In 2003, Pierre Frei penned a thoroughly engrossing serial murder mystery with the straightforward title, Berlin. He apparently knew instinctively that it was the one city name that, alone, conjured visions of nightmarish deeds without need of embroidery. Especially when he set the story at the end of the second world war, and brought to life a city of rubble, occupied by satiated victors, starving losers and innumerable inhabitants rummaging like rats to survive. The pity was, it was the survivors who were now being picked off one by one.

You can’t read Berlin without hearing a bit of Zither music in your head. Yes, that strangely bizarre tune (Third Man’s Theme) that so perfectly captured the intrigue of another divided city in Carol Reed’s famous movie. But Frei doesn’t have the light and shadows of cinema to play tricks with your eyes, or the repetitiveness of melody to insert itself in your head. He has only the printed word, and your own imagination, to bring you into a world dark, jittery, electric with the promise of danger.

Frei’s Berlin is a world where cigarette butts are legal tender, fought over, traded on the black market, sought after like precious jewels. They buy everything from sex to suits to education. It’s a world turned inside out, where women make love to men who killed their husbands and lovers, seniors take in soldiers who obliterated their sons, and policemen work with recent enemies to find and stop a serial killer.

The characters are finely drawn and disturbingly real. The plot is wholly believable and frighteningly etched. And the author uses an interesting technique to tell his victims stories. You only learn their life histories after they’ve been killed, not before. Each is a tale of resilience and survival. Survival of the Nazi’s, the war, each other.

Berlin is a mix of mystery and history, at times funny, sobering, repellent. It reminds us that Hitler’s appalling attempt to subjugate Europe may have done the most harm to Germany itself.

Berlin is Frei’s first novel. But here’s a surprise. It was written and published when the author was in his seventies.

If you like your whodunits steeped in atmosphere and anxiety, buy a ticket to Pierre Frei’s Berlin. You won’t be disappointed.

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