A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr
Quercus, £14.99

Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski
Maclehose, £15.99

Silesian Station by David Downing
Old Street, £10.99

If thriller Writers have a god (which I doubt), he must bless the Nazis. From 1945 onwards they have provided entertainment for generations, from the gruesome via the grotesque to the absurd.

We have had SS men on the run in Frederick Forsyth's The Odessa File, the Reich reconstructed in Robert Harris's Fatherland, mini-Hitler clones in Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil, and even an assassin who'd had both legs amputated to change his height trying to help mad scientists stitch Hitler's frozen head on to a muscular young body.

Somewhere in all that the bleak reality of life in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe got totally, hopelessly lost. Now, just when you might think it was safe to get back into lederhosen, comes a new incarnation of the Nazi genre, this time as historical novel.

Philip Kerr has been loitering here for a while of course. His Weimar Republic private eye Bernie Gunther appeared more than a decade ago, but he has returned in fine form in the aftermath of a war in which he was press-ganged into the SS.

In A Quiet Flame he is getting off the boat in Argentina in the unsavoury company of, among others, Adolf Eichmann, all set for new identities and new lives in a new country. Of course, a past like theirs is not so easy to put behind them.

The Argentinian dictatorship proves rich pickings and Kerr involves the dictator Juan Perón, his wife Evita and a cabal of nasty Nazi folk villains in a tale involving the sexual mutilation and murder of young girls, anti-Semitism and missing millions in Swiss bank accounts.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the celebrity cast, he makes this ambitious ripping yarn seem historically plausible, even if taking just a few too many pains to make sure we realise that Gunther is a good guy all along.

The world is far less clear-cut in Marek Krajewski's Death in Breslau, the second in the series featuring his outrageously believable police detective Eberhard Mock, a corrupt, gluttonous, ambitious, greedy sensualist and whoremonger.

The plot involves the delicate, poisonous interplay of a police power struggle between Freemasons and Nazis intermingled with a 700-year-old plot to execute a gruesome revenge killing. Young girls don't do too well here either, one of them ending up with a sliced-open stomach full of live scorpions.

Part of the black magic in this book is the reimagination of what is now the Polish city of Wroclaw as it was for 700 years, the German city of Breslau.

There are always going to be difficulties in translation of a book written in Polish but set in a German milieu. The most glaring here is the use of the Polish-transliterated fenig for the smallest unit of German currency, rather than the familiar old pfennig, which echoed our penny. Can the translator Danusia Stok really belong to a generation whose memory no longer goes back beyond the introduction of the euro?

David Downing also makes a few errors of detail in place names in Warsaw and Moscow in his otherwise excellent and evocative Silesian Station, second in a series of novels recreating life in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War.

His protagonist, John Russell, is a British-born journalist with a German lover, former wife and young son, who has taken American citizenship because life as a neutral will be more tolerable in the approaching war.

It also makes him more of an obvious go-between for US intelligence, the Soviets and the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD) secret service, all of which put pressure on him to collaborate. Wisely he manages to give each the impression that he is on their side while at the same time filing stories for his newspaper in San Francisco.

Downing's strength is his fleshing-out of the tense and often dangerous nature of everyday life in a totalitarian state that is edging towards open war. In the background there is also the mystery of what happened to a young Jewish girl sent by her provincial family to what they mistakenly believe is the safety of Berlin.

It looks as if the Nazis are out to conquer the world of fiction anew, only this time more roundly set in their historical context. We can recognise the dangers more clearly if we more closely approximate the reality.

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