SEVENTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: guest Anthony Horowitz chooses THE ESCAPE ARTIST by Jonathan Freedland

 

"A study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read."

Anthony Horowitz is one of the most prolific and successful writers working in the UK – and is unique for working across so many media. A born polymath, he juggles writing books, TV series, films, plays and journalism. Anthony has written over 50 books including the bestselling teen spy series Alex Rider, which is estimated to have sold 21 million copies worldwide and has been turned into a hugely successful TV series by Amazon Freevee. A third series has just been filmed and the fourteenth Alex Rider novel, Nightshade: Revenge will be out later this year.

Also an acclaimed writer for adults, Anthony was commissioned to write two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The House of Silk and Moriarty. He was commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation novels for James Bond with Trigger Mortis and Forever and Day, published in 2015 and 2018 respectively. A third novel in the series, With a Mind to Kill, was published in May 2022.

Anthony’s award-winning novel Magpie Murders was published in October 2016 to critical acclaim and was serialised on BritBox at the beginning of 2022 with Lesley Manville in the lead role. It was televised on the BBC in 2023. The sequel, Moonflower Murders, will begin filming in September 2023. His new series featuring Detective Hawthorne and a sidekick called Anthony Horowitz has four books so far: The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill and the recently published The Twist of a Knife. Anthony has just started work on a fifth: Close to Death.

Anthony is responsible for creating and writing some of the UK’s most beloved and successful television series including Midsomer Murders and he is the writer and creator of award-winning drama series Foyle’s War, which was the Winner of the Lew Grade Audience award for BAFTA.

Anthony was awarded a CBE in 2022 for his services to literature.

(photo credit: Canneseries/Olivier Vigerie 2022)

 

I’ve always had misgivings about books about Auschwitz. The evil of the place is so overwhelming, its darkness so profound, that how can any writer find anything new to add to what is already an extensive library on the subject? And there is a danger that repetition will only blunt the horror of it all. I visited the camp one February, a few years ago, and standing there in my jersey, gloves and puffer jacket, but still colder than I had ever been, I wondered how anyone could have survived even a week there (the average life expectancy was actually four months). Meanwhile, all around me, other visitors were taking selfies. 

The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland, which came out last year and is now in paperback, is a brilliant and important piece of writing because it tells a story that is less well-known, because it finds fresh details to illustrate the horrors of life inside the camp but above all because its focus extends far beyond the gas chambers and the electrified fences. In terrible detail, it explains how the world allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Its central protagonist, Walter Rosenberg, was just nineteen years old when he became the first Jew to escape from the camp, hiding in a tiny dug-out beneath a pile of wood and covering himself in petrol-soaked tobacco to put off the guard dogs. This breathless sequence – he and his fellow escapee, Fred Wetzler, were just seconds away from being discovered – is extremely tense; a reminder that, under another name, Freedland has written many successful thrillers.

Once out, the two men had to travel 75 miles through enemy territory to reach the border with Slovakia. “Just nineteen and twenty-five years old, Walter and Fred were entirely on their own. The way Walter saw it, they had been written off by the world…” And this is the nub of the matter. The descriptions of life inside Auschwitz are horrific enough. The casual murders, the starvation, the daily torture are detailed in sombre, effective prose. But as incredible as it may sound, what happens to Walter (who renames himself Rudolf Vrba) is in some ways even worse.

He had escaped in order to tell the world what was happening. “If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?” A scientist and a mathematician gifted with an extraordinary memory, he described his ordeal to a Jewish organisation in Bratislava – the UZ – and the result was The Auschwitz Report which detailed everything from the arrival of the transports from different parts of Europe to the numbers and even the names of those who perished. The final list numbered 1,765,000 dead in just two years.

Almost nobody cared. Nobody did anything. The Catholic church responded to their report with silence. Copies of the report got ‘lost in the post’. Jewish community leaders who did receive it dithered. The Americans were lethargic. Churchill read the document but his response was ineffectual. “What can be done?” he wrote to Anthony Eden. “What can be said?” The British did consider air strikes on Auschwitz or even on the railways leading to the camp. They decided not to.

Jonathan Freedland does not lose faith with his subject. “His life was defined by what he had endured as a teenager. But he was not crushed by it.” Even so, reading the second half of this book, it’s hard not to feel that Rosenberg does not come out of it as quite the hero he most certainly was even if he is credited with saving the lives of 200,000 people. For him, it wasn’t enough. The last part of the book describes a life that self-destructs. He falls out with Fred Wetzler and also with his daughter. An inveterate womaniser, he divorces his childhood sweetheart and wife. He moves from country to country and seems to have few friends. When he dies, in 2006, just forty people come to his memorial service.

The Escape Artist is a complex portrait of a man who was no artist and who never really escaped from the shadows of Auschwitz or, indeed, from himself. It is a study of humanity like no other and an unforgettable read.

The Escape Artist is published by John Murray

Guest review by Leslie Wilson: WE GERMANS by Alexander Starritt

 

"The great strength of this part of the novel is that it makes the soldiers, and particularly Meissner, real people. Not monsters, but human beings who might be ourselves under other circumstances."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and three for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. The first two deal with Nazi Germany: The War’s Not Over Yet is just out as a Kindle e-book and is set at the time of the Russian blockade of Berlin in 1948. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany.

My grandfather fought in Ukraine, though only up till 1943, but unlike the fictional grandfather here, my Opa never spoke to me or to my brother about his experiences (or anything he might have perpetrated). In fact, since he was an officer, his experience would have been different from those of the ordinary Landser, or squaddies. But when I read Alexander Starritt’s description of those men, some of them only lads, ‘fleeing on foot, broken, bedraggled, our tanks blown up, our artillery abandoned, our good name blackened for generations, our friends and brothers-in-arms buried in hostile soil', I did remember my mother’s description of my grandfather returning from the Front, haggard, unshaven, dressed in rags, drinking morosely in the kitchen. I also remember watching Gone with the Wind, when the movie showed the shattered Confederate army limping back, and my mother whispered to me: ‘That’s what our soldiers looked like when I saw them retreating.’ By the time she saw that, the soldiers had been beaten back to Graz, with the Russians hard on their heels. All the same. Not only defeated, but on the wrong side of history.

Meissner, the protagonist of We Germans, is one of a group of soldiers who are authorised by their captain to go hunting for a ‘food depot’ which, it’s rumoured, is about to be abandoned to the enemy. They don’t even half believe in its existence, but by now (1944) supplies aren’t getting to them and the ordinary soldiers, at least, are starving. Some of them are shooting themselves, or just wandering out to let the Russians kill them. The survivors will do anything if they think it might just fill their bellies.

What the soldiers first happen on, though, are the inhabitants of an entire village who have been strung up on ‘a single big tree ... in bunches, like swollen plums.’ Too hardened by the war, by the things they have seen and done, the soldiers leave them there, foraging onwards, arguing with each other and threatening each other, till they find an empty champagne bottle, Bollinger. That gets them on the scent. They follow a trail of empty bottles till they find a hunting lodge guarded by the much hated, brutal military police (hated because they’re brutal to their own side), Feldgendarmerie. At this point, Meissner tells us, ‘the desperate animal part of me barged any more complex sentiment out of the way. We stormed the compound just as we would have a Russian outpost.’ The soldiers kill most of the policemen. When they get inside, they find two frightened and teary Polish prostitutes. This novel is definitely not one for the squeamish, but the soldiers are more interested in food than in rape, and the Polish girls get away.

Meissner and his comrades (if that word is appropriate) help themselves to unimagined riches; ‘Italian sardines, French cheese, rollmops.. tinned peaches from Greece, sacks and sacks of firm, hale potatoes,’ also cigarettes and ‘fancy drinks.’ Finally, they torch the hunting lodge and leave it, having committed murder and treason. Yet the line they have crossed has given them ‘the taste of a certain destructive freedom.’ They escape out into the countryside, get huge quantities of the food down themselves, get the squitters because it’s too rich, torment each other.

Brutal and licentious soldiery, indeed. Meissner does have some human feeling left, but it’s too ‘deeply buried.’ Or driven out by the nagging misery of foot-rot, by, confusion, a vicious irritability, by fears for family at home, fear of death or capture, by, in Meissner’s case, a dogged determination to survive.

And yet these disaffected soldiers manage to seize a Russian tank and drive it towards the enemy, knocking out a great many tanks as they go. The story might end with their deaths, but they then get out of the tank and escape into the forest once more.

All this is portrayed with consummate and convincing skill; the reader is drawn into the ghastly reality of the soldiers’ existence, and the great strength of this part of the novel is that it makes the soldiers, and particularly Meissner, real people. Not monsters, but human beings who might be ourselves under other circumstances. Hunger does dreadful things to us; makes us more inclined to violence, sharpens the survival instinct to a lethal extent.

So far, so convincing. However, this is a novel of layers, and there are other layers which are less accomplished. Meissner’s narrative is a written document he leaves for his grandson, Callum, to read after his death, and it is heavily mediated. We have Meissner’s story from 1944, and then, like voiceovers, the older Meissner, and Callum speak to us; my reaction to those voices often veered from irritation to indignation.

I did at first wonder if what I was reading was the well-worn (in my youth) myth of the ordinary ‘Landser’ or squaddie, who fought a largely decent war, while police regiments and SS committed the atrocities. Then I thought, no, it’s not this kind of story. On the surface, Meissner is brutally honest; he describes how he and his fellow soldiers went ‘foraging,’ which meant stealing food from civilians, who were going to starve, but then you read: ‘What I want to tell you isn’t about atrocities or genocide’. Yet there is an episode where the soldiers come upon more Feldgendarmen and men from a ‘penal battallion’ (composed of convicted criminals), who are hanging German deserters, raping Polish housemaids and crucifying them and Polish labourers against the sides of a barn. So what, exactly, is Meissner’s definition of an atrocity? To be fair, he is quite clear that by merely fighting as a conscript he was complicit in the whole thing, but we know now that ordinary soldiers did murder civilians, incluidng Jews. Not Meissner, apparently.

Meissner also claims that the story is really about courage. Does he mean the naked instinct to survive (if so, are the others, who gave up, cowards?) or is it only about the capture of the tank? The tank capture actually prevents the Russians getting to the atrocities against the Poles and perhaps rescuing the victims before they died.

‘Did we do wrong?’ Meissner reflects. ‘By the morality of consequences, yes, undoubtedly. But it’s hard for me to accept that so baldly, because by the morality of virtues, of character, the others at least were brave and loyal.’

The elephant in the room here is that warfare is actually about killing people (though the expression ‘killing for your country’ is never used.) Nowadays it’s always justified in terms of some future good; the Russians, right now, are freeing Ukraine from ‘Nazis’, or so Putin tells us. We still feel that World War 2 was largely a just war, because it defeated Nazism (though it failed to protect the territorial integrity of Poland, which was where it started). In the post-war moral system, admittedly flawed, that Meissner is supposed to adhere to now, the morality of consequences is what it’s all about. What I would see in the tank capture is a kind of resetting of psychological equilibrium: the soldiers compensate for the treason they have committed. Or else they are simply doing what they have been programmed, by years of training and propaganda, to do.

Meissner does make one very valuable observation, a conclusion I came to myself after years of reading about Nazi Germany and thinking it through: ‘Only a very few of us were stronger than our times. Not me. A handful who somehow knew how to act beyond themselves, even then.’ Look at our own society. How many people dare blow the whistle on their employers, no matter what those employers do? He also writes: ‘I think that we were blemished by the consequences of what other people decided. No one ever has complete responsibility for his own moral balance. And the unforgiving truth, the severe, ancient truth, is that you can be culpable for something that you weren’t in control of.’

As one who has looked back at her own grandfather and wondered how he could live after participating in that war, and being part of that machinery, I have had similar thoughts. I cannot be indignant about the horrors of his internment after the end of the war, even though the investigators found nothing to convict him of in the end. He began by hating the Nazis; I do know that after the war he hated them, yet he became part of the machinery, to survive. To me, not the least crime of Nazis great and small is that the society they created made criminals of so many others. But I did feel that it might have been possible to get this view across through the narrative (indeed, I have passed quite a few moments, when walking the dog or dealing with mundane household tasks, working out how it could be done). I also wondered how far the opinions I heard were Starritt’s, rather than those of his characters.

Some of the interventions in the story are frankly off-beam, and why does Callum have to end an exposition of the myth of Ragnarok by sniping that dedicated recyclers are driven by an ‘end-of-days fixation’ which is a ‘narrow, atavistic niche in German culture, brought out by the extreme despair of losing two world wars’? It is news to me that recycling is a purely German concern. But what made me indignant (not to mention furious) was the attitude (whether Starritt’s or Meissner’s) towards the atrocities the Russians in their turn committed when they conquered Germany.

‘We were in the wrong,’ Starritt has Meissner write. ‘We had that knowledge hammered into us with the deaths of friends and the rape of our families. And the enormity of our crime meant we had to accept that the punishment, though terrible, was not unjust.’ Leaving aside the fact that the Russians also raped Polish and Yugoslav women (and what were they punished for?) what that boils down to is that the rape of women, girls and even young children and babies was a matter between men; the German army, the Red Army. Women, then, are property, what’s done to them is primarily an act of retribution against the males who own them?

But if there is ‘no fair, except what people effortfully construct’, as Starritt has Meissner tell us, then we need absolute clarity about what is just and what is not. What happened in Germany and Austria in 1945 was certainly the consequence of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941; it doesn’t follow that it is right for a child to wake up and find a Russian soldier on top of her. ‘And then,’ (the adult woman, speaking on a video I once watched, shuddered) ‘the next one came, and the next one, and the next one-’

Imagine what that was like, if you can bear to, and see if you can comfortably talk about justice.

We Germans is published by John Murray.

The War's Not Over Yet is available from Amazon Kindle.

Guest review by Lesli Wilson: WHAT YOU CAN SEE FROM HERE by Mariana Leky

 

"With its humour, its unsentimental humanity, and its intimacy, it's a pretty good place to inhabit..."

Lesli Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and two for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. Both deal with Nazi Germany. Lesli Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany. She is currently working on a novel for adults, set in the very early nineteenth century. 

'An okapi is completely implausible, every bit as implausible, in fact, as the sinister dreams of a woman from the Westerwald.'

The Westerwald (the name means Western Forest), lies a little way to the east of the Rhine. Its tourist site describes it as 'dreamfully unspoilt,' which is amusing, since the entire plot of this novel, set in that area, hinges on the dreams of the narrator's grandmother, Selma. If you want to know what Selma looks like, you can look up Rudi Carrell, the Dutch television host on the Internet. Selma 'resembled Rudi Carrell so perfectly that.. in our eyes, he was nothing more than a poor copy of Selma.' However, Selma has several characteristics that differentiate her from Rudi, unless Rudi also used to have dreams of an okapi that meant one person in his neighbourhood was going to die within days.

When Selma dreams of the okapi, she tells two people and swears them to secrecy; which means, inevitably, that the news runs round the neighbourhood like wildfire, creating havoc in the lives of its inhabitants. Some become deeply risk-averse, avoiding animals, even gentle old dogs, looking up to rule out falling rooftiles, branches, or heavy light fixtures, constantly checking themselves for signs of an incipient heart attack. An old farmer who feels he's lived too long lies in his bed and prepares to welcome death; in vain, as it turns out. Others vent long-kept hidden truths, which they might as well reveal before they die; 'A secret truth does not want to perish in hiding.' The survivors then, of course, have to live with the consequences of this frankness.

One of this latter category is the Optician (the otherwise excellent translator doesn’t capitalise the name, but I would have done; all nouns, of course, are capitalised in German, but I sensed what you might call a special capitalisation there. The Optician is Selma's best friend, and he has helped her bring up her granddaughter, the narrator Luise, and Luise's best friend Martin. Luise's mother and father have other preoccupations that prevent them from playing much of a role in her life. Martin's father is an alcoholic and physically abusive. The Optician has loved Selma for years, but his mind is populated by doubting voices that prevent him telling her so, and in the end, even the prospect of imminent death can silence them.

This is not a novel about how people behave in the face of death, however, or even about the emergence of long-held secrets, though that enters into the plot. It's primarily about people, how they relate to each other, how they love, or hide from love; how they hurt each other and heal.  The characters are presented with wry, ironic, sometimes dark humour. There's a reclusive woman (euphemistically named 'sad Marlies') who lives to hurt other people; her  aunt hanged herself in her kitchen  at the age of ninety two 'which Marlies could not understand. In her opinion, committing suicide at ninety-two was hardly worth the trouble.' There's Elsbeth, Luise's great aunt by marriage, small and circular, who purveys potions to the villagers: they slip into her garden 'with their coat collars turned up' and look around several times 'the way men in the county seat turn up their collars and look around when they opened the door to Gaby's Erotic boutique.' When the Optician tries to kill Martin's father by sawing through the legs of his hunting blind (a tower that hunters in Germany climb onto so they can see the game from a distance,) he repents and rushes off to repair it. But he has confided what he's done to Elsbeth, and when he arrives she's already there, trying to do the job with wire and superglue. The ensuing dialogue, which becomes three-cornered when they discover that their intended victim is actually up in the hunting blind as they work, is a triumph of comedy. But the book also contains tragedy and sadness, joy, and many different varieties of love.

It's a piece of fiction which is hard to categorise, quite different from anything else I have read recently. With its humour, its unsentimental humanity, and its intimacy, it's a pretty good place to inhabit; a book to keep on your shelves after you've finished it, and revisit again and again.

What You Can See From Here is published by Bloomsbury.

Guest review by Ian Beck: STASI 77 by David Young

"... the constant fear of being observed, followed or overheard runs like a strong thread throughout ..." 

Ian Beck is the author and illustrator of many books for children. He has also illustrated books by Adele Geras, Rose Impey, Geraldine MaCaughrean and Philip Pullman. He has published several novels for young people including the Tom Trueheart series, Pastworld, The Haunting of Charity Delafield, and The Carmody Casebooks. He recently revisited his iconic illustration to the cover of Elton John’s 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road reimaging it for the cover of Elton’s final world tour programme. His most recent picture book is The Magic Hour published by Tate Gallery in March of this year.

It is 1977 in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik of East Germany. The anti-fascist protection barrier (to give the Berlin wall its official title) will still be standing for another 12 years. Major Karin Muller of the Kriminalpolizei has been recalled from holiday to investigate the suspicious death of a party official. As with the three previous books in the series (Stasi Child, Stasi Wolf and A Darker State) her enquiries are never straightforward. There are always deeply hidden crosscurrents and darker motives. The shadowy hands of the Stasi, the state secret police, are close  behind her at almost every turn.

Karin has an odd kind of relationship with her country and its politics. Frequently frustrated at her attempts to get to the truth and yet, in passing, admiring the architecture of their brave ‘new world’, feeling at one point in the centre of a new development that ‘Marx himself would be proud of what they had achieved’. However, she can still deplore the qualities of the official ersatz coffee, Kaffe Mix. It comes as a delightful, almost ecstatic shock when in one scene she ís covertly served a cup made from real coffee imported from the West.

The party official has been found suffocated by smoke inhalation. What at first might have been seen and dismissed as an accident is soon revealed to be murder. A similar killing of another party official is reported, and further murders using the same modus operandi. Karin sets off with her assistant, Hauptmann Werner Tilsner (with whom she has shared the odd dalliance in the past) who says, ‘I’d much rather be getting dirty hands than shuffling paper and pushing pens.’ However an interview with the widow of one of the murdered men is made difficult through the presence of a Stasi official who censors certain questions and forbids particular lines of enquiry. It seems that the Stasi are taking a very keen interest in what appears at first to be a routine case. Even those officials and colleagues who she has been able to trust in the past now seem at times to be untrustworthy, even perhaps capable of physically doctoring evidence. Who can Karin Muller trust? In the end, perhaps, only herself.  

The narrative is interrupted at certain points with the testimony of a French prisoner in WW2. A fisherman from the Isle de Re, he was in the resistance with his two siblings, ‘a band of brothers’. They have been caught and shipped to Germany as slave labourers, known as Zebras, for their striped uniforms. They work in terrible conditions tunnelling for the secret V1 and V2 rocket bases, flogged and starved and treated as barely human by the Kapos in charge of them. The horror of their story, each time it appears, provides a vivid and continually worsening counterpoint to the main thrust of the investigation. Karin seems especially vulnerable this time round. Her twins, aged seventeen months and mostly looked after by her grandmother Helga, are a sensitive pressure point, a possible bargaining chip for any officials out to thwart her investigation if it gets too near the truth. The narrative constantly circles the very dark secrets of Germany’s past in WW2. Karin is from the generation born too late to be held responsible for what happened in the war: as one of the characters says to her at one point, ‘You are too young to bear the guilt’. Later in the narrative a series of immediate post-war debriefing interviews between a major in the American forces and a member of the Nazi party are transcribed, throwing more light on the darkness at the heart of the book and its shocking conclusion. 

David Young writes with admirable clarity and atmosphere. The day to day details of East German life, the suspicions and petty inconveniences, the constant fear of being observed, followed or overheard runs like a strong thread throughout. Interviews might be conducted at an especially unpopular bench at the Zoo. Older buildings and their history are evoked: ‘Like many of the Republic’s older structures, bullet hole damage from the Second World War was still evident in its brickwork’....indeed that damage is not only physical but runs deep into the structure of the state itself. This gripping and satisfying read is a worthy conclusion to the Karin Muller series. It is also fascinating to read of the true deeply moving and shocking events behind the story in the author’s note at the end of the book.

Stasi 77 is published by Bonnier.

Guest review by Leslie Wilson: BABYLON BERLIN by Volker Kutscher, translated by Niall Sellar

"A cracking good read, brilliantly plotted..."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and two for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. Both deal with Nazi Germany. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany. She is currently working on a novel for adults, set in the very early nineteenth century.

My grandfather and his younger brother Erich Rösel were both German policemen; Uncle Erich was a member of the Kriminalpolizei (CID) in Berlin. Alas, I only met him once and I know nothing about his career except that, as a working class lad, he must have started at the bottom. But reading Babylon Berlin, I wonder how much the novel resembles the reality that Erich knew.

He’d have been one of the police constables that Gereon Rath and his superior officers deploy in the novel, on stakeouts, doing door to door investigations; footsloggers. Gereon Rath, by contrast, is a detective inspector, the son of a high-ranking Rhineland police officer. Unfortunately for him, an injudicious shooting in Cologne (he killed the trigger-happy son of a major newspaper publisher; in the line of duty, but a bad move) got him moved to Berlin. Now he’s in the Vice Squad instead of the Murder Squad, which feels like a punishment. Rath is ambitious, frustrated, under a slight cloud; not much of a team player, and with a troubled relationship with his distinguished father; all good stuff for a crime fiction hero.

It’s 1929, and Berlin is a hotbed of crime, corruption, and political conflict. Communists and Trotskyites are fomenting revolution in Germany; Nazis and other right-wingers, yearning to fight the Allies and defeat them this time, are acquiring arms and building up illegal armies. The Social Democratic city government is trying, sometimes brutally, to keep a lid on the boiling pot. It’s a city of savage contrasts; in poverty-stricken, left-wing Neukölln a gigantic Karstadt department store is being constructed (later, alas,destroyed by Allied bombs; it was an impressive building). Here Rath, fighting vertigo, and his Chief Inspector, Wolter, capture a fleeing porn actor on the top of the scaffolding.

It’s a city that anyone familiar with the literature and the media of the period will recognise. There are mafia-style organisations, tolerated by the police because they keep a kind of order among thieves. Fritz Lang portrayed these in his brilliant film M, where the gangs track down a child-murderer; I can’t help seeing Marlow, in the novel, as Gustav Gründgens,who played the gang boss in M. The porn actors are straight out of George Grosz; so are the women they screw for the camera.There are transvestites, there are dancing girls and drugs. (Rath himself snorts cocaine on occasion.)

Some of the police are historical figures; particularly Superintendant Ernst Gennat, a noted eccentric, addicted to cake and thus known as ‘the fat man of the murder squad.’ His office was said to contain sagging velvet armchairs, an axe used by a murderer, and the head of a woman that was once fished, wrapped in paper, from the river Spree. (I can’t understand why Kutscher doesn’t mention these details.) Gennat’s intelligence and sophistication as a police investigator certainly feature in the plot. Incidentally, it was Gennat who coined the expression ‘serial killer.’

Babylon Berlin is a cracking good read, with its own mutilated body fished from the Spree, and brilliantly plotted; it keeps you guessing, which is what any keen crime reader wants. There’s a love interest, too; Rath develops a troubled relationship with the lovely Charlotte, a stenographer in the Murder Squad who aspires to become a police officer herself. I can’t help sympathising with her when she calls him an arsehole. At least he recognises the fact - but I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry him.

What gripped me was the complex and convincing portrayal of the city: I’ve already got the second novel in the series. I read it in German first; what I did miss in the (competent, occasionally sloppy) translation was the complexity of language and a lot of the irony, which Berliners do so well. Some texture is lost thereby.

I know from experience that it’s near-impossible to render Berlin dialect into English. I would have liked to see the army officer-jargon of the police brought into the English version, for that demonstrates how military an institution the 1920s German police were. But then, I suppose there are layers of meaning in the Montalbano books that are lost to me, because I can only enjoy them in translation.

Babylon Berlin is published by Sandstone Press. Original title: Der nasse Fisch, Gereon Rath’s Erster Fall.