One of the givens in detective fiction these days is that the sleuth should be deeply flawed. You almost expect, as you pry open the pages of the latest overnight sensation to discover that the inspector in question is an internet troll who gets in fights at closing time and closes his eyes to the excesses of the English Defence League while somehow remaining sympathetic and miles better than his boss, who imagines that proper procedure and pins in the board are the way to solve crime.
It would be stretching things, even so, to imagine that we might get behind a Berlin detective – known as a ‘bull’ – who happens to be the go-to man for most of the Nazi hierarchy in wartime Germany. Do we really want to be pals with a womanising sleuth who spends time solving cases on behalf of Himmler, Göring and (my particular favourite) Reinhard Heydrich?
Well, apparently we do.
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