Tim Slee's Blog: How's the Serenity? - Posts Tagged "kerr"

Berlin Noir: Penguin eBook by Philip Kerr

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I have very very few books in my Did Not Finish pile, and none of those are crime noir novels because I LOVE NOIR... but ...

(Thud of Phillip Kerr’s Berlin Noir series hitting the floor)

... this one is a first.

It shouldn’t have been, I love the setting (Berlin, 1930s, bad Nazis ... awesome). Second, he has the tone down pat, with some great Chandleresque writing:

“If he was a member of the human race at all, Neumann was its least attractive specimen. His eyebrows, twitching and curling like two poisoned caterpillars, were joined together by an irregular scribble of poorly matched hair. Behind thick glasses that were almost opaque with greasy thumbprints, his grey eyes were shifty and nervous, searching the floor as if he expected that at any moment he would be lying flat on it. Cigarette smoke poured out from between teeth that were so badly stained with tobacco they looked like two wooden fences.”

Third, well, the bad guys are Nazis, did I mention that? So it had to take a lot to get me to throw this one in the literary bin. It was the rampant sexism that did my head in. And yes, I realise it was written in the 1990s and is set in the 1930s but that isn’t an excuse. I just finished a couple of Dashiell Hammet novels written seventy years ago and they weren’t as bad as this one. I let the first couple of passages of derogatory remarks about women slide past in the hope he was just building the protagonist up as a sleazeball, but after a while I realised it was the WRITER’S voice coming through, not his character’s.

This is the passage that made me puke:

“Is that a fact?’ she said, smiling quietly to herself. It irritated me quite a bit, that smile; in part because I felt she was patronizing me, but also because I wanted desperately to stop it with a kiss. Failing that, the back of my hand.”

WHAAAAT...

I immediately thought, oh, ok, so because the woman is patronising the dumb gumshoe, that’s an excuse for a little light assault?

Yes, men in the 1930s thought like that. Hell, there are plenty of dumbass men today who are or should be in jail who think like that. But I read plenty of noir from all ages where it doesn’t come through as pure misogyny in the way Kerr’s writing does.

2 stars for his talent with metaphor and simile, and that’s it. Avoid this writer unless you WANT quotes to use in essays on misogyny!



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