With Gordon Ferris' s The Unquiet Heart, true also I believe of his earlier novel Truth Dare Kill, the reader is in the world of the private detective. The hero, Scotsman Danny McRae, is in the mould of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. He is a tough loner, driven to do good in a world generally evil. But together with a kind of cynical toughness he can also be romantic and idealistic.
McRae's background is London in the years just after the Second World War and his occupation, already stated, that of private detective, a somewhat superior title for the rather sleazy cases he generally gets employed to solve. The London Ferris describes, more accurately Bermondsey, is a war-torn, gang-dominated community, whose inhabitants are often poor, lives controlled by ration-books bomb craters and dust. A world of odd loyalties, a perfect 'noir' landscape.
The political and romantic dimensions reveal themselves in the female character of a crime reporter on a local paper, Eva Copeland, who appears at first just to want McRae to let her in on some of his investigations so that she can report on them to her paper. In fact, when she disappears, it opens up a quite different can of worms. What she is actually involved in, McRae as well when he goes in search of her, is a much more violent, frightening world, which is associated in both cases with what happened to them during the war, he in a German prison camp in Dachau, she and her family as Jews under the Hitler regime. While he is prepared to forget the past and live his life in the future, she is looking to avenge the deaths of her family, lover and race and refuses to forget.
In the world of post-war Berlin, to where the action now moves, black-market, espionage, terrorism and cruelty flourish, innocent people suffer violent deaths and torture is a weapon. The city is divided into uneven quarters, Russian, German, English and American occupation, and it is not clear who is on whose side or who is spying on whom. Continue the story for yourselves, it makes an interesting read, disturbing in some of its conclusions but gripping in its power to hold.
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Rosemary Brown