This dramatised bio-pic about the WW2 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich is based on a novel entitled ‘HHhH’ – ‘Himmler’s brain is named Heydrich.’ Quite clever, but perhaps too subtle for a mainstream movie audience. There’s another film about the same subject – Anthropoid – which majors on the Czech soldiers and their undercover mission. ‘The…
This is a beast of a book. A substantial, meticulously crafted alternate reality, populated with a fully-fledged society and acres of exhaustive backstory. Think American Gods meets Bernie Gunther with overtones of Orwell, a collision between myriad strands of mythology and the hard-bitten cynicism of an under-dog who struggles to survive the grinding oppression of…
Despite what the title suggests, this is an entirely gentlemanly novel of behind-the-lines, undercover activity in occupied France during WW2. It’s an old-school espionage adventure which cleverly captures the classic vibe of films like The Great Escape. I almost expected Dickie Attenborough and Kenneth Moore to appear as character cameos… …and in fact Howard Linskey,…
Our year has been stacked with mystery and intrigue, betrayal and revenge, bitterness and redemption – and some simply stunning plot twists. We’ve reviewed and read almost 200 crime / thrillers, from literary fiction by established authors to debut books by indie authors. Only a very select few, less than 10%, achieve a full-on five-star…
Take a roadtrip with a US Marshall, travel back to Nazi Germany, explore the underbelly of the banking business in Switzerland, discover the strange side of Japanese noir, and meet one of Scandi crime’s finest detectives in his younger years. All this and more in these criminal escapades from international authors… The Pyramid by Henning…
It seems that there’s an insatiable appetite for crime novels which are also war stories – historical fiction which uses the international upheaval of WW2 as its dramatic backdrop. I blame Bernie Gunther… but find these philosophical investigations as compelling as any contemporary thrillers. It’s as if we still can’t come to terms with what…
It’s not often that I buy an actual paperback book – a proper thing with pages, not an ethereal ebook – and then give up on it halfway through. So The Butchers Of Berlin has secured an unusual accolade indeed. It should have been straight up my street, as I enjoy criminal investigations, serial killer…
This is not a book to wolf down in one sitting, nor one you can nibble away at in brief bites. It’s too densely detailed and emotionally intense for that. Like a giant supertanker, The Ashes of Berlin takes quite a while to get going – but once you’re absorbed in the plot and characters…
It’s 1939 at the Berghof. A Nazi apparatchik just got shot – on the terrace where Hitler takes his tea! When I picked up the 12th book in the Bernie Gunther series I was fully prepared to report that the modern thrillers aren’t a patch on the original Berlin Noir trilogy. Duh. Wrong again. Overall, Prussian…
Philip Kerr wrote his original Berlin Noir trilogy nearly three decades ago, and it’s been about that long since I last read them. The Pale Criminal is the second in the series and only its brevity suggests that it’s a much older book than the current, long-running series centred around Bernie Gunther. The popularity of…
MurderMayhem&More 