In September 1931 a young woman is found shot dead in a locked bedroom on Prinzregentenplatz, and the Munich detective who catches the case does something unremarkable: he treats it as a homicide. He measures the room. He notes that the pistol is on the floor rather than in her hand, that a suitcase sits half closed on the bed. Everything after that is the story of how much machinery a country will spend to make one policeman stop counting. The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis is at its best in that first hundred pages, and never quite gets back there.
The Case That Should Have Ended It
Kriminalinspektor Thomas Bauer is a Great War veteran, the son of a quarryman, married to a Jewish schoolteacher named Amalie and father to two small children he sings badly to each night before bed. He is no crusader when the book opens, just a competent investigator handed a death in the home of a rising politician, who discovers within a day that his own chief, the Justice Ministry, the party’s press office and a helpful priest have all reached the same conclusion ahead of the evidence.
The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis is very good on the texture of that obstruction. A body released for burial across the border before an autopsy can be completed. A witness who was in the building and is suddenly on holiday. A file that thins each time it crosses a desk. A colleague barely out of his teens who is offered a promotion for the contents of Bauer’s notebook and takes it. There is no conspiracy meeting here, just a long sequence of people choosing the easier paperwork, which is exactly how the historical record of Geli Raubal’s death reads.
Bauer’s ally is Fritz Gerlich, a Catholic journalist running a small Munich paper called Der Gerade Weg, who has been telling his wife Sophie for a year that he will be among the first men hanged if the National Socialists take power, and keeps publishing anyway. Their partnership drives the most satisfying set piece here: a burglary of a safe inside party headquarters that costs them almost everything.
Where The Munich Affair Stops Being a Detective Novel
The second half of the 1930s strand converts Bauer from a policeman into a partisan. Demoted to patrolman and washing pots on the night shift at Hitler’s favourite restaurant purely to be in the building, he recruits nine other veterans into a group they half-jokingly call the Ten Patriots, and later works almost entirely alongside Erich von der Haas, a tiny, wry former signals officer out of the Abwehr who is both Jewish and gay, and the best character here by a wide margin.
What follows is twelve years of attempts that fail, most drawn from history. A rifle on a library roof above the Berlin book burning, aimed at a man who does not attend. Two suitcases from Paris at Nuremberg station with the Gestapo beside them. A bomb inside a pillar at the Bürgerbräukeller in November 1939, defeated by fog and a rescheduled train. A hole four square centimetres wide cut in a wire fence at the Berghof, a night up a spruce tree, and a wild animal at exactly the wrong moment. The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis runs these as a serial of near misses, and the effect is unusual: the reader learns to expect failure, and the tension shifts from will it work to what will it cost him.
The cost is the marriage and the children. Amalie’s letters reach a safe house in Potsdam with the children reduced to initials, reporting violin lessons and a growing interest in baseball, and Bauer keeps one photograph in a shirt pocket for years. Her only instruction to him, on a hill above Salzburg, is not to say goodbye.
Where James Patterson and David Ellis Give Ground
- The inner circle is exposition with a temper. Göring, Goebbels and Himmler explain policy to each other in finished paragraphs, defining racial categories grandparent by grandparent for the reader’s benefit, while Hitler reddens, pounds furniture and demands to know what they are calling it. Efficient, never once alive, and a great deal of the middle of the book.
- The present-day strand is scaffolding. Professor Eleanor Robbins of the University of Chicago is a likeable narrator, deliberately hopeless at surveillance and aware of it. But her chapters mostly restate what the historical ones have shown, float a theory, then receive something from a stranger.
- The shock material does work the prose should be doing. Two invented sequences involving Hitler’s sexual coercion are rendered in close detail, including an extended one that serves as the climax. The intent is plainly to indict rather than titillate, and the effect is still a novel reaching for its most graphic pages exactly where The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis needs to land an argument.
- Part Five sprints. The decade-long friendship between Bauer and von der Haas, the richest thing here, becomes montage so the plot can reach a Berlin bunker on schedule.
- The chapter hooks are metronomic. After a hundred and twenty chapters ending on a cliff, you feel the next one coming.
What The Munich Affair Is Actually About
Underneath the manhunt this is a book about paperwork. Its most valuable stretch is not an assassination attempt but a run of chapters in which a democracy comes apart in legal instalments, each dated and numbered: seven constitutional articles suspended by decree after a fire; four thousand arrests before daybreak; an enabling law passed with a quorum nobody dares count; a boycott announced for a single day as a warning; a civil-service statute that removes a schoolteacher of eleven years from her classroom between first and second period.
The finest thread in The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis belongs to Bauer’s father-in-law, Selig Geiger, a wealthy Jewish department-store owner who has met antisemitism his entire life, has learned to absorb it, and cannot see why this time should be different. Hitler, he tells Bauer, is a blowhard who will come and go like the rest; the difference between them is that he handles it and Bauer obsesses. He is not written as a fool. He is a man whose survival strategy has worked for fifty years, and the novel takes his argument seriously before taking it apart.
Content Notes
The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis is an unsparing book. Sexual coercion and the sexual abuse of a minor, described rather than implied; a murder depicted twice, once at length; camp conditions, forced labour and an execution staged with musical accompaniment; the deportation and gassing of a family, a child among them; a man beaten in police custody and publicly degraded; antisemitic violence throughout; a suicide attempt; period racial slurs and Nazi racial pseudoscience on the page; a child’s death from illness.
Read These Next
Four for readers who finish The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis:
- Lies He Told Me by James Patterson and David Ellis. The same partnership on contemporary ground, useful for working out what Ellis brings to it.
- The Ragged Edge of Night by Olivia Hawker. A former friar in a German village doing small, dangerous things under the same regime, with far more interiority than a thriller allows.
- A Bookseller in Madrid by Mario Escobar. Ordinary courage against European fascism, built around a shop rather than a rifle.
- Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne. Non-fiction, and the natural companion: how respectable German institutions made themselves useful.
More for a wider shelf in our guide to the best books on World War 2.
What Stays With You
The runway, the bunker and the reel of film are what the marketing will sell, and they are not what lasts. What lasts is an early scene in which a detective stands in a bedroom with a tape measure and a notebook, doing his job properly, in a city that has already settled on the answer.
The Munich Affair by James Patterson and David Ellis is two books stapled together: a first-rate procedural about institutional cowardice, and a competent thriller that keeps interrupting it with men in rooms announcing their plans. The first is worth your time even at this length, and it leaves a question the villains never get asked. Not how did he get away with it. How many ordinary people, each doing slightly less than the job required, does getting away with it take.