Crítics Matiners

It’s 1954 and Bernie now finds himself incarcerated in War Crimes Prison Number One in Landsberg, Germany. At first, the American lawyers who question him follow the rules. They despise him but they don’t abuse him, and in flashbacks to Berlin in 1931, Bernie takes them through the upheavals and street-fighting that preceded Hitler’s rise to power during his own days as a hard-bitten cop, and to the summer of 1941 on the Eastern Front, where he was in command of an SS unit that shot Russian prisoners and where, when he found out that women and children—Jews—were being murdered, he demanded to be relieved of duty. Not long after the American lawyers disappear, a new set of interrogators, schooled in techniques that lie far outside the rules, takes over. Bernie is now in the hands of the CIA and they want something. It seems Bernie is the only person in the West who personally knew the man who is now the head of East Germany’s security services (the notorious STASI). And so, under torture, Bernie spools out more of his history: dragooned into the SS by Heydrich, Bernie is sent to France in 1940 to identify the same man, now interned in a French concentration camp; in 1945 he is a Soviet POW on the Eastern Front when the man reappears and offers him a means of escape that he suspects may be a death trap. Complex and totally devious, FIELD GRAY is Philip Kerr’s breakout book, so full of double crosses it will have readers doing double takes (making it a book to be savored not skimmed) and so authoritative it could stand as a textbook account of the period. Striding across Europe through the killing fields of three decades, it reveals the reality of a world based on expediency, where, as long as you hold power, all is indeed fair in war and the ends are assumed to justify the means. Above all, it brings us a darker, more sardonic Bernie, an equal-opportunity hater who alone seems to understand that actions have consequences even in a world in which morality is at best relative. This is Bernie at his best, still able to pull off one-liners that make you laugh—until you wince. A Bernie who is forced by circumstances to become the ultimate trickster, an unreliable narrator for good reasons, a man seeking to save himself and still remain true to his tattered sense of right and wrong.