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If the Dead Rise Not
If the Dead Rise Not
If the Dead Rise Not
Audiobook16 hours

If the Dead Rise Not

Written by Philip Kerr

Narrated by Paul Hecht

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

The best-selling author of 20 novels, Philip Kerr has won a devoted following-and there are none more ardent than those who devour his Bernie Gunther series. In 1934, Bernie found himself in Berlin, where he was caught up in intrigue surrounding Hitler, America, and the upcoming Olympiad. Two decades later, Bernie surfaces in Havana. But an old associate has appeared there as well-and might spell trouble of a decidedly deadly nature.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 10, 2010
ISBN9781456122782
If the Dead Rise Not
Author

Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr is the bestselling author of the Bernie Gunther thrillers, for which he received a CWA Dagger Award. Born in Edinburgh, he now lives in London. He is a life-long supporter of Arsenal. Follow @theScottManson on Twitter.

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Reviews for If the Dead Rise Not

Rating: 3.9169884525096528 out of 5 stars
4/5

259 ratings11 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An extremely well-researched novel set mainly in 1934 Berlin and partly 1954 Havana. Bernie Gunther is an ex-cop and anti-Naxi working as head of security at the famous Adlon Hotel in Berlin. Investigating the death of a guest, he finds himself caught up in powerful groups trying to corrupt the contracts for the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Oh no! The last Bernie Gunther novel! Through Paul Hecht, I feel I really know this facinating man and his incredible story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "If the Dead Rise Not", the sixth novel in the Bernie Gunther series follows the pattern of his previous novels with a setting in Nazi Germany in 1934 with the plot resumed in Havana, Cuba in 1954 during the reign of Fulgencio Batista.In 1934 Bernie has recently resigned from his position as a homicide investigator with the Berlin police department and taken a job as the house dick at the Hotel Adlon, the premier hotel in Berlin owned by Hedda and Louis Adlon. One of the recurring themes of the novel is the exchange of favors among the characters beginning with Bernie offering to help out a sometime Jewish lover, Frieda Bamburger, who wants to leave Berlin for Hamburg, harboring the illusion that she will be able to cover up her heritage by virtue of her marriage to Gentile husband.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This Bernie Gunther series is just so good.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book is awful. Having read Philip Kerr’s first three novels in the anthology edition, Berlin Noir, I knew what to expect, so I was not really surprised that I didn’t enjoy this book. It had the same things that I liked and hated in the first novels, and I chose to read it because there are some things I like in it. Kerr’s historical description is detailed, concrete and sufficiently accurate factually that I’m willing to credit him with likely getting the life details right. So if you want to know how one negotiates life under a fascist bureaucracy, and that’s the sort of thing I am interested in, then there is a reason to read Kerr’s fiction. Of course, Kerr’s protagonist, Bernie Gunther, does much more than negotiate everyday life – he’s kicked out of the police for his support of the liberal goals of the Weimar Republic, but feels compelled as a hotel detective to look into the criminals in the hotel who are profiteering with the Nazi government. Under a tough exterior, he has an honest heart, but one he has to hide to survive the corrupt times. His frequently cynical, sarcastic comments can be read as an expression of the conflict he feels.Between the seedy bars and Alexanderplatz police station, the Olympic construction site and the Adlon Hotel, he covers a lot of Berlin, and later covers similar ground in Cuba. He shows the petty and major corruption, the ambitions and the avoidances that Berliners adopt to get by or to profit under the violent, anti-Semitic and racist nationalism of the Nazis. He paints a picture that is vile and gritty with no sense of hope except to just get through until things change. I imagine that that’s how a lot of people did try to survive. Unfortunately, Kerr overdoes the historical detail, so some passages read as if he found some interesting descriptions in his research, and wants to cram it all in. Curious as I am about the period, I don’t need exaggerated architectural description to get the point.What I don’t like about this book, and the earlier ones I read, are the clumsy, overdone “hardboiled” style in which it is narrated. Kerr adopts the most obvious characteristics of Raymond Chandler’s style without restraint, and embellishes them with grotesque exaggeration and unrelenting sexism. Written in the first-person voice of narrator Bernie Gunther, it’s inescapable and it’s too much. Where Chandler used a sarcastic wit to illuminate his character’s point of view, Kerr turns the style into caricature. By half way through the book, I began to skip the satirical asides because they added nothing to the characters or the storyline. Kerr’s characters are little better. They are stereotypes with little depth or development. When they do something unexpected, rather than think that there is a new side to a complex personality, I just think, where did that come from? The relationship that develops between Gunther and the American hotel guest merely seems absurd and unbelievable. The introduction of a string of American characters seems more of an attempt to build up readership in the USA rather than anything necessary to the storyline.I started the book as a light alternative to the fairly heavy novel I had been reading, but it’s not light or a pleasure to read. So I’m done with Philip Kerr. I’ll learn about Germany under the Nazis elsewhere.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the first Philip Kerr book I have read. I am, for some unfathomable reason, interested in the period in Europe and Germany in particular, between the First and Second World wars.

    I enjoyed 'If The Dead Rise Not', not least because it felt like it was adding some nuances of colour to a previously black and white dominated memory world. I feel like, that because there wasn't - so much - colour film around in those days, when we now read about those days, during and just before WWII, our imagination is in black and white. What I'm clumsily trying to say, is that now, writers like Philip Kerr are bringing subtle colours into the previously faded, sepia-toned black and white photo memories.

    The story centers around a German ex-Police Detective called Bernie Gunther. The book begins in 1934 and if you know your German history, it is only a year or so since the Nazis came to power. If you really know your German history, you will know that the Third Reich removed the Weimar Republic and after the Nazis came to power, Germany became an extremely unpleasant place to be for Jews, Communists and everyone else the Nazis didn't like, which included previous supporters of the Weimar Republic. Like Bernie Gunther. As the book starts, Gunther is working as a private detective of sorts at a big hotel in Berlin. He becomes involved in investigating a couple of murders, which lead him to uncover, or at least suspect, a plot to siphon money from the building of the Olympic Games facilities for 1936. He gets involved with two of the hotel's guests and their paths cross many times, for good and bad and again much later, 20-odd years later, when he has ended up in Cuba, in the years before the revolution there.

    As a description of the character of Bernie Gunther, I can't do better than the Daily Telegraph's "In Bernie Gunther, Kerr has created a plum example of that irresistible folk hero, the detective who is the only honorable man in a wicked world"

    Interestingly enough, it just so happened that I was reading 'The Coming of the Third Reich' by Richard J. Evans at the same time as reading this. The first part deals with the events leading up to the Nazis coming to power. So I can confirm, as much as I'm sure confirmation was needed, that all facts are present and correct. Philip Kerr uses the situation in Germany, to show how ordinary people reacted to the extraordinary situations they now found themselves in. In some it brings out the good, in others it of course created the perfect place for the free reign of the bad. Whilst some of his characters are, at least in part, Jewish, this isn't a story about the Jewish situation. Probably as this is a subject best covered elsewhere. Obviously the anti-Jewish aspects of the Nazi's regime even in their early days, is touched upon (as it is unavoidable in a story set in Europe in this period), though it isn't the main motivation for his characters' actions. The characters here are by and large reasonably ordinary people, dealing with an extraordinary situation and doing what a lot of people must have done while their masters were playing politics with their lives; just getting on with it.

    If there absolutely has to be a 'but' within my enjoyment of this book, and I fear there absolutely has to be, it is the almost constant wisecracking. Both in what Bernie Gunther says and thinks. I sometimes thought it was a little too much. I'm not saying, that there wouldn't have been a lot of black humour at the time, as Germans in general and perhaps especially the Berlin urban sophisticates Philip Kerr writes about, came to terms with what they'd let themselves in for, by either voting for, or not resisting enough (as Kerr writes: "Quite a few of them (Nazis) ... Seemed to have a flair for persuading Germans to go against their own common sense"). On the positive side, I got a sense that his characters joked about life to alleviate their current situation, with perhaps the underlying hope that 'it can't go on like this, it can't last' and I'm sure that was a real feeling. Black humour would be understandable and perhaps necessary to retain your sanity and I'm guessing that because everything else has been so obviously well-researched, he has also researched and found that this amount of wise-cracking, from big-city Germans throughout Berlin, is authentic. However, sometimes it feelt too much. Sometimes it feels more like Philip Kerr has written it in because he, Philip Kerr, liked writing it, more than 'Bernie Gunther' would have either had the character to say it, or have found it necessary, or that its inclusion helps the plot development. It is enjoyable to read and I'm not saying it wouldn't have been the case, or that all Germans did, or do, fit their stereotype as humourless automatons. I found it a little distracting on occasions.

    I was also not entirely sure why the story ended to move some 20 years into the future to 1954. Obviously, by mentioning what has happened to the main characters - who somewhat fortuitously have all found themselves on Cuba at exactly the same time - in half dozen lines at a time flashbacks, does save a lot of time (ours' and the author's) and space, but why, wasn't entirely clear to me. Maybe because two of the people involved in the German part of the story are American. Or maybe I missed something.

    On the whole positive, with a few negatives. So I'm giving it a rating a little over half way and enough to make me trying others by Philip Kerr.

    As a final thought, I wouldn't have thought it a bad idea, to have added a bibliography at the end. I'm sure his research material would make equally interesting reading. For people like me anyway.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The first two-thirds of If the Dead Rise Not is set in Berlin in 1934. Hitler’s National Socialist Party has been in power for 18 months which made Bernie Gunther’s life as a homicide detective untenable because he is a supporter of the previous regime. So he is now a house detective for an up-market hotel. In that role he becomes embroiled in several investigations including gangster involvement in the bidding for building contracts for the upcoming Olympiad. In the second book last third of the book we jump to Cuba in 1954 where Bernie is playing with model trains and having sex with a selection of prostitutes when some of the people from 1934 reprise their roles bit-players in Bernie’s life in a sequence of events that had, to my ears, less to do with crime fiction and more to do with Bernie proving some more how witty and sarcastic he can be.

    If I had read the excellent review at Crime Scraps before embarking on this book I wouldn’t have. Embarked on the book that is. Because 30’s hardboiled detectives in the style of Chandler, Hammett et al is just not my cup of tea. Where that reviewer, Uriah Robinson, sees a sharp first person narrative and clever lines I see a bunch of blokes who exhibit a blasé attitude to violence and a leering, lecherous quality that I find tiresome.

    So my first problem is the style of the book which, it turns out, I still don’t like even though it was conceivable that my tastes might have changed in the 20 or so years since I read a hardboiled PI novel.

    Then we come to the fact it felt like two separate books rather than a single entity. The audio version of the book is 16 hours long. A little more than the last 6 hours takes place in Cuba after the rather abrupt ending to the first part. A handful of the same characters are present, including the woman he fell in love with and an American gangster who nearly killed him, but I’ve seen separate books in a series have more connection with each other than the two parts of this book. Also, the Cuba portion of the book incorporated even more real characters from history in a way that I find trite. As soon as we jumped to Cuba I was waiting for Ernest Hemingway to make an appearance. Which of course he did. Ho hum.

    What I did like about the book was Kerr’s ability to create a sense of time and place. His early period Nazi Germany is oppressive and sinister and there is a tangible quality to the sense that no one comprehending how bad things will get. It really is quite chilling. I found the Cuba portion a little more ‘hokey’ but I admit that’s at least partly because I was, by then, over it. And to be fair, when he wasn’t belting people or describing every woman he encountered in terms of how much he would like to have sex with her Bernie was quite witty and had random moments of moral clarity. I have to say too that Jeff Harding’s narration was a perfect match for the tone and style of the book.

    To be abundantly clear I am in the minority in my feelings towards this book and if there was any doubt If the Dead Rise Not won the 2009 CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical fiction.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Kerr has got the hang of this series again, it seems to me. This is a worthy successor to the initial trilogy. While I had a feeling that Kerr had returned only reluctantly to writing Bernie Gunther books, it now seems to me as if he's figured out some fresh fields he can work with this character.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I bought the book in Berlin, attrackted by the setting of the plot. It was a good read, surprisingly full of classical references, but the ending was somewhat disappointing (and predictable).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    great read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Set in Berlin in 1934,in a Germany preparing to host the Olympic Games in 1936. An American Olympic committee is in Berlin supposedly assessing whether there should be a US boycott of the Games because of racial practices in Nazi Germany. Hitler's determination to show Aryan supremacy is already having effect - Jews are being excluded from public office, sporting clubs, and even those who seem most German are having to take steps to hide their Jewish bloodlines.Because Germany is prepared to spend vast sums on the construction of the venues for the Games, it is also a golden opportunity for overseas entrepreneurs to make money.Ex-homicide detective with the Berlin Criminal Police, Bernie Gunther, works at the Adlon Hotel as a house detective. The discovery of the body of a German businessman connected with the construction industry sparks an investigative trail for Bernie, and the final resolution will not happen for another twenty years, nor will it take place in Berlin.The main story reminded me of THE IRON HEART by Australian author Marshall Browne which I read earlier this year. Admittedly THE IRON HEART is set in Berlin 5 years later, but the danger of being Jewish in Nazi Germany is well described there too.If I have a bone to pick with IF THE DEAD RISE NOT it is with Philip Kerr's decision to set the tying up of the threads in Cuba twenty years later. IF THE DEAD RISE NOT is the sixth in the Bernie Gunther series but I haven't read any others. The series has been published over a period of twenty years. From my research I believe the first, MARCH VIOLETS, was set in Berlin in 1936. It seems to me that what Kerr has done is weave threads in Bernie Gunther's life from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s through each of the books. (Perhaps someone reading this post will tell me how correct I am).For me, the technique didn't quite work. When we got to Cuba, I just wanted it all to finish, to finally see how he would round it off. I was much happier back in Germany in 1934. As I read the latter part of the book I became aware of things I might have missed out on by not reading other books in the series. There were allusions and quickly told snippets of Bernie's history, which I thought were there to fill me in on the "back story".