Berlin Noir: March Violets / The Pale Criminal / A German Requiem

by Philip Kerr

You don’t miss the Hitler Salute with someone like Gruber. It’s not worth the trouble. But one day I’m going to have to beat the crap out of that weasel, just for the sheer pleasure of it.

antimacassar

Doubly deprived of daylight, the shop’s only source of illumination was an oil lamp hanging from the low ceiling, and the general effect was that of the inside of an old sailing ship.

I made myself a pot of coffee that you could have eaten with a knife and fork,

There were many more articulate than me who were simply unable to find the words. It is a silence born of shame, for even the guiltless are guilty. Shorn of all human rights, man reverts back to the animal. The starving steal from the starving, and personal survival is the only consideration, which overrides, even censors, the experience.

To stay alive it is first necessary to die a little.

Pipe-smokers are the grandmasters of fiddling and fidgeting, and as great a blight on our world as a missionary landing on Tahiti with a boxful of brassieres.

Children are the reflection of one’s old age. They’re the quickest way of growing old I know. The mirror of one’s decline.

abattoir.

There are so many ways of escaping from that which one fears, and not the least of these is hatred.

But perhaps the most surprising thing was that I still had the capacity to be surprised at what was happening in Germany.

plinths,

For my money, having to stand quietly in a toilet where someone has just achieved a bowel-movement of truly Gothic proportions is about as rotten as it can get.

middens

terpsichorean

bucolic

Frenchman. As Napoleon might have said, but didn’t, “French history is the version of past events that French people have decided to agree upon.”