About 100 pages into Nightingale & Co I figure I’m reading it all wrong. I’m finding myself drowning in too much information and I keep thinking we’re in a different decade altogether. I can’t quite gel with the world that Charlotte Printz is describing. Then I realise that the multiple layers and confusion are completely the point. The description of the novel as cosy crime and the picture of Audrey Hepburn on the cover had made me expect dinner parties rather than the chaos of August 1961 Berlin. And in fact, Printz gets us to take a wide-angle lens to that chaos in a way that’s far more realistic than the Cold War novels that I’m more used to.

Carla and Wallie are the main characters. Carla runs a West Berlin detective agency but is surrounded by an aunt who’s larger than life and a mum with smaller horizons. The rhythms of their domesticity are shocked when, shortly after the Wall goes up, Wallie (geddit?) – or Waltraud – shows up, claiming to be Carla’s never-predicted half sister. She’s from the East and she can’t go home. Wallie is instinctive and open which contrasts nicely with the more buttoned-up Carla. They’re chalk and cheese and they bicker and pick but, after Wallie inserts herself in Carla’s cases, find they complement each other perfectly.

The Wallie/Carla yin/yang East/West thing could, if handled badly, lead to a mess of a novel. As DDR chief Walter Ulbricht nearly said, ‘No one is thinking of building a metaphor.’ But once we’re over the initial shocks – of the tearing apart of Berlin, of the shattering of Carla’s illusions about her father, of the slight weirdness of both Nightingale & Co’s cases, we settle down again. Back in 1961 people took upheaval in their stride: it means something for Carla’s mum to change the day on which she makes a hot meal. It’s these details that you just don’t get in a Cold War spy novel, and it’s a useful reminder that historical novels should do more than detail the big events that we all know about anyway. Towards the end of the book, a taxi driver tells Carla and Wallie: ‘I tell you that wall won’t last another week. They can’t just lock up a whole population.’ In a book where we see the wall from every direction, this would be too much. In fact, the remark has far more impact because the reader – carried along by the pace of the plot – may well have forgotten that we are Doing History.

The two cases – a woman wants to find a lost crush, a man’s dead and his wife’s the main suspect – are weird, but only by our modern viewpoint. Both indicate an innate conservatism especially regarding gender relations. When the woman does find her crush, he requires her to deny the existence of her previous life. Spousal abuse is regarded as natural, as long as it’s the guy who’s doing it. We’re shocked, but we’re also made to delight in the strong female characters who act as the main protagonists. Marina Sofia’s translation gives a contemporary feel to the prose that seems really well measured.

Once I’d got into this, I really enjoyed it. There’s more to life than walls, and that was true even in 1961. We’d do well to remember it.

Thanks to Corylus Books for the review copy and to Ewa Sherman for the blog tour invitation.