The Berlin Noir Series

by Philip Kerr

on the ceiling hung a chandelier that was bigger than a church-bell and gaudier than a stripper’s earrings. I made a mental note to raise my fees.

There’s only one thing that unnerves me more than the company of an ugly woman in the evening, and that’s the company of the same ugly woman the following morning.

You always eliminate the obvious. That’s fundamental to detection.

It’s the small manifestations of ordinary good humour and common courtesy that make the job so worthwhile.

I felt as full of life as a pack of sled-dogs.

‘Perhaps there never was just one jigsaw,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you’ve been trying to put one together when there were two all along.’ It took a moment or two to let that one sink all the way in, helped at the end with the flat of my hand smacking against my forehead. ‘Shit, of course.’ Her remark had the force of revelation. It wasn’t one crime I was staring in the face, trying to understand. It was two.

‘For a detective being a cynic is like green fingers in a gardener,

It’s the very absurdity of the British which makes them so impossible to radicalize.

Ordinarily I’m no listener to Party broadcasts. I’d sooner listen to my own wind.

It was a cold, beautiful day, the kind you can best appreciate with a fire to stoke and a dog to scratch.

I had neither, but then there wasn’t any fuel about and I never much liked dogs.

But thanks to the quilt I had wrapped around my legs I was warm, and I had just started to congratulate myself on being able to work from home — the sitting-room doubled as my office — when ...

As I waited for the car, Stalin seemed to watch me, a sensation which, I supposed, was intended: the eyes were as deep, black and unpleasant as the inside of a postman’s boot, and under the cockroach moustaches the smile was hard permafrost.

You see, I’m like an old piano — I don’t much like being played.