If the Dead Rise Not is a 2009 novel by Philip Kerr. It is the sixth novel in his historical fiction series about German detective Bernie Gunther. This installment of the Gunther series has two parts.
- Part I: Berlin, 1934. Bernie, who quit the criminal police ("KRIPO") of Berlin because of his disgust at how the police have been corrupted by Nazism, is working as the house detective at the Hotel Adlon. He is asked by an old friend in the police department to unofficially mentor a young detective, and take on a case of a body which was found floating in the Spree River, which seems an obvious case of drowning—except that the victim's lungs are full of salt water, not fresh. Bernie's second case involves Heinrich Rubusch, a businessman who was found dead in his room at the Adlon. While investigating these crimes, Bernie gets into a passionate love affair with Noreen Charalambides, an idealistic American reporter. Together they expose a tangled plot relating to an American gangster in Berlin, Max Reles, and corruption involving the construction projects for the upcoming 1936 Olympic Games. This part takes up the first 2/3 of the book.
- Part II: Havana, 1954. Bernie is living in Cuba under an assumed name, having fled Germany because he's wrongly suspected of being a war criminal (and because he has a lot of other enemies). Bernie, who hopes to start a business exporting Cuban cigars to Germany, runs into his old flame Noreen, now a successful author with a 19-year-old daughter named Dinah. Bernie gets mixed up in more crime and corruption in Cuba, as well as getting tangled up in the then-ongoing Castro rebellion. Max Reles the murderous gangster is also in Cuba, where he's gone semi-straight as a hotelier and casino owner. And Noreen has a secret.
Tropes:
- Auto Erotica: After their first day going around investigating in 1934 Berlin, Bernie and Noreen have sex in the car.
- The Bad Guy Wins: In Part I, anyway. Max Reles winds up getting away with everything, including three murders as well as getting his crooked construction deal. Bernie can't do anything about it, because if he does, Max's brother back in America will kill Noreen.
- Bald of Evil: Lt. Quevedo, the State Sec policeman and torturer in Havana, has a shaved head. When he rubs his head Bernie thinks it looks like "polishing a shoe."
- Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Part of the motive for Bernie murdering Max Reles, after Bernie finds out about Dinah, the young woman Max is marrying, being Bernie's daughter. (There's also the motive of revenge for Dora, the hooker/stenographer that Max murdered in 1934.)
- Buxom Beauty Standard:
- Bernie, who throughout the series is always admiring nice racks, admires the curves of Noreen Charalambides at their first meeting. Later, as they're having sex, Bernie admires her curves again and thinks they are "good enough to satisfy Apollonius of Perga and probably Kepler, too."
- 20 years later when meeting Noreen's daughter, Bernie observes that "her figure was worth a whole basketful of golden apples."
- Bernie can't even stop himself from thinking like this when flipping through magazines, like when he sees a photo of Cuban mambo dancer Ana Gloria Varona (a Real Life mambo star) and observes that she has "a large chest that cries out for a child-sized sweater."
- Cacophony Cover Up: No one hears the shots that killed Max Reles, because the sound was masked by the fireworks of Havana's Chinese New Year celebration.
- Call-Forward:
- Noreen makes a casual comment about how the people of the Sudetenland (western Czechoslovakia) are ethnic Germans. Bernie snarks "Well don't tell Hitler. Or he'll want them back." Four years later, Hitler took the Sudetenland.
- Bernie watches a Jewish man take his cigarette and smoke it with the desperate need of an addict. He thinks that people like that, nicotine addicts, "make you think that maybe there's something really harmful about a little thing like a cigarette."
- Day of the Jackboot: It's already happened. But the first page of the novel has Bernie, in Berlin, watching a Nazi parade and feeling depressed about how his city, once vibrant and cosmopolitan, has been ruined by fascism.
- Friends with Benefits: In the backstory, Bernie and Frieda Bamberger, his predecessor at the Hotel Adlon, used to enjoy a friendly relationship of casual sex. Frieda lost her job because she is Jewish. Bernie is still fond of Frieda and tries to get her fake identity papers.
- Full-Frontal Assault: Towards the end of Part I, Bernie is snooping through Max Reles's room when he is confronted by Dora Bauer, stark naked, carrying a gun. It turns out that Dora was Reles's coconspirator all the while and helped him to kill Heinrich Rubusch.
- Girls With Mustaches: A random gag has Bernie, at police headquarters, observe a cleaning lady "badly in need of a shave."
- He Knows Too Much: Bernie reveals that Max Reles is a Jew, which would get him killed in Hitler's Germany. Bernie has arranged for an "in the event of my death" letter to protect himself...but Max's moll Dora hasn't, so Max shoots and kills her.
- Hired to Hunt Yourself: The ending reveals that Bernie, who was hired by Meyer Lansky to investigate Max's murder, is the killer. As Bernie observes, it works out for everybody because Lansky was less interested in finding out the truth than he was in pinning the crime on someone in order to avoid a mob war.
- Historical Domain Character:
- Bernie's bosses at the Hotel Adlon, husband and wife Louis and Hedda Adlon. They like him.
- In Havana, Max Reles introduces Bernie to a bunch of real life gangsters, Meyer Lansky being the most famous.
- Hitler Ate Sugar: In Cuba, Bernie is talking with a British businessman who asks him idly about the war. They pass a photo of Winston Churchill smoking a cigar and Bernie snarks that Hitler was a nonsmoker and teetotaler and was in good health until he shot himself.note
- It Will Never Catch On:
- Bernie says that of all the victims of the Nazis, the Communists have it the worst. Bernie, who just recently heard about a Communist youth who was executed, says that Jews have it bad now but "I haven't yet heard of anyone who's been executed for being Jewish." Very soon after, that would no longer be true.
- Bernie observes armored cars outside a government building in Havana and wonders how Castro and the rebels ever thought they could challenge Batista and the government.
- I Was Never Here: Bernie goes to his old friend Otto Schuchardt for help and advice, because as it turns out Bernie had a Jewish grandmother, being even 1/4 Jewish is not a good thing in 1934 Berlin, and Bernie would like some fake documents to make the (deceased) Jewish grandma go away. Otto refers him to one Otto Trettin, another cop who has a side business in fake papers, and says "You didn't hear it from me." Bernie's answer as he gets up to leave was "I was never even here."
- The Killer in Me: The Twist Ending. Bernie, who is hired by Meyer Lansky to investigate the murder of Max Reles in Havana, reveals to Nora at the end that, actually, he did it.
- The Killer Was Left-Handed: The victim was left-handed. Bernie examines the body taken out of the river, and concludes that not only was the man a boxer he was a left-handed boxer, which gives Bernie a lead on his identity.
- Mythology Gag: Bernie's old buddy at the police, Otto Schuchardt, makes a disparaging reference to "March violets"—a slang term for bandwagon converts to the Nazi party after the Nazis took over. March Violets was the title of the first Bernie Gunther novel.
- Old Cop, Young Cop: At first played straight and then quickly cut short. Bernie is asked by a police official to mentor one Richard Bomer, a young detective. Bernie and Richard go to the morgue, and Richard watches with fascination as Bernie examines the corpse and concludes that the victim was a left-handed boxer who was probably working on a construction site...and that the dead man was a Jew. Bomer, a true blue Nazi, promptly turns around and leaves. Bernie says he heard later that Bomer joined the SS.
- Pink Mist: After Max shoots Dora in the head, it "seemed to explode with a pinkish thought made entirely of blood and brains."
- Second-Face Smoke: Played with. Bernie does this with Feigenbaum, the Jewish man that he's interviewing, not to humiliate him but because he knows that Feigenbaum is jonesing for a smoke. Soon Feigenbaum is talking.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: Bernie goes over to Noreen's Cuban villa and catches Noreen's daughter Dinah swimming nude in the pool. Dinah is utterly unashamed. Bernie turns his back and tells her to put her swimsuit on.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Bernie is a veteran of the Great War. He visits the construction site of the Olympic Stadium, then just a pit in the earth with piles of dirt everywhere. The site is such a strong reminder of the trenches and shell pits of the Battle of Amiens
that the normally unflappable Bernie has a panic attack that drives him to his knees. - Shout-Out: Dora, the stenographer who has a second job as a prostitute, compares herself to Joan Crawford's character in Grand Hotel: a stenographer considering becoming a kept woman.note
- Time Skip: 20 years between Part I with Bernie as a house detective in Berlin, and Part II with Bernie as an older and even more cynical man in pre-revolution Cuba.
- Title Drop: The very end of the book, when Bernie thinks about all the bad things he's done and wonders about the possibility of redemption, and how he can ever hope to be redeemed "if the dead rise not."
- Unreliable Narrator:
- Bernie tells us all about what happened before and after the murder of Max Reles, and how he investigated, but does not reveal until the end that actually, he did it.
- A subtle example comes earlier, when Bernie mentions that he has consecutive appointments with Alfredo and Max—and then completely skips over the appointment with Alfredo, picking up his narrative the next chapter with arriving in Max's office. It turns out that the appointment with Alfredo is when Alfredo is where Bernie learned that Dinah is his, Bernie's, daughter.
- Worthy Opponent: Max Reles, who is about to chuck Bernie off of the yacht and into the lake to his death, says that he really does like Bernie and contemplated offering him a job.
