August 29, 2021
BEFORE ROBERT B. PARKER RUINED THE GENRE:
THE POWER OF TOTALITARIAN NOIR: Stories about cops and detectives working within authoritarian systems have always had a complex appeal. For one author, those stories now seem closer to home. (THOMAS MULLEN, 8/27/21, Crime Reads)
I first discovered Philip Kerr's excellent Bernie Gunther series seven years ago. The experience of walking the streets of Nazi-era Berlin to watch Kerr's good-hearted detective solve a murder mystery while trying to stay true to his moral compass in that snake pit felt exhilarating, challenging, and strange.Reading another of Kerr's Gunther novels this year, shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection and an election in which democracy itself seemed at stake, felt altogether more chilling.I've long been a fan of the sliver of crime fiction that I've dubbed totalitarian noir: stories of cops and detectives who try to ply their difficult trade while living within the suffocating grip of an authoritarian system. The first example of this genre-within-a-genre I know of was Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (1981), about Moscow homicide detective Arkady Renko, who was tasked with solving a murder while trying to stay in the good graces of his deeply corrupt Soviet boss and even more corrupt system. Since then I've also walked the streets of Castro's Havana thanks to Leonardo Padura's Mario Conde series, an unnamed Warsaw Pact country in Olen Steinhauer's Cold War cycle, Calcutta during the late Raj era with Abir Mukerherjee's Wyndham and Banerjee novels, and Franco's Spain thanks to Carlos Ruiz Zafon's genre-bending Cemetery of Forgotten Books tetralogy, among others.Why do I find these stories so fascinating?Partly it's the way fiction opens up new worlds, making these historical moments feel so much more vivid by showing us how regular people went about their daily lives under the thumb of dictators, how they navigated the dangers that lay all around them. The neighbors who could turn informant at any time, the family members who became true believers, the friends who suddenly disappeared after daring to speak out. People have lived in horrific regimes, yet they still had to find a way to go to work in the morning, fall in love, raise children, save for the future, while somehow not completely breaking down mentally and emotionally. That so many millions of people endured this during the 20th Century makes it no less remarkable.
To read a Spenser novel, an Elvis Cole or a Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, is to have no idea why private eye novels were ever popular in the first place. Where Raymond Chandler wrote about a lone knight trying to obtain justice in a corrupt world, the modern detective is friends--essentially colleagues--with murderous sidekicks, cops, prosecutors, "good" mobsters, CIA agents, etc., etc., etc. The deck is so stacked in their favor as to drain the stories of tension and the presence of their own henchman, eager to do the dirty work on their behalf, obviates the possibility of moral choice.
What the series that are set in Totalitarian societies do is restore both the isolation of the detective--necessarily he's often a policeman--and the odds against him succeeding. James Church's Inspector O novels, set in North Korea, are quite good if you've already finished Kerr and Cruz Smith.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 29, 2021 7:49 AM