Judith Sullivan is a writer in London, originally from Baltimore. She is working on a crime series set in Paris. Fluent in French, she’s pretty good with English and has conversational Italian and German and 20+ years in Leeds improved her Yorkshire speak.
Any reader mourning the 2018 passing of Philip Kerr, a lively chronicler of life in post-war Germany, could do worse than pick up The Fifteenth Man, the maiden novel from journalist William Cook.
It’s early 1990s in Berlin, the wall has fallen and so has our hero Michael Braun, out of work, divorced and struggling financially. A bilingual journalist, Braun is drafted for an assignment by Bernhard Schmidt, an editor at local daily Berliner Tageblatt. The remit is an enticing, if scary, one.
Heinrich Mueller, the fifteenth man of the title and the head of the Gestapo, was one of the architects of the Final Solution. The fourteen other heinous masterminds at the Wannsee Conference have died but Mueller has somehow vanished, Schmidt explains to a dubious Braun, and no Nazi hunter has been able to track him.
Schmidt, however, has gotten word that in a vicious twist, almost 90-year-old Mueller has assumed the identity of an elderly Jewish gentleman Martin Augsburger. Mueller/Augsburger has been corresponding with an old friend of the real Augsburger, one Walter von Baden. Von Baden uses the epistolary relationship to blackmail his “old friend,” suggesting the two men’s friendship was a romantic liaison.
Schmidt dangles a hefty purse Braun’s way and so our half-Brit, half-German hack sets out to track down the players in this deception. He knows Berlin from prior experience but is dismayed by how dowdy and down-at-heel the city remains (he compares one neighbourhood to Croydon and not in a good way). Tagged as a better writer than reporter, Braun nonetheless chases the story with much doggedness and a little trickery.
This being a spy story, of course there is a femme fatale, beautiful and witty and, unhappily for Braun, married to his editor. Dagmar Schmidt is an old lover of Braun’s, the one that got away and again slinks away in this book.
With Braun, we see Berlin and Dresden differently than they appear in Fodor’s. He essentially takes the reader on a journey across a Germany adjusting to reunification at a sluggish pace. The ex-DDR is grimy, tawdry, and not full of joy about joining the BRD. Cook knows his stuff and I felt I was travelling with Braun on slowpoke trains through crappy streets looking at by-the-numbers housing estates.
The plot is as complex and twisty as one would hope. The thriller is also very much about journalism – the practice, the morality, the constraints and inter-publication rivalry. Mueller was a real person, I have learned, and there is no suggestion the plot of this book is accurate but it is an enjoyable cat and mouse pursuit.
Braun is not necessarily the happiest of campers at the end of The Fifteenth Man but he is multi-layered and intriguing. I am looking forward to a further outing and new adventures for him.
