Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Then We Take Berlin, by John Lawton

Writing historical fiction – and especially a mystery – is hard. I know because I’ve tried my hand at it. Setting a mystery in the present is far easier: you just look around and record what you observe.

Going into the past requires a juggling act. On the one hand, you need a plot and characters that a contemporary audience can relate to. At the same time, you need to be true to the period about which you’re writing and, to do that, you surround yourself with mountains of facts. The third baton in this juggling act is what every mystery requires: a satisfying conclusion.

In “Then We Take Berlin”, John Lawton pulls off the first two of these requirements with an expert hand. His protagonist is John Wilfrid Holderness, aka ‘Joe Wilderness’, a Cockney ‘wide boy’ (someone who lives by his wits) whose mother is killed in the Blitz of 1940, still at a barstool with a glass of gin still in her hand. With his absentee father in the Army, Joe goes to live with his grandfather, who promptly initiates Joe into the fine art of safecracking and grand theft.

Joe is drafted at 18 in 1945, just as the war in Europe is being won. The battery of intelligence tests he has taken call him to the attention of Britain’s MI-5. Joe is a safecracker with an IQ of 160. He is also a ‘word child’ – a prodigious reader who can both remember what he has read and assemble that knowledge into patterns. Had he been born a few years earlier, Joe might have ended up at Bletchley Park. Instead, he is put through a crash course in German and Russian and sent to occupied Germany.

Thus begins the second display of Lawton’s skills. We are introduced to a Germany that, though not even 70 years in the past, seems unreal to anyone who has visited the country in the past few decades. He shows us a shattered land partitioned into sectors administered by Americans, British, French and Russians. The devastation is everywhere and one of the jobs that gets the best ration card belongs to the women who, street by street, clear the rubble of bombed-out buildings a bucket at a time. It is a country of squalor; of living quarters carved out of the basements of ruined buildings.

We also meet Nell Burkhardt, a 15-year-old girl sent by her parents in the closing months of the war to live with a relative in the country. It seems a peaceful place but, as Allied troops close in from the west, there comes a morning when the air is filled with a stench of something burning. Days later, Nell coms face to face with the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the horror of what her country has done – and the revelation that the good burghers around her knew all along what was transpiring just outside their village.

Nell, too, is a ‘word child’ with a practical knowledge of half a dozen languages. She makes herself useful to the British forces who are attempting to save those still alive in the concentration camp, but there comes a time when she feels she must return to Berlin. She makes that arduous journey, and there she meets Wilderness, who now spends part of his day interviewing Germans to determine the extent of their involvement with the Nazi party, and the balance of his time selling PX goods on the black market or burgling apartments at the behest of MI-5.

All of this is conveyed with a fine eye for detail and wonderful dialogue. Lawton details his source material at the end of the book. It is impressive – diaries and period memoirs that have been out of print for more than half a century – and Lawton has mined those sources thoroughly. I came to know the Germany of the late 1940s and the travails it went through. I also came away with a sympathy for the German people, though Lawton, through his characters, makes no attempt to lessen the madness that was unleashed by the Third Reich.

But where is the mystery? That’s the third requirement and it is, unfortunately, the weakest element of the book.

Lawton begins his story in 1963. Wilderness, now in his thirties, has left MI-5 and makes a subsistence living as a London detective. One day, he gets a call from one of his black-market buddies, an American who is now an advertising agency executive. First class tickets to New York, a private driver, and a suite at the Gramercy. His benefactor is Frank Spoleto, now grown wealthy by inventing new ways to sell the soap and cigarettes he once hustled in Berlin.

He has a job for Wilderness: $20,000 to smuggle the great aunt of a friend out of East Berlin through a tunnel the black marketers used to move good between the Western and Soviet zones back in 1948 – long before the 1961 building of the Berlin Wall. Oh, and the elderly woman’s escape will be timed to coincide with John F. Kennedy’s visit to the city, and where the President will deliver his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech.

The execution of that smuggling job concludes the book. As in any good mystery, nothing is entirely as it seems but Lawton leaves the story pointedly unfinished. I felt cheated and more than a little let down after such a great run-up.

After reading the book, I learned that Lawton intends to build a series around Wilderness. Perhaps his next book will pick up where “Then We Take Berlin” ends. The book is sufficiently impressive that I’ve ordered the first of his ‘Inspector Troy’ series, which is also set in 1940s London.

Despite that last-minute letdown, this is an impressive book. The characters are wonderful and the history is top-notch. I have a few quibbles – especially writing Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet without providing a translation – but they pale beside the quality of the story-telling. Read this book.
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Neal Sanders is the author of eight mysteries. His “The Accidental Spy” is set in 1967.




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