When an executive at the renowned Ufa film studios is found dead, it falls to Nikolai Hoffner, a chief inspector in the Kriminalpolizei, to investigate. With the help of Fritz Lang and Alby Pimm, Hoffner finds this case taking him into the treacherous underbelly of Berlin.
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When an executive at the renowned Ufa film studios is found dead, it falls to Nikolai Hoffner, a chief inspector in the Kriminalpolizei, to investigate. With the help of Fritz Lang and Alby Pimm, Hoffner finds this case taking him into the treacherous underbelly of Berlin.
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Berlin in 1927 fascinates. The detective does not.
Jonathan Rabb's new novel, SHADOW AND LIGHT, is far from without merits. But unity and coherence are not among them. Since this is the second appearance of Rabb's Berlin police officer 53-year old Nikolai Hoffner, it is fair to judge SHADOW AND LIGHT primarily as a detective yarn. But detection and suspense are its weakest elements. Over a five day period in March 1927 Chief Inspector Hoffner, a hard-drinking, heavy smoking 53-year old widower, moves rapidly from one easy clue to another until he uncovers a huge variety of forces at work that created the corpse he investigated in a corporate bathtub of the giant film studio UFA. Despite forces controlling vast resources of personnel and money at work to stop him, Hoffner succeeds. True he draws upon the resources of two or three gangster friends of his. And no one has a clue where all this is leading at the start, but succeed he does. Between clues five and ten with ten or twelve more to come, it was clear to me that nothing would stop him. Hence: low marks as detective thriller.
It is another matter with Rabb's large dollops of genuine, accurate history of Berlin in 1926-27. Yes, there were Nazis and Dr. Josef Goebbels was unleashing them against communists and Jews. Yes, there were conservatives and rich media men plotting to rearm Weimar Germany despite the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. Yes, Germany was wildly innovative in producing black and white silent films and with their October 1928 THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL Germans had beaten (without getting credit) Los Angeles in the race for the technology to launch "talkies," starting with Al Jolson in THE JAZZ SINGER. And finally, yes, Berlin was a dark, evil, creative, horrible, fascinating city six years before Hitler came to power in 1933. All these elements author Rabb laboriously weaves together into one plot.
It is too much. G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and other founders of the 1928 London Detection Club were right: the best detective story is a short story. It is a puzzle, not easy to unravel. You are free to build a novel around it, but you do so at your peril. So why did Jonathan Rabb write SHADOW AND LIGHT? My guess is that he wants to teach German history and Berlin history to people who would not otherwise give a hang about it. And to do so he embeds truly fetching, important real history in a detective story. In my opinion, he does not bring it off. But then I incline more to detective stories by Conan Doyle and Ronald Knox. -OOO-
