October 29, 2006
Berlin Noir Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:20 PM EST A British thriller that I started reading last night and finished this morning—Philip Kerr’s The One from the Other—made me think about the eerie historical range and persistence of one of American popular culture’s greatest creations, the hardboiled private eye, the two greatest of whom were Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Dashiell Hammett invented Sam Spade in 1930, when he published The Maltese Falcon; Raymond Chandler invented Marlowe in 1939, when The Big Sleep was published; the last novel Chandler finished was Playback, published in 1958. Chandler died the following year, before completing Poodle Springs. Hammett died in 1961, but Spade appeared only in that one novel. Marlowe and Spade are two of most the imitated characters in popular fiction, which makes Chandler and Hammett two of the most influential American writers. The original Marlowe was based in a version of Los Angeles, and Chandler’s vision of L.A. became part of the mythos of that city, but it turns out that Chandler’s hero can be very readily detached from L.A. By the 1980s, novels starring Marlowe/Spade clones seemed to be set in every middling-sized town in America. I remember one series set in Indianapolis, and it wasn’t bad. On the other hand, other towns became regional variants of L.A. once they became the venues for the careers of Marlowe clones. I seem to remember the Indianapolis clone being sharply distinguishable from the L.A. original only when he ate a regional specialty—a pork tenderloin sandwich—or when he traveled a short distance to Kentucky, to locate someone in a town where brothels were openly tolerated by brutal, corrupt police; Marlowe had only to cross city lines to encounter more brutal, corrupt police; he didn’t have to leave the state. Marlowe/Spade could even be incarnated as an android, as he was in the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner, and suffered no loss of cultural potency. American imagination has rarely produced anything more flexible and durable. Why was the figure so widely imitated? Possibly because that sub-Marxian take on twentieth-century America was peculiarly appealing when fused with a reworking of the notion of the American hero as an isolate, a man untainted by implication in what are depicted as the invariably corrupt forms of collective life. In Chandler’s and Hammett’s vision, authority was invariably dishonest and frequently vicious, inevitably at the service of predatory elites, and the fix was always in. There was no alternative to this situation, no possibility of a collective political response to corruption and predation, but there was the possibility of anatomizing the situation, which is what the novelist did, and of small acts of justice being performed by a cynical but not compromised hero. At any rate, the private detective, refusing affiliation with the morally compromised authorities, living by his own moral code, never possessed of illusions, turned out to be an amazingly hardy creation. His longevity was probably protracted by the fact that he was immortalized in a number of masterpieces of film noir and twice incarnated with genius by Humphrey Bogart, who played both Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. After a while, the prospect of seeing yet another jerkwater town turned into a dime-store version of L.A. began to pall on me, but I am not sure it palled on too many other people, for Marlowe/Spade clones are still appearing, along with some odd hybrid types. A while ago, the British author Phillip Kerr adapted Marlowe/Spade to the world of the Third Reich, and produced three novels (March Violets, set in 1936, The Pale Criminal, set in 1938, and A German Requiem, set in 1947); the three were republished in 1994 in one volume titled Berlin Noir. Last month, after a fifteen year gap, Kerr produced The One from the Other, a fourth novel in the series, mostly set in Munich and Vienna, in 1949, which I started reading last night and finished this morning. Kerr’s protagonist is Bernhard Gunther, a veteran of World War I and a former detective for the Kripo, the German Criminal Police, also former house detective at the Adlon, the greatest of Berlin’s hotels. He begins the series as a private detective, a wisecracking tough guy who encounters his share of babes, booze, saps, gats, and corrupt and brutal authorities; he also brushes up against much more historically specific and ghastly things. In the most recent volume, he is again a private detective and a veteran of the SS, who saw combat, and other things, on the Eastern Front. Gunther differs from his American originals in the infinitely greater horror that surrounds him, and I have at times wondered whether Kerr risks trivializing that horrific history by using it as the background for a noir, but in the event I think such fears are excessive. The One from the Other is loosely based on some historical events, some of them better known than others. The series owes something to Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith’s splendid noir set in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, and possibly to Hans Hellmut Kirst’s The Night of the Generals, although both of those novels have protagonists who work directly for the forces of order, but the series remains rooted in Chandler’s vision of 1940s L.A. The fact that Kerr’s series works at all is, in a sense, odd; Nazi Germany, and a military occupation of the defeated Nazi Germany, are not obviously too much like even a dystopian vision of L.A. My guess is that Chandler and Hammett can work as inspiration for a series initially set in Nazi Berlin because we like to think that there is generally some margin for ethical choice in almost every social and historical context, and can work in occupied Germany because the modern reader, especially the modern British reader, may be likely to resist any Panglossian vision of the consequences of World War II. Stories that are less sour about the Hitler years—which overlapped the Stalin years—are certainly possible; the best reworker of the spy thriller writing today is Alan Furst, who owes little if anything to Chandler or Hammett, although he does owe something to the movie Casablanca (and to Joseph Roth, and to Eric Ambler, and for that matter to Tolstoy), and like Kerr, Furst sets some scenes in late 1930s Berlin. For my money, Furst is a great deal better in every respect, but in this series Kerr isn’t bad. It may afford Europeans some consolation for the ignominy of having being saved from Hitler and Stalin by the odious Americans to find an American vision that greatly weakens, indeed almost annihilates, the moral authority of their liberators. We are a more generous people than we may realize.
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