Coincidentally I was reading this thriller as Holocaust survivors and the world marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I found this a sobering coincidence. The action (the murder of an upper middle class young Englishwoman living in Germany to learn the language) is set against the sobering backdrop of 1935 Munich and the world of Brown Shirts and the SS, the threat of Dachau, the rise of Hitler, eyes being averted, heads never raised above the parapet. ‘Few good men’ were left standing: the cold brutality of Nazism undergirds everyone and everything.
One of the few good men is Inspector Sebastian Wolff, ordered to find the killer. The detective had fallen out with the ruling elite and had been consigned to Dachau as a warning. Reasonably well connected, he is bailed out by his uncle, a pillar of national socialism. We enter the world of the young aristocratic English free to swan around Munich, ski in the Alps and get ever closer to the ruling elite and to Hitler himself. Wolff has to walk the tightrope of a governing political party which he loathes and finding the killer. The powers that be soon identify a suitable suspect, a Jew, who is swiftly executed. Wolff knows of course that the real killer is still at large. No spoiler alerts, but we enter a world of Germanic folklore, sacrifice and demons, a world full of the hatred that fuelled Auschwitz. Parallel with this comes the complexity of Wolff’s own story and struggle, from memories of the trenches to his son’s membership of the Hitler Youth. Clements’ historical research enriches this thriller, which is a really good read.
[We have a copy of Munich Wolf in the library]
