Rita

The Other Side of Silence
Philip Kerr
Putnam & Sons, New York, 2016
978-0-399-18519-9

This is the eleventh book in the series about former Berlin detective Bernie Gunther. Gunther’s history starts before WW II, as the Nazi Party is beginning to gain power. Gunther does not like the Nazis, but tries to investigate murders without regard to politics. This eventually becomes impossible and his adventures lead him through a brief career as a private detective followed by being drafted into the German army. Germany under the Nazis is a seething pit of ambition and conspiracies, hidden crimes and hidden motives. Different factions within the Party and within the government use Gunther’s talents and his persistent wish for justice to further their own ends. Gunther is forced to work with many people that both he and history find morally repugnant.

In 1956 the war is over and Gunther is hiding on the French Riviera while working as a concierge at a luxury hotel under the name of Walter Wolf. A figure from his past appears, Harold Hennig, a former captain in German intelligence, who is also under an assumed name. The reclusive British novelist W. Somerset Maugham lives in a nearby villa with his nephew Robin Maugham and his lover Ronald Searle. Maugham is being blackmailed with a photograph that reveals him and several male friends and lovers as homosexuals. Since homosexuality was still illegal in England at the time, both he and his friends, many in prominent positions have a great deal to lose if outed. He wants Gunther to serve as a go between in the payoff to the blackmailer. But a simple blackmail turns into a complex plot involving the British intelligence agencies M-15 and M-16, the East German Stassi, which now employs Hennig, and the Soviets. The ensuing story includes Gunther’s previous history with Hennig, two incidents in which Hennig had attacked people with whom Gunther had attachments.

Although the novel is fiction, Kerr make it clear that he has based it on a great deal of fact. Maugham was indeed homosexual and did run a British spy ring in Russia just after the Winter Revolution. A number of British intelligence agents were known or suspected to be double agents for the Soviets. And most students of the history of this era are familiar with the numbers of former Nazis who were absorbed into the successor governments of Germany and of the Allies.

The Other Side of Silence is more of a spy novel than a mystery. It will probably be enjoyed best by those who are already familiar with the character, but this is true of many series books. Kerr has a gift for turning obscure bits of history into vigorous fiction.

Under the Midnight Sun
by Keigo Higashino
Translated by Alexander O. Smith with Joseph Reeder
Minotaur, November 2016

A pawnbroker is killed in Osaka, Japan. Experienced police detective Sasagaki leads the
investigation, which peters out when a likely suspect dies.

The scene shifts to a group of middle school students which includes the victim’s son, Ryo Kirihara, and the daughter of one the pawn shop customers. There are a series of apparently unconnected incidents as the group moves on into high school. Computer crime in particular is a recurrent theme, with Ryo involved in a plot to make and sell counterfeit Mario Brothers games.

For long periods, the novel will focus on a new character or group and new crimes that involve them. Computer hacking and sale of industrial secrets affect some. Others find love affairs foiled. Characters marry and divorce. The Japanese economybooms and declines. Some characters have secure positions as heirs to family owned companies or comfortable positions as salarymen in corporate Japan. Others live on the edge of the economy as temporary office workers or running small businesses out of converted apartments.

Through it all, Yuhiko Nishimoto Karasawa moves as a mysteriously glamorous young
woman with an uncanny ability to make money. The reader soon notes that persons who are
obstacles to her plans mysteriously come to grief, yet she never seems to be directly
involved.

Almost twenty years after the original murder, detective Sasagaki is retired, but still intent on the case. He returns to the scene and re-interrogates those involved. People, including the dead man’s widow, are willing to be more open with him since the statute of limitations has expired. This element is obviously quite different from American mysteries, in which there is no statute of limitations on homicide. The Japanese law has been altered recently as well. Eventually, Sasagaki learns two facts that enable him to solve the case, and he moves to assist in an arrest, with evidence that the suspect has committed other crimes that can be punished.

The leisurely pace of this novel and the large number of characters set it apart from most western mysteries. Actual detection or police procedure takes place on only a few pages. One might almost regard it as a novel with mystery elements. However, the tension builds as more people die and more lives are affected. The author portrays various levels of Japanese society, from the comfortably well off who send their children to exclusive private schools to single mothers barely making the rent of tiny apartments. Higashino, a native of Osaka, describes the regional differences between his hometown, in the warmer south of Japan, and Toyko: cuisine, accents, levels of prosperity, and climate, making it clear that Japan is not as homogeneous as westerners may assume.

Keigo Higashino is an award-winning writer who has served as president of the Mystery
Writers of Japan. An English translation of his _The Devotion of Suspect X_ was nominated
for a 2013 Edgar Award. In addition to dozens of novels, he has published collections of
short stories and essays. Several works have been adapted as films and television dramas,
including one film, _The Secret_, in French.