Book Bites February

Paris Noir: Edited by Aurelien Masson

I am becoming addicted to the Noir mystery stories from Akashic Books. The first one I read was Istanbul Noir and I currently have Boston Noir by my bed. Each story is set in a different part of the city so you really get a sense of the city. In the case of Paris Noir, it is a Paris beyond the museums and tourists centers. In the Istanbul book, I got a good sense of the history of the city and the effect of geography, ethnicity, and religion on its inhabitants. In the Paris book, it was different – I got a taste of the clash between the old city and the current trend of yuppiefication. There were stories of immigrants and there was an undercurrent of WWII but the main theme was economic displacement. Not every story was great but the book as a whole made good bedtime reading.

The Pale Criminal by Phillip Kerr

The Pale Criminal is the second of Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series. Gunther is a private detective working in Berlin in the Nazi era. If you like hard boiled detective novels ala Raymond Chandler, then Kerr’s series might be for you. I like the unique aspect of the time and place the mysteries are set – it adds a twist. So you have bodies, police, guns, babes and the Nazi Party hierarchy all in the same book.  I’m not sure if I will try to read the series in order and might skip ahead to the one set after the war in Bolivia and Germany but it was a good way to while away an afternoon. I gave the first three books to my dad for his birthday and he was steadily reading through them. His only complaint so far is the author does not know very much about guns as he found many of Kerr’s descriptions of weapons to be inaccurate.