Very good modern noir. This was a little harsher at times than I expected, in the language and descriptions, surprised a bit at times. Also, It seemed the last 20 pages are a pretty enormous part of the book and kind of just tacked on? It's almost like a completely different book. Odd. Still, very good and I'll likely read more of them.
    • 5/5
      This is a masterful beginning to a dark series about a private detective who first begins in 1936 Germany. The time and the setting are essential to the narrative, placing the story in a dark soul-drenching time and place where a socialist authoritarian police state has taken root. For good reason, the Berlin of the 1930's is a place of fear and terror and conformity. There are those who are selling their worldly possessions for ten cents on the dollar in the hopes of escaping. And there are those who know nowhere else and are conforming to the demands of political correctness run amuck, repeating sayings they do not believe in and posting photographs in their living room so that, if the Gestapo visits, they will see nothing but loyal Germans. It is a book which takes the reader into the depths of a despairing world, a police state where people keep disappearing and the business of looking for missing persons is booming for a detective, not that anyone who disappears is ever heard from again. It evokes North Korea and Stalinist Soviet Union, where no freedom truly existed and people just disappeared. Into this maelstrom, we find a noir unlike few others that have been written. At first when I encountered this series, I wondered about the setting - an odd choice - but now I see how the setting is so important and so fundamental to the story. There is nothing sugarcoated about the description of the Third Reich and its evils even in 1936, but Kerr brings a time and place alive.
    • 4/5
      Set in 1936 Berlin this highly acclaimed series features the debut of Bernie Gunther, an ex-cop who specializes in tracking down missing persons. When wealthy industrialist, Hermann Six, asks Bernie to track down the murderer of his daughter and son-in-law he is thrown into a world of political scandals involving artwork, Goering, Himmler and the wealthy German class. Bernie also meets Six's wife, film star Ilse Rudel, who believes he is looking for evidence of her infidelity, despite his assurances that he doesn't do that type of work.

      Bernie uses humor and sarcasm to help him overcome the brutality of the times. It's obvious to everyone that Germany is preparing for war and Bernie wants to have nothing to do with the tensions between the various Nazi factions. He's just one of the endless average Germans who consider themselves spectators and go along with the rules rather than fight and possibly end up in a camp themselves. These are still early day and I'm anxious to see how Bernie fit's his philosophy of disinterest into the future books of the series.

      The title is a reference about those who became Nazis after they had seized power, not for ideological reasons, but for political or economic advancement. The setting of the novel is what makes it different from the typical mystery genre. The author does a great job of making Bernie a noir detective in the mold of authors like Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler. Gunther is a richly crafted character who interacts with some of the most notorious members of the Nazi party. I'm looking forward to reading more books in this fascinating series.
    • 3/5
      This book was chosen for a mystery book club, and I must lead the discussion. The German proper noun are difficult to pronounce and therefore difficult to remember. The time before WWII marks a perilous era in German history. While preparing Berlin, Germany, for the summer Olympics of 1936, Hitler's regime had started their atrocities against the Jews and non-Aryans. March Violets, the title of Kerr's novel refers the late comers to the Nazi party after Hitler's Enabling Act of March 1933. Membership to the Nazi Party froze after May 1933. Kerr presents Bernhard Gunther, the detective, as an anti hero. Bernie has all the qualifications for the Nazi Party elite, but he resists joining Hitler in many underhanded means. I have not decided my opinion of Bernie, maybe I will read the next book in the series.
    • 2/5
      This is the first of Kerr's series about ex-cop-turned-PI Bernie Gunther, here trying to solve a case (he's hired by a plutocrat to track down an expensive item of jewellery missing from the safe of the plutocrat's murdered daughter and son-in-law) while coping with the everyday horrors and bureaucratic complications of Nazism in pre-WWII Berlin.

      A problem the novel has is that this latter aspect is often far more interesting, and far more effectively portrayed, than the noirish plot itself; I came away from the novel with a real sense that Nazism was soul-destroying in a far more wholesale manner than simply its policies of mass murder (barely getting into action by the time of this book), with not just the obvious victims of its viciousness being brutalized but also all the Germans who either obeyed mindlessly or -- the "March violets" of the title -- went along with the "disappearances" and other atrocities for reasons of terrified or mercenary self-interest.

      A second difficulty is the writing style. Yes, it's refreshing that Kerr should put into Gunther's narration the kind of sardonic wisecracking similes that Raymond Chandler and other writers of the hardboiled era deployed to such spectacular effect, and sometimes it works. At other times, though, it becomes wearisome either because a particular simile stretches laboriously over two or three lines or simply because there have already been far too many similes over the past couple of pages.

      Overall, then: moderately enjoyable, and in some places powerfully affecting. I read the novel bound up in an omnibus (Berlin Noir, 1993) with the next two in the series, and so was happy enough to keep reading. If I'd read it as a solo title, however, I'm not sure I'd have troubled to do so.
    • 3/5
      The plot was overly complex but I kind of liked the characters.
    • 2/5
      Don't think I'll finish. Just not enough to keep me going. And I'm easy. World War II. Not sure why. I might try again some time.
    • 3/5
      This book gives a chilling portrait of Berlin as the Nazis consolidate their power over the populace. Bernie Gunther is a private investigator whose latest case quickly takes him deep into the ugliness.

      This is a fast-moving, quickly shifting action tale, but the author tries so hard to slather on the noir detective story atmosphere that the story itself is hard to follow. There is far too much of pages of names of streets and buildings, impenetrable tough-guy slang, and brutality. Hopefully this lightens up in following books in the series, since the writing was good enough that I'll undoubtedly read more.
    • 4/5
      Just a great series. You got your terrible enemy (Hitler!), hard-boiled detective hero, a little love, and some very moving passages.
    • 3/5
      More wise-ass than Philip Marlowe, Bernie is an ex-cop gumshoe with a lot of mouth and attitude. In Hitler’s Germany before the war, this doesn’t go over so well. Nazis were not known for their senses of humor apparently. Three stars instead of four merely because there’s no glossary but a ton of slang as well as many arcane abbreviations, such as SiPo for Sicherheitspolizei- German security police. Thank goodness for Wikipedia or I would have been a bit lost. That said, I’ll continue with the series.
    • 3/5
      Bernie Gunther is a Private Investigator in Berlin 1935. He is hired by a wealthy man to find a stolen diamond necklace, and the murderer of his daughter and son-in-law. Bernie is the typical hard-boiled private detective of the Noir genre; hard drinking, gun toting ex-cop turned PI. Nothing too original, except the backdrop, Berlin 1935-36. Kerr does an excellent job of setting the pre-WWII atmosphere in Germany. I found the historical information of Nazi Germany much more interesting than the actual nuts and bolts of the who-done-it. I liked the way in which Keller uses Bernie to show the perspective of what many typical Germans thought about what was happening to their country in the hands of Adolf Hitler. There aren't many books that I've come across that show the typical German sentiment at the time, although his portrayal of all Nazis are stereotypically bad.

      I listened to this on audio, read by John Lee. I like Lee as a narrator, although it was a little strange having the very German story read by someone British, but I did get used to it. The jury is still out on whether I will continue reading this series.
    • 2/5
      I really struggled with March Violets, despite the fact that I usually love crime and thriller novels set in the 1930s and 40s. Philip Kerr is clearly a talented writer, who has created an interesting and believable character in private detective, Bernard Gunther; investigating the suspicious death of a steel magnet’s daughter and her husband in Berlin at the time of the 1936 Olympics, I really wanted to get into the story, but I found too many distractions to make this a smooth read. Kerr creates an excellent sense of time and place, everything sounds and feels believable and realistic, but the heavy use of acronyms, abbreviations and the Nazi obsession with a myriad of different levels of military and civilian law enforcement, meant I was constantly puzzling to understand their relative significance in the overall story. In the end, I simply went along for the ride, not bothering whether I knew which department was which, and which or who was who. Perhaps an understanding of German and knowledge of the Nazi organisation would have helped. Don’t think I’ll be reading the other two books in this trilogy, despite liking Gunther and his sardonic humour.
      © Koplowitz 2012
    • 4/5
      A gritty, noir thriller, and the first of what promises to be a gripping series. Bernie Gunther has left the police force and struck out on his own as a private investigator. What makes his work interesting is the time and place: Berlin, 1936 when the Nazis are in full power and preparing for the Summer Olympics. His services are more or less forcibly retained by a millionaire industrialist who has just lost his beloved daughter and her husband to a fire in their home. Both bodies are found in their bed, and the safe containing a priceless diamond necklace has been broken into. Was this a straightforward murder and burglary or is there more than first meets the eye? As Gunther investigates local jewelry vendors, he can't help but be horrified at how the Jews are being taken advantage of, with glaring anti-semitism at it's peak. Desperate to sell their valuables to get away from the repressive measures taken against them (most professions are banned to them, and everyone is quick to add "German" as a preface to their profession on their business cards to indicate they are of good Arian stock), they are forced to sell their belongings well below the market price. Trying to find out anything in this repressive system is bound to bring about all sorts of complications, and when Bernie's widowed secretary is too scared to return to work after being bullied by Nazi police officers, he's delighted to find a beautiful and single replacement for her in ex-journalist Ilse, but their romantic involvement is bound to render him that much more vulnerable. “March violets” was a term used for late-comers to the Nazi Party after the passage of Hitler's Enabling Act which rendered him a dictator on March 23, 1933. In May, the Nazi Party froze membership, and those with the lowest membership numbers were given preferential treatment, though everyone was eager to be seen as a Hitler supporter. Not so Bernie, who has Jewish clients and doesn't care for the views of a party he never chose to support, which is dangerous in and of itself because dissidents are daily being sent to concentration camps, where few are expected to survive the harsh conditions. I loved every bit of this private dick story set during a very dramatic period in history. Those who've enjoyed the more recent John Russell series by David Downing are bound to find this precursor highly satisfying. I'm very much looking forward to the next book!
    • 5/5
      ). Pelican has released a trilogy of his Berlin detective novels that feature the wise-cracking, ex-Kripo, private detective, Bernie Gunther. The first, March Violets, takes place in 1936 as the Nazis are rising to power, and Kerr sets the scene masterfully. Bernie has been hired to find the contents of a safe that belonged to the daughter of Herr Six, a wealthy German manufacturer. It seems Six’s daughter and son-in-law were murdered, their house torched, and jewels worth millions of marks removed from the safe. Six wants those jewels back. Bernie’s investigation leads him to join an uneasy alliance with Hermann Goering as he finds himself caught in a powerplay between the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst. It turns out that there were really two thefts the night of the murders and that one body may even have been misidentified (no hints, but the ending has a neat twist). Bernie can only extricate himself from the web by catching the man who has the secret to the location of the stolen papers and who is hiding in the only place he thinks the enemy won’t look for him: a concentration camp. Kerr has recreated an authentic feel of what was a very dangerous time, when no one could trust anyone else and death was at the whim of the powerful.
    • 3/5
      This novel is set in the 1930's in Nazi Germany. Bernie Gunther is a private investigator and an ex cop. He is brought in to investigate a double murder and robbery of jewels. The father of the murdered girl is a steel magnate and he is the one who brings in Bernie to investigate the crime. In his investigation Bernie unravels a more complicated puzzle concerning some important documents and betrayal. He gets into trouble with the authorities and gets away.This gives an insight into Nazi Germany leading into the Second World War. The novel reads like a classic American detective fiction. So anyone who is a fan of that should read this. Otherwise it's just ok.
    • 4/5
      Hardly anything can outdo 1936's Nazi Germany as a mood setter of a crime-noir novel. Three years after Hitler won the elections the stifling of freedoms is firm, concentration camps are already established, jews, gypsies and gays suffer incrementally abridged civil rights, Gestapo and SS take over the police and army, the competent old hands are pushed aside.Bernie Gunter, a private detective in Berlin, gives us the peering eyes of the intelligentsia and the black humor of the concealed dissent, now that it is obvious that Germany is in the grip of a dictatorship.The case that he labors to solve involves a rich industrialist's daughter, a playful movie star, and a coterie of brutals of the underground world. The increasing complications open for Bernie, and us, the doors of the upper Nazi echelon.Layering the grotesque transformation of a society strained by the dictatorship with the timeless forces of vice and crime is the genius of this book. A very enjoyable read.
    • 3/5
      This was the first of the Bernie Gunther series. I've read many of the rest so it's interesting to get a view of how the series started.

      Kerr certainly got much better as time went on.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book in the Bernie Gunther trilogy, and like the others it immediately sucks you in. It takes place in Berlin in 1936 under Nazi rule, and the history of like at the time is remarkable. It explains to some degree how the Nazi's were able to get away with what they did for so long. As with all Bernie Gunther books they read like a detective story written from the 1930's through 1950's. If you like this style of writing you will enjoy any of the books in the series.
    • 4/5
      March Violets is my first ‘noir’ read, and I have to say that I really enjoyed this stark, dark crime fiction tale set in 1930s Berlin. The aura of the place and time swirled like fog through the story. I enjoyed the audio version and found the narration very well done. I will definitely read more of the Bernie Gunther series.
    • 3/5
      This is the first Bernie Gunther novel. Gunther is a detective in pre-war Nazi Germany. He is not a Nazi, but sees what is going on in Germany as a horror. The case he works on involves someone high up in the Nazi hierarchy who, along with his wife, was murdered and then left in a burning house. The final resolution of the plot is complex and involves Gunther spending some time in Dachau as a prisoner.
    • 4/5
      The setting is Berlin in 1936, and Berlin is readying for the Olympic Games. Gunther's secretary Dagmarr is getting married to a member of the National Socialist Flying Corps.When Gunther returns to his office after the wedding he finds a dark blue Mercedes convertible waiting for him.Its occupant asks him to investigate the deaths of his daughter and son-in-law.Gunther's investigation leads him to calling in favours from his former colleagues in the police force, and will eventually lead to him being imprisoned himself.The setting of MARCH VIOLETS feels authentic and well researched, the author seems to have based his style on better known hard boiled noir writers. If anything I got a little tired of the plentiful-in-metaphors style.However Jeff Harding does an excellent job of the narration even if it does feel as if it owes a lot to a Chicago gangster style.MARCH VIOLETS is #1 in Kerr's Bernard Guther series. IF THE DEAD RISE NOT, which I read and reviewed recently, seems to have been set more or less in the same period. I found the time threads connecting the two a little confusing, but I guess that serves me right for reading them out of order.
    • 5/5
      March Violets is the first entrée in Kerr’s Berlin trilogy. The book may be found separately or in Berlin Noir, the compilation of all three books. March Violets is set in the darkening days of Hitler’s Germany; the 1936 Olympics are just coming to town. Kerr’s protagonist, Bernard Gunther, is a private detective hired by a very wealthy conservative (i.e. non-Nazi) German industrialist to find out who murdered his daughter and her Nazi husband, burned down their home, and stole a diamond necklace from their safe. Kerr’s tale gets a bit convoluted and he is prone to excessive flights of language (usually intended to be funny, but falling flat to this reader). Kerr excels in recreating the complex world of Berlin, one of Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities as it is being smothered by the Nazis. Gunther is an ex-cop and we meet his former police colleagues, several colorful underworld characters, and a number of revolting Nazis, too. (Although even among the Nazis, there are levels of malevolence; Goering is on one level, Himmler on another one altogether.). Gunther also falls into bed with beautiful women with an ease sure to make most men jealous.By the way, the title refers to the numerous new members the Nazi party gained after leveraged its 1933 electoral victory into total control of the German government. Older Nazis derided these latecomers as "March Violets."An intelligent and entertaining tale that makes one want to read the second volume. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This was an enjoyable enough read, but ultimately I found it slightly disappointing. The best part was the evocative setting: the characters journey through lush jungles and ruined cities in the time of the Maya. Unfortunately, though, the author wasn't content to let us experience this world through the eyes of the characters. We were constantly jerked back to a modern, European-based worldview by phrases like "Guama could not begin to guess that on this important day... the country of the goblet's origin was referring to this seasonal cycle as the Year of Our Lord 1323" or "the mountain town of Cuauhnahuac... which a future race of men would alter to Cuernevaca, deeming it more pronounceable". One of the worst interruptions came when a character saw a vast number of orange and black butterflies and interpreted it as an omen from the gods, "not knowing that she was witnessing the annual migration of a butterfly that would one day be called 'monarch,' and that these millions of butterflies had just ended a flight of three thousand miles, begun in the far north at a place someday to be called the Great Lakes." What bothered me most was how unnecessary this was; the reader is perfectly capable of recognizing a black and orange butterfly as a monarch, and the monarch's migrations are likewise fairly common knowledge. It was like the author had done her research and wanted to make sure everyone knew it, rather than letting her knowledge remain subtly in the background.The characters suffered from a certain lack of subtlety, too; the good guys are unfailingly honourable and the bad guy is completely delusional. The issues they faced were also fairly standard: people had to accept their true selves so that love could triumph in the face of adversity. The best way to describe my objection to this might be to say that it felt too much like a typical women's book.Still, despite focusing on the negatives here, I certainly don't regret the time spent on this book, and would consider reading another by the same author. It was worth it for the setting alone, and the storyline did hold my attention. So although it wasn't exceptional, it definitely wasn't a bad book either.