When Ian Rankin picks a book, it’s never random. The bestselling author of the Rebus novels has spent decades exploring the darker corners of human nature, often through flawed detectives and haunted streets.
But his choice for BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read isn’t your standard crime novel. It’s The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger – the screenwriting half of Powell and Pressburger, the filmmaking duo behind British cinema classics like The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death.
The story follows Karl Braun, a seemingly ordinary German piano tuner living in 1960s London, who is actually Dr. Otto Reitmüller, a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight.
Karl lives among other German émigrés, who mistake him for a fellow refugee fleeing Hitler, while he navigates a life of paranoia and self-imposed exile, haunted by the past and fearing the net of justice closing in. And Rankin can’t stop talking about how unsettlingly good it is.
“It’s enormously morally complex, this novel, because what we learn very early on is that he is wanted as a Nazi war criminal. And we gradually understand what he did. And it is totally peculiar because I don’t know that we like him or root for him exactly, but we are concerned about what happens to this guy”, Rankin says.
“I think it just fizzes along,” he says, not with the usual joy of a page-turner, but with a kind of grim fascination. “And if he’s a hunted man, you’re on his side. Somehow you are kind of on his side and the paranoia starts to get to him. He starts to see people around every corner who are out to get him”.
And here’s where more about the book’s context gets complicated: Pressburger was a Hungarian Jew whose own mother died in the Holocaust. That he would write a novel this empathetic towards a Nazi fugitive is, in Rankin’s words, “quite astonishing.”
“To have this amount of empathy for a hunted Nazi is quite astonishing, isn’t it? Yeah, I think I’ve subsequently read that he used quite a lot of his own biographical background details with the main protagonist’s sort of character and some of the backstory. And there was a kind of debate of how could he do that?”
There’s an eerie, near-uncomfortable intelligence to the way The Glass Pearls manipulates reader loyalty. Rankin compares it to Patricia Highsmith or Georges Simenon – novelists skilled at crafting morally ambiguous thrillers. But here, “tt’s very morally complex,” he notes. “The whole Hannah Arendt thing about the banality of evil is kind of threaded through this book.”
And then there’s Helen – Braun’s girlfriend, unaware of who she’s really dating. Rankin sees her not just as a compelling character (“she just jumps off the page”), but as the book’s quiet moral core. She’s the conscience Pressburger plants at the centre of his story, allowing readers to feel the full weight of deception, both personal and historical. “Everything [Braun] tells her is fiction,” Rankin notes. “So he’s an amazing storyteller. He’s an amazing maker-up of stuff. And she falls for it.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Colin MacIntyre chose Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, a lyrical, fragmentary account of artist Suzanne Mallouk’s turbulent relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat during the explosive art scene of early 1980s New York: “He’s horrible to Suzanne,” Rankin says bluntly.
And presenter Harriett Gilbert recommended The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi, a harrowing, intimate portrait of an Afghan woman speaking to her comatose husband as war rages outside.
