A man takes a job washing pots in a restaurant cellar at one in the morning, because the night shift pays five marks a week more and he has a family. He is a police officer, recently demoted as far down the ladder as it goes, and a colleague asks why he bothers with this kitchen when the sausage house next door pays better. He says he likes the ambience. And he does not say that the restaurant is where his enemy eats most weeks. Small deceptions of this kind are what The Munich Affair by James Patterson is made of, and they are the reason its historical half works as well as it does. The co-author is David Ellis, an Illinois appellate judge and an Edgar winner, and the legal machinery here suggests which of them held the pen for it.
The Munich Affair Opens in a Locked Room
The case is the one every reader will half recognise. September 1931, a young woman dead of a gunshot in an apartment belonging to her uncle, a rising Bavarian politician; a pistol on the floor; an evening dress; a suitcase on the bed with clothes in it. The detective handed the file is Thomas Bauer, a veteran of the Great War with a Jewish wife, two children and no appetite for politics, and the opening section watches him do ordinary police work in a city where ordinary police work has become defiance.
The obstruction in The Munich Affair by James Patterson is beautifully specific. The body leaves the country before the examination is finished. A file loses pages between desks. An eighteen-year-old assistant is offered the rank Bauer holds in exchange for the contents of his notebook, and takes it. Nobody here conspires; each of them simply declines to be the one who insists. Bauer’s only allies are a Catholic newspaperman named Fritz Gerlich, who has worked out that he will be among the first to hang and keeps printing anyway, and Gerlich’s wife Sophie, who would rather he had done the arithmetic differently.
James Patterson and Twelve Years of Failure
The middle of the book is the interesting structural gamble. Once the case is buried, Bauer stops being a detective and becomes something the reader has to sit with: a man who attempts an assassination repeatedly and fails every time. He lies on a rooftop above a Berlin bonfire of banned books, waiting for a guest of honour who never turns up. He collects luggage from a station cloakroom and finds plainclothes officers around it. Twice he takes his shot and hits the wrong man, or nobody. On the best of these nights he waits in a spruce tree until dawn to fire through a gap in a fence no wider than a postage stamp, and a stray animal takes the moment from him.
Most of these are drawn from the record, which is part of the pleasure. The rest of it comes from his partner: Erich von der Haas, an undersized former intelligence officer, Jewish and gay in a country building whole bureaucracies to hunt both, who steals antique clocks to hide microphones inside them and gives his grenade launcher a name. Their friendship is the best thing in The Munich Affair by James Patterson, funnier than the material has any right to be, and it earns a late exchange in which one man explains why he will not leave Berlin: the other is family, and has been for a decade.
Set against that is a present-day thread narrated by Eleanor Robbins, a Chicago historian in her late fifties with one working eye, a dead daughter and a burner phone, chasing the documents Bauer lost. She is an appealing voice and an openly terrible spy. She is also the thinner half of The Munich Affair by James Patterson. Her chapters restate what the 1930s chapters have just dramatised, propose a theory, then have somebody hand her an object.
The Decrees Are the Real Story
Book clubs will find the substance of The Munich Affair by James Patterson in the stretch that has nothing to do with rifles. Across Part Three a republic is taken to pieces by document rather than by force. A parliament building burns, and by the following morning seven articles of the constitution have been set aside and several thousand people are in custody. A statute handing the chancellor the power to legislate by himself is carried on a headcount nobody present will risk challenging. Jewish-owned shops are picketed for exactly one day, and the announcement makes plain that a longer version is available on request. An amendment to the rules on public employment ends an eleven-year teaching career between one lesson and the next. The emergency decree at the centre of all this is quoted at length, and it is the most frightening writing here precisely because it sounds like administration.
The thread that makes this personal is Bauer’s father-in-law, Selig Geiger, who owns a department store his grandfather founded and employs eight hundred people. Selig has been insulted, excluded and vandalised his whole life. He has a working method for it, which is to absorb it and get on with business, and he cannot see why this episode should differ from the others. Bauer, he says with real force, is the one who cannot let a thing go; Selig deals with it and moves on. The Munich Affair by James Patterson lets him hold the better end of that argument for a hundred pages, which is what makes what follows land.
Where The Munich Affair by James Patterson loses altitude is whenever the leadership speaks. Göring, Goebbels and Himmler are written as men who explain finished policy to one another in paragraphs, defining racial categories aloud for the reader’s benefit, while their leader reddens and pounds tables and asks what they are calling it. And the closing act reaches for graphic sexual material twice, the second time as its culminating revelation, described in a detail that will stop some readers cold. The intention is plainly condemnation rather than sensation; the execution still puts the most explicit pages of the book where its argument should be.
For the Group
- Selig’s mistake is the whole discussion. He is not naive and not stupid. He has correctly read fifty years of experience and drawn the wrong conclusion from it. What would have changed his mind earlier, and would anything?
- Failure as structure. Does a thriller in which the hero never succeeds build tension or drain it? Groups will split on this.
- Two strands, unequal weight. Would The Munich Affair by James Patterson be stronger as a straight historical novel without the modern hunt? What does Eleanor provide that a prologue could not?
- The ending’s method. The revelation depends on the reader watching something appalling in close detail. Is that the only way to make the point, and does the book earn it?
- Content warnings, before anyone commits: an abusive sexual relationship with a girl under sixteen; hard labour, camp conditions and a killing carried out as a lesson to onlookers; a family sent east and murdered, their young daughter with them; a beating in police custody followed by a public humiliation; antisemitic violence across the whole book; one attempt at suicide; a grown child lost to cancer.
For a group wanting more of this, The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau by Kristin Harmel braids an occupation story with a modern search and gives the modern half real work to do. The Girls of the Glimmer Factory by Jennifer Coburn goes properly into the propaganda apparatus this novel only points at, and The Ragged Edge of Night by Olivia Hawker takes village resistance at walking pace. Anyone curious about this partnership elsewhere should try Lies He Told Me, the same two writers on present-day ground.
After the Last Page
A week later the bunker and the reel of film have gone. What remains is a detective in a bedroom with a tape measure, writing down what is in front of him, in a city that settled the question before he arrived.
So The Munich Affair by James Patterson is uneven in a way that is easy to forgive and hard to overlook. When it trusts its procedural instincts it is excellent, and its real subject turns out not to be one monstrous man but the hundreds of unremarkable ones who shaved a little off their duty and let him through. For a group that is a better argument than any assassination plot, and the novel, almost despite itself, arrives at it.