The One From the Other

“Philip Kerr is the contemporary master of the morally complex thriller. . . . [
A German Requiem
], set mainly in postwar Vienna, has an affinity with Graham Greene’s
The Third Man
but—dare I say it?—equals or surpasses Greene (and the Carol Reed film featuring Orson Welles), because it doesn’t shy away from the Nazi-saturated substratum of the Viennese milieu. And then I discovered—and devoured—Mr. Kerr’s new noir,
The One from the Other
. It crystallized my dissatisfaction with recent le Carré novels (clumsily didactic) and made me rethink my addiction to Alan Furst’s oeuvre (brilliant but a bit too thickly varnished with romantic glamour). . . . The achievement of Philip Kerr’s novels is that he takes his Chandler/Hammett-style detective, that lone figure in the (largely ahistorical) mean streets of the urban jungle, into the midst of a far more highly charged historical backdrop, a different, more profoundly mean—indeed, evil—sort of mean-street neighborhood, the crossroads of history and tragedy. Mr. Kerr has set his detective on an
Inferno
-like trajectory that takes us deep into the heart of darkness.”

—Ron Rosenbaum,
New York Observer

“Several elements account for the excellence of the Gunther books. First, Kerr is a fine novelist; in terms of narrative, plot, pace, and characterizations, he’s in a league with John le Carré and Alan Furst. Moreover, he has done prodigious research into an era that ended well before he was born. The political, historical, military, and cultural details feel absolutely authentic. If you want a sense of what Nazi Germany was like, day to day, not many novels equal these. Finally, Kerr was truly inspired to place a detective-turned-private-eye at work in Nazi Germany. Private eyes investigate crimes, and where in human history can we find more cosmic crimes than those of the Hitler era? The question was whether Kerr would be equal to the challenge he set for himself. He has been. . . . One of the bright spots in this always readable, often troubling novel is the suggestion, near the end, that Kerr’s good German will return again.”

—Patrick Anderson,
The Washington Post

“Because he never had any illusions to begin with, Gunther is the ideal narrator for Kerr’s bleak tale of the dirty deals made by victors and vanquished alike. Having learned that there’s no way to distinguish ‘the one from the other,’ the cynical P.I. has the moral clarity to see through the deceit and hypocrisy of both friend and foe. He’s the right kind of hero for his time—and ours.”

—Marilyn Stasio,
The New York Times Book Review

“It is to be sincerely hoped that a very large number of readers buy this book so that Mr. Kerr won’t be tempted to abandon Bernie Gunther again, and that his adventures will continue for many years. Even if the author wants to torture his hero, he shouldn’t do it to his readers.”

—Otto Penzler,
The New York Sun

“No novelist ‘gets’ Germany and Europe before, during, and after World War II as well as Mr. Kerr, not even Alan Furst. . . . There seems to be little of which Mr. Kerr is not in command—noirish turns of phrase (‘His teeth were big and yellow, as if he usually ate grass for dinner’), pacing, atmosphere, story, and historical facts and events.”

—Roger K. Miller,
The Washington Times

“Kerr’s book is his spectacular follow-up to his extraordinarily brilliant Berlin Noir trilogy. Kerr is the only bona fide heir to Raymond Chandler that I have ever come across; his German private detective Bernie Gunther would have been respected by Philip Marlowe and the two of them would have enjoyed sitting down at a bar and talking. One of the things that is so amazing about Kerr’s four Bernie Gunther novels, to me, is that while the books are ostensibly hard-boiled mysteries, they gave me a glimpse into the incomprehensible horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust in much the same way D. M. Thomas’
The White Hotel
and Spiegelman’s
Maus
once did. For me they are all works of art that for a moment enabled me to grasp the unimaginable, before my mind clouded over and returned to the safety of the quotidian.”

—Jonathan Ames,
Salon.com
Book Awards

“Kerr’s stylish noir writing makes every page a joy to read.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Grim and gripping, with the author’s customary sure-handedness in evidence.”—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Once more, Kerr demonstrates his mastery of a time well-mined in fiction but still rife for exploration.”

—Sarah Weinman,
The Baltimore Sun

“Kerr’s expertly plotted tale glistens with period detail and punchily cynical asides. A-.”—
Entertainment Weekly

“A welcome return [of Bernie Gunther] . . . A somber, melancholy, compelling work,
The One from the Other
stretches the notion of entertaining fiction to [the] breaking point. . . . Philip Kerr impressively sustains the novel’s parched, opportunistic, bottomlessly compromised world. Where next for Bernie Gunther?”

—
The Times Literary Supplement
(London)

“It is a highly entertaining book, imaginatively conceived and smartly executed. Although it stands as a remarkable work of historical fiction, fans of hard-boiled detective stories will not be disappointed.”

—
Historical Novels Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip Kerr is the author of seventeen previous novels, but perhaps most importantly, the four featuring Bernie Gunther—
The One from the Other
and the
Berlin Noir
trilogy (
March Violets
,
The Pale Criminal
, and
A German Requiem
). He also wrote the cult classic
A Philosophical Investigation
and five bestselling children’s books (as P. B. Kerr). Kerr was chosen early in his career as one of
Granta
magazine’s Best Young British Novelists and was hailed by Salman Rushdie as “a brilliantly innovative thriller-writer.” Born in Edinburgh, he now lives in London and Cornwall with his family.

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First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006
Published in Penguin Books 2009

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-1-440-65767-2

1. International relations—Fiction. 2. Munich (Germany)—Fiction.
3. Vienna (Austria)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6061.E
823'.914—dc22

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FOR JANE

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be
changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and
the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

—REINHOLD NIEBUHR

PROLOGUE

Berlin, September 1937

I remember how good the weather was that September. Hitler weather, they used to call it. As if the elements themselves were disposed to be kind to Adolf Hitler, of all people. I remember him making a ranting speech demanding foreign colonies for Germany. It was, perhaps, the first time any of us had heard him use the phrase “living space.” No one thought for a moment that our living space could only be created if someone else died first.

I was living and working in the space we called Berlin. There was plenty of business there for a private detective. It was all missing persons, of course. And most of them were Jewish. Most of them murdered in back alleys, or sent off to a KZ, a concentration camp, without the authorities bothering to notify their families. The Nazis thought it was quite funny, the way they did that. The Jews were, of course, officially encouraged to emigrate, but because they were forbidden to take their property with them, few did so. Still, some people devised several neat tricks to get their money out of Germany.

One such trick was for a Jew to deposit a large sealed parcel containing various valuables, and labeled the “last will and testament” of so and so, with a German court of law before going abroad for “a holiday.” The Jew would then “die” in a foreign country and have the local French or English court request the German court to forward the parcel containing his “last will and testament.” German courts being run by German lawyers were usually only too happy to comply with the requests of other lawyers, even French and English ones. And in this way quite a few lucky Jews managed to be reunited with enough cash or valuables to start a new life in a new country.

It might seem hard to believe, but another neat scheme was actually devised by the Jewish Department of the Security Police—the SD. This scheme was seen as a good way of helping Jews leave Germany and, in the process, of enriching certain officers of the SD into the bargain. It was what we called the
tocher,
or Jewish peddler, scheme, and I first had experience of it as a result of the strangest pair of clients that ever came my way.

Paul Begelmann was a rich German Jewish businessman who owned several garages and car dealerships throughout Germany. And SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Franz Six was the head of the SD’s Jewish Department. I was summoned to meet them both in the department’s modest, three-room suite of offices at the Hohen-zollern Palais, on Wilhelmstrasse. Behind Six’s desk was a picture of the Führer, as well as a host of legal degrees from the universities of Heidelberg, Königsberg, and Leipzig. Six might have been a Nazi crook, but he was an extremely well-qualified Nazi crook. He was hardly Himmler’s ideal-looking Aryan. Aged about thirty, he was dark-haired, a little self-satisfied around the mouth, and no more Jewish-looking than Paul Begelmann. He smelled faintly of cologne and hypocrisy. On his desk was a little bust of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had founded the University of Berlin and who, famously, had defined the limits beyond which the activities of the State should not go. I guessed it was unlikely that Sturmbannführer Six would have agreed with him there.

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