ByDavid Herman, David Herman
By Jonathan Rabb
Halban, £10.99
The ranks of good Jewish detective writers (Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown, comes to mind, along with the Coen brothers and Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union) are fairly thin on the ground, reason enough to welcome Jonathan Rabb’s Shadow and Light, the second in his police trilogy set in interwar Berlin.
Rabb’s previous novel, Rosa, introduced us to his Berlin detective, Nikolai Hoffner. Then, he was trying to solve the murder of the Communist leader, Rosa Luxemburg, whose killing bore an uncanny resemblance to the other victims of a serial killer in Berlin in 1919. Now, it is 1927 and a film executive named Thyssen is found dead in his bath at the famous Ufa studios.
Ufa was Germany’s Hollywood, in the days when Fritz Lang, Emil Jannings and Conrad Veidt were at their height. The studio claims Thyssen’s death was suicide. Hoffner is not convinced. The circumstances of the death bear an uncanny resemblance to a previous case — the death of the great film director Fritz Lang’s first wife — and in no time the plot starts to twist and turn.
Rabb’s stylish thriller has a bit of everything: movies (even a brief cameo by Peter Lorre), sex and Nazis. It is clever about the history, with knowing references to Weimar Germany and interwar Europe. The dialogue is crisp and smart — not Chandler or Hammett perhaps, but it rattles along. And Hoffner is a fine creation, exactly as we like our detectives. Single, estranged from his two sons, middle-aged, seen it all.
Fast-talking, smoking, hard-drinking, he’s had seven brandies and a whisky by the end of the first day. A loner, he will do anything to get to the truth. He could be the love-child of Wallander and Cracker.
The supporting cast is excellent, notably a Jewish gangster and the love interest: a tough broad straight out of 1940s cinema who talks like a machine gun and is twice as dangerous.
Rabb sets his characters against a superbly evoked interwar Berlin. This is Berlin noir, full of seedy clubs, smoky bars and gangsters around every corner. And then there’s the kinky sex. It’s not so much Brecht and Weill. More like Sam Spade goes to Weimar.
Dark and dangerous, it is the sort of place where you step off the tram “into the faint aroma of hacked flesh”. Forget Christopher Isherwood and Cabaret. Rabb’s Berlin is even scarier and kinkier.
The opening scene tells it all. Hoffner is driving to the studio. “The road,” writes Rabb, “was straight and smooth.” On the very next page, the car breaks down: “Various metal shafts stretched across at odd angles.”
From there on, everything in this gripping novel is “at odd angles” and nothing is again “straight and smooth”. But, unlike Hoffner’s jalopy, Rabb’s plot races along.
David Herman is the JC’s chief fiction reviewer