Here is a list of five of the best books I read and one film I watched when researching Operation Berlin, my detective novel set in Berlin in 1930.  By ‘best’, I mean most useful, or most entertaining, or both.  

The High Sheriff by Henry Wade (1937) 

One of my two detectives, Archie, suffers from shell shock sustained during the First World War.  Martin Edwards, an expert on Golden Age detective fiction of the 1920s and 30s, suggested this book to me.  Henry Wade’s real name was Major Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher DSO; he had served in the war, was wounded and decorated, and then, later, wrote detective stories.   

The protagonist of The High Sheriff is a retired colonel and a landowner who is also the High Sherriff of his county.  As such, he fits a classic stereotype of detective fiction: he should be bluff, dim and unimaginative.  But he’s not, and Henry Wade wasn’t either.  The High Sheriff is intelligent, brave, responsible but deeply damaged by the war, damage that he cannot bear to show to the outside world, or even to his family.  This novel was invaluable to me when creating Archie.  It was also fun to read.  Goodbye to All That, a justly famous memoir by Robert Graves, was equally useful. 

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial by Deborah Cohen (2022) 

My other detective, Esme, is a young American who has travelled to Europe to follow her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent.  Last Call describes the lives of American foreign correspondents between the war, focusing on five: Dorothy Thompson, Vincent ‘Jimmy” Sheean, HR ‘Knick” Knickerbocker, John Gunther and his wife Frances Fineman.  The Hotel Imperial of the title refers to the hotel in Vienna where they used to meet.  The Berlin equivalent was the Hotel Adlon.  This book was invaluable for creating Esme’s character, as well as those of other reporters and murder suspects, in Berlin. 

Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher (1999, 2014) 

A German publisher recommended Volker Kutscher’s novels to me many years ago, but they have only been translated into English in the last ten years.  They are crime novels set in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and they are brilliant, full of expertly researched historical detail.  Generally, I make it a rule not to read modern-day novels set in a period I am writing about, preferring contemporary books like The High Sheriff.  But rules are made to be broken. 

Babylon Berlin is the first in the series – they are all good – and was published in Germany under the title Der nasse Fisch, which means The Wet Fish.  The television series Babylon Berlin is based on Kutscher’s books.  Both the TV series and the novel are good, but they are also very different.  The TV series is more stylish and the novels are more accurate.  I much prefer the detective Gideon Rath who appears in the novels to the Gideon Rath in the TV series.  

In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson (2011) 

This is the story of William Dodd and his family during his years as American ambassador to Germany.  Although Dodd didn’t arrive in Berlin until 1933, three years after my book takes place and the year Hitler came to power, the descriptions of life in Berlin, especially for diplomats, are excellent.  So too are his portrayals of Dodd and his wayward daughter Martha, who became friends with a long list of good-looking Germans, Americans and, most interestingly, Russians.  This is popular history at its best, entertaining, yet accurate and as skilful at portraying characters as events. 

Baedecker’s Berlin and its Environs (1923) 

Behind the issue desk at the London Library is a spiral staircase that rises to a gallery of wooden bookshelves ten feet above the floor.  On these shelves, sorted by the London Library’s idiosyncratic and archaic definition of countries, are rows of travel guides from different years stretching back to the 19th century.  The 1923 edition of the Baedecker guide to Berlin became my handbook for researching this novel.   

More than most cities, Berlin has changed markedly since the early 1930s.  Hitler made the first changes in the late 1930s, renaming streets and putting up new buildings.  The devastation caused by the Russian soldiers and British bombers and then the partition during the Cold War changed the city entirely.  But in the London Library’s small red copy of the Baedecker Guides, Berlin in the 1920s lives on.       

Film: Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) written by Billy Wilder (1930) 

It’s all very well to read about Berlin and Berliners, but it’s nice to see them moving about, if only in black and white.  There are some great films of Berlin from the early 30s, in particular M, a film about the Berlin underworld directed by Fritz Lang and arguably the first ‘Film Noir’ and Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927), but Billy Wilder’s film made Berliners really come alive to me. The film follows four young Berliners, two women and two men, as they prepare for their day out on a summer Sunday and go to one of the lakes in the Grunewald to sunbathe and swim.  A carefree Berlin, which is difficult for us to see clearly now through the blackened glass of the horror and destruction of the following fifteen years.