In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson

In the Garden of the Beasts
by
Erik Larson


Though Erik Larson mentions in passing the colorful Nazi pageant ("we only see it in black and white war films"), it's at the heart of his book, In the Garden of the Beasts. Larson examines the four years in Berlin from 1933, when W. E. Dodd, formerly a professor of History at University of Chicago, became the American Ambassador to Germany. The book tells Dodd's story to 1937 when America's foreign service corps, an old boy's club, ran Dodd out of town.

Larson lays out the colorful spectacle of Berlin in 1930s, with flower lined streets, exciting cars, the fast trains, terrified Jews, scheming foreign service people, alarmed media, and of course, Nazi thugs. Larson's locations are the government and embassy buildings around the famous Tiergarten, Berlin's enormous central park. This exceptional neighborhood is the setting for the Night of the Long Knives that serves as the book's penultimate, barbaric moment. The urban wonders of Berlin that Larson describes suggest that, at least in the past, Germany could behave better than it did when Dodd was ambassador.

Larson's book focuses on Dodd and his attractive adult daughter, Martha. The author's attention to a small town SS parade that features a shaved and placarded woman who took a Jew as a lover is intended to show how shocking the Nazi movement was to his ingénue, Martha, who witnessed the spectacle. Certainly, if Martha Dodd had been the ideal Joan of Arc type that Larson suggests, her reaction to Nazism and her descent into the world of spies and espionage may have been compelling. Unfortunately, Martha's story is presented as gossipy melodrama, and she and her lovers seem inconvenienced only by a world that puts out young lovers. 

Dodd ambassadorship, on the other hand, is a cautionary tale about a man who recognized Hitler's master plan, but finds his warnings to FDR are ineffective. To Dodd, the Nazi problem seemed so easily fixed in 1934. Unfortunately, America's corrupt diplomatic corps obstructed his efforts. Though Dodd warns of the growing danger Hitler represents, his peers pooh-pooh his concerns. In a sad moment, the State Department suggests Dodd should quit insulting the German government.

America after the Great War was on the rise but Americans didn't appreciate Europe's old order. During the years of Dodd's ambassadorship, Hitler set up the pieces from the Great War in order to fight it over again, and he went ahead like a man confident that he was alone on the playing field. The book's concern is Berlin. The invading Russians reduced the city to rubble in 1945. Larson includes a picture of the Tiergarten after the Russians arrived, reduced to a scorched field. Berlin is a metaphor for Europe. All the adults quit and Hitler had no qualms about destroying it.

The Various Haunts of Men

The Various Haunts of Men
By
Susan Hill
A Review

Nobody is safe in a Susan Hill novel. Her gothic stories supply answers to her desperate protagonists, but in the end, the riddles are insoluble and the horror is inexorable. So, when Hill takes up the traditional detective novel, the middle-class security blanket, is she really going to make readers warm and fuzzy?

With The Various Haunts of Men, Hill introduces CID Simon Seerailler. She yokes the CID up with a subordinate, DS Graffam in the little town of Laffeter, but the pairing is so unlike say, Elizabeth George's Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers, there's something amiss, most definitely. Will this arrangement actually survive the book? In fact, DS Graffam, whose only interaction with Seerailler is to occasionally update him on her work, does all the investigating, and Seerailler only steps in at the end.

Graffam, the investigating officer in a missing persons case, is new to the town and utterly lonely. She's gone through a trying divorce and pines for a new life/love. Seerailler immediately strikes her as a potential lover, but she's too frightened to hit on her superior. She stews in silence with her girlhood crush. Seerailler has lived in the village all his life. He comes from a family of medical doctors. The black sheep in the family, he makes a living at his second love, police work, but his first love is art. Graffam, with her debilitating crush, is at the center of the book, setting up an odd, tragic story. The author gives interesting accounts of the victims and a fair amount of space to her creepy killer too.

As the number of missing women increases, Graffam becomes convinced that a serial killer is at work. The first two missing women are oddballs, single for their own reasons; their eccentric lifestyles make them of little interest to the police. Only Graffam and the missing women's friends suspect foul play, and Graffam wishes she could find more evidence to raise a general alarm.

As the serial killer takes another victim, the author sets up Seerailler's professional medical family against a bevy of New Age Health gurus, alternative medicine practitioners and psychics, and entertains us with a phony séances and a district full of New Age retailers with strange products for sale. Seerailler's sister, a doctor in the area, suspects something terrible has happened to one of her patients, and unaware of Graffam's investigation, starts her own, with a head full of significant generalizations about any practice not sanctioned by the medical community.
 

The mystery keeps you reading. A great twist at the end is worthwhile. Setting her story in a cathedral town might be closer to Hill's gothic novels. It recalls RM James stories, where black, moody monsters live in every nook and cranny. Through Simon Seerailler, Hill manages to bring the quirks and nuances of the little village to light, although the pursuit of a maniacal killer whose gruesome acts appall the community are unquestionably part of the police procedural genre.