The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr

Published by Putnam on March 29, 2016

Living in the beautiful French Riviera, Bernie Gunther is almost paradoxically suicidal, but he’s bored and he misses being a cop in Berlin. Working as a concierge, Gunther is using the name Walter Wolf to conceal his past as an SS officer. The year is 1956. Gunther meets, beds, and falls in love with a writer who says she has been commissioned to write a biography of Somerset Maugham. To her apparent good fortune, Gunther’s passion for bridge brings him within the small circle of local friends maintained by Maugham, although Maugham intends to use Gunther for purposes other than filling the fourth seat at the bridge table.

Maugham is being blackmailed. Maugham’s embarrassment involves a sexual indiscretion with a well-known Russian double agent during an era in which the British espionage agencies were overflowing with Russian spies. The blackmail threat has been delivered by someone Gunther happens to know, giving him a chance to reflect upon the past. The reader is therefore treated to stories from 1938, when Gunther was working as a private detective in Berlin, and 1944, when he was an SS lieutenant (having been demoted after an unfortunate incident with Goebbels).

I never read Philip Kerr’s novels expecting scintillating prose, although The Other Side of Silence is a bit more graceful than some of Kerr’s work. Rather, I read them in the expectation that Kerr will deliver a strong plot and even stronger characters. The Other Side of Silence did not disappoint me on either front. The plot is clever, inviting the reader to guess which characters are betrayers and which are betrayed. The intricacy of the plot is worthy of the real-life deviousness of the Russian double agents with whom the story intersects.

Gunther continues to be one of my favorite characters in crime fiction. I admire the complexity with which he is crafted. The point of all the Gunther novels is that principles are easy to live by when they come without a cost. When the choice is between a principle and survival, or between a principle and the torture and murder of the people you love, principles are not so easy to follow. Gunther’s life is an illustration of the tension between survival and principle. The Other Side of Silence does not add new facets to Gunther’s character but it sharpens those with which fans of the series will be familiar. The novel’s other characters -- particularly Maugham -- are also given rich and believable personalities. The characters and the intriguing plot make The Other Side of Silence a welcome entry in the Gunther series.

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