Thanks to this fun mystery, Brazilian writer, translator and graphic designer Samir Machado de Machado won the Jabuti Prize for Best Entertainment Novel, considered Brazil’s most important book awards, for a second time. Now English-speaking readers can enjoy a novel with echoes of Agatha Christie while still being its own unique tale.

Rather than Poirot or Marple, our sleuth is police detective Bruno Brückner. He’s travelling on a trans-Atlantic zeppelin flight to Rio de Janeiro. Far faster, and pricier, than a seagoing voyage in 1933. Alongside some Brazilian passengers and the 40-member crew, Brückner is joined by wealthy German Baroness Fridegunde van Hattem, who chases summer back and forth; Dr Karl Kass Voegler, who’s set to speak at a eugenics conference on the dangers of racial mixing; and debonair Englishman William Hay.

They’re joined in Recife by another German, Otto Klein, for the final legs of the journey. But he doesn’t make it, dying overnight, after a dinner where the European quintet discuss classic art, how rising Nazism would fix what ailed Germany, and racial purity. Brückner is asked to investigate, and as he interviews the crew and passengers uncovers a startling tale of fake identities, queer love and revenge, where little is what it seems.

With The Good Nazi de Machado crafts an exquisite classic mystery with a unique setting that soaks readers in at-times disturbing pre-war viewpoints, while sprinkling his tale with several delightful surprises, right up until he absolutely sticks the landing of this aeronautical whodunnit.

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Samir Machado de Machado is an award-winning Brazilian writer, translator and graphic designer. He has won the Jabuti Prize for Best Entertainment Novel twice, for Dry Bodies and The Good Nazi, and received the Minuano Literature Prize. His novels have been translated into French, Italian and English. He was born in Porto Alegre in 1981.

Read more about Samir’s work here.

His translator Rahul Bery translates from Spanish and Portuguese and is based in Cardiff. He has translated novels by David Trueba and Afonso Cruz, and his shorter translations have appeared in The White Review, TLS, Granta, Words Without Borders, Freeman’s and Partisan Hotel. He was the British Library’s translator in residence from 2018-2019.