NJ 24: Fascism, War, and Noir

Welcome to Noir Journal #24, on the war/fascism/noir connection. Thanks to contributors Vicki Wilt, Rich Nemanich, Pierre (last name unknown), and, for the wide-scope concluding essay, author Steve Anderson. 

IF THE DEAD RISE NOT, Philip Kerr  

Review by Vicki Wilt

Bernie Gunther used to be a good cop. But now that the Nazis have begun their rise to power in Germany in the 1930s, Bernie has left Berlin’s police force. He’s marking time as a house detective in one of Berlin’s finest hotels, keeping his head down and hoping to quietly survive the betrayals and brutality of the Nazi era.

That is, until a beautiful American reporter persuades him to start asking questions about the upcoming 1936 Berlin Olympics—and the bribery and corruption that are allowing plans for it to go forward. Before long, Bernie has uncovered more than one murder, and he’s risking everything to fight Nazis, corrupt American officials, and mobsters who will do anything it takes to keep the truth from coming out.

First encountered in Philip Kerr’s acclaimed Berlin Noir trilogy, Bernie Gunther is the classic wisecracking, cynical noir hero with a heart of gold—and a weakness for damsels in distress. If the Dead Rise Not is the sixth novel in the Bernie Gunther series. Like the recently published A Quiet Flame, the fifth volume in the series, this one tracks Bernie’s precarious existence across momentous decades of the twentieth century, from pre-World War II Berlin to pre-Castro Cuba. Learning the truth behind historic events was never more fun—or more suspenseful.

Like Alan Furst, Philip Kerr has the rare gift of making a historical novel sound like an eyewitness account from another time and place—and allowing readers to vividly experience the moral dilemmas that history imposes on an ordinary man. If you’re new to this series, I envy you: You can gobble up all six of these great novels, one after the other. What a treat!

 --Vicki Wilt is a freelance writer and editor

The Dark Historical Novels of Alan Furst 

contributed by Rich Nemanich

One noir writer I discovered recently is Alan Furst (picture,left), who writes dark historical novels about war and espionage during World War II. His main influences appear to be Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Although not a series in the conventional sense of featuring the same characters and settings, Furst's novels all take place between 1934 (Hitler's ascent to power and the first Stalinist purges in Moscow) and the end of the war in 1945. So far, I have read only one of his novels, Night Soldiers, in which a Bulgarian victim of a fascist mob is recruited by the Soviet intelligence agency and sent to Spain at the outbreak of the civil war. The novel is well-crafted, contains an intricate plot, and is masterfully written. It is compelling reading, but in typical noir fashion, it is also bleak and unremitting in its depiction of the ravages of war.

Furst and Lucarelli, contributed by Noir Journal reader Pierre in response to Rich N., above.

I recently read Furst's novel The Foreign Correspondent, and it made quite an impression on me. Because I'm very interested in 30s and 40s European history and love noir/crime fiction, Furst is a perfect fit for my tastes. He writes well, establishes credible and complex characters, and it's incredible how he incorporates the dirty, tragic politics of his chosen era into the classic parameters of the noir genre. You're right that he is influenced by Graham Greene, but that's absolutely fine, since Greene is an absolute master. I'll certainly check out Night Soldiers. Since you obviously like Furst, I'd recommend Carlo Lucarelli's work, especially the trilogy that begins with Carte Blanche. Lucarelli locates his cop squarely in the era of Mussolini and he vividly creates a fine crime procedural and shoots it through with the dangerous absurdity and ruthlessness of the time. Unfortunately the three works are rather short--novellas really--and the publisher, Europa Editions, hasn't put the three works together into an omnibus edition. You can buy them pretty cheaply used on Amazon though. Fortunately for another recommendation of mine--Philip Kerr--there is an omnibus edition of his first three novels, Berlin Noir, which is set in 30s and 40s Berlin, and will knock your socks off. There's the same difficult navigation by the protagonist of the crime and the totalitarian politics. Give it a shot! Cheers.

 

War and Noir Tell the Same Grim Story

by Steve Anderson

In Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels, German detective Gunther faces adversaries who are sick products of those in political power — men who also happen to be brutal fascists. In the later postwar novels, Gunther's mere existence within such a regime comes back to haunt him. The classic flawed fall guy, he too was a product. 

In Kubrick's gritty masterpiece Paths of Glory (from the novel by Humphrey Cobb), Colonel Dax, a French officer in WWI, tries to stop the court martial of soldiers who mutinied rather than fight in another suicidal sortie. Dax doesn't solve a murder but he does discover, in starkest black-and-white, that the corrupt war Establishment works a scam of lies so big that a regular guy can never beat it. 

 

Both of these noirish tales were borne from war and the forces that need war to self-perpetuate. You could say modern war spawned noir. The monarchical proto-fascism that willed WWI sparked the new realism of the 20s, which shouted out that all we were being told was not blessed but bleak. WWII, with all its raw power unleashed, proved that bleakness worse than any could imagine. Sure, the postwar eras could look fun, pioneering and prosperous in popular culture, but there was always that sordid underbelly in which fermented the wretched truth that had been so deadly proved during war.  

 (Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory)

 How are the examples of Gunther and Dax, borne of war and fascism, much different from Chinatown, in which Jake Gittes finds that those most powerful are more perverse, corrupt, and controlling than any mob of smalltime hoods? To take this in another direction, John Le Carré's spare spy stories gave us Cold War controllers (much like a gumshoe's clients) who are only slightly cleaner than the legion of spies and masters on the enemy side. 

In the noir world, what else is war but a system rigged to serve not only the few power hungry but to dupe the many into believing in that very system? Many know it's rigged yet few can fight it. You can only survive. You might have to get a little dirty to survive. War, with all its blood-soaked, flag-draped, cynical and gilded champions; with all its grim consequences for the guy, however flawed, who's just trying to survive. This is the same world as in The Red Harvest and The Asphalt Jungle and right on through to LA Confidential. You have to play along even though you just know it's going to screw a guy. War is the ultimate expression of noir, whether we're talking about the thick of it or its grim aftermath. 

In war-tinged noir, the protagonists aren't bulls on the take, careerists looking to please or greedy industrialists but Nazis, Soviets, or worse yet, a main character's own officers, comrade soldiers or fellow travelers. The examples are so many — from The Third Man to Alan Furst's novels to those many hard-boiled types who returned from war only to find out the cards are stacked against them, whether it's a battle for a general's glory or a water grab to serve an incestuous LA baron. After the war the powerful are right back at it, only this time with more colorful flags, bigger mansions, heartier slogans. 

I try to discover the nexus of war and noir in my own work. In my new WWII novel The Losing Role a failed German actor, Max Kaspar, is forced to join a desperate secret mission in which he must impersonate an enemy American officer. So Max cooks up his own fanatical plan — he'll use his false identity to escape tyranny and war and flee to the America he'd once abandoned. Too bad Max is in far over his head. The Liberator, the sequel to The Losing Role, puts Max's German-American brother Harry in postwar Europe as the Allied Occupation and ensuing Cold War prove to be just another racket in the long line of rackets. Another novel, False Refuge, follows an American AWOL from the Iraq war who finds that the one haven he believed would give him a chance was the only thing worse — a new corrupt racket with even fewer scruples. 

The noir label gets stretched beyond recognition sometimes, and the dark world in which noir belonged to war can certainly look like an artifact of the 20th Century. But just look at the headlines. If you still think it's dead and buried, you've been taking one hell of a nap.

Steve Anderson is the author of The Losing Role, Besserwisser: A Novel, and False Refuge.

    
 (Steve Anderson)

That's it for now. Back soon.

Take care,

 ML

 

Comments

[Chris Wood]

War noir is a new one on me, excluding the PIs with war buddies in the background etc. Mussolini as the backdrop on a sleuth is a nice take and I'd be interested in finding out more about these.

[Mike L.]

Chris,
Glad you've learned about a new branch of noir. There's anohter writer I didn't mention named Hans Fallada who writes similar stories.
Thanks again for your continued support of Noir Journal. I trust that your own books, Incluidng THE INGREDIENTS OF A GOOD THRILLER, are doing well.
Cheers,
Mike L.