In 1989, a young British-born journalist living in London, Philip Kerr, performed a magic trick: He wrote the nearest pastiche to Raymond Chandler’s literary style yet achieved, transcending the scores — no, hundreds — who had attempted it before him.

Even more remarkably, the setting was Nazi Germany in 1936, not exactly the place one would expect to read about a wise-cracking, self-deprecating private eye. Bernie Gunther made his debut in this pastiche, which was titled “March Violets.” Drawn into a case while still drunk from a wedding reception, he walks into a rich man’s mansion and the butler attempts to take his hat. “I’ll hang on to it, if you don’t mind,” he says. “It’ll help to keep my hands off the silver.”

March violets, by the way, is the derisive term by which long-time Nazis referred to new party converts. With the Munich Olympics as a backdrop, Gunther, a former member of Kripo, the German criminal police force, investigates a murder that leads him to the hierarchy of the Nazi party.

In “The Pale Criminal” (1990), Germany holds its collective breath awaiting the results of the 1938 Munich conference and whether Hitler will draw the nation into all-out war. The third volume of the Gunther trilogy, “A German Requiem” (1991), is set in the dark aftermath of the war. Stuck in the Russian sector of divided Berlin, he is only too happy to take an assignment in beautiful, peaceful Vienna, where a former Kripo colleague has been accused of killing an American Nazi-hunter.

All three books were collected in “Berlin Noir” (Penguin, 848 pages, $18), an essential volume for any aficionado of distinguished crime fiction. It didn’t offer a new exploit for Gunther when it was issued in 1994, but it seemed the best one could hope for, as Mr. Kerr abandoned Berlin and his hero, writing more contemporary books in search of a wider audience.

Now the first new Gunther novel in 15 years has been published. In “The One From the Other” (Putnam, 384 pages, $26.95), he’s back, working in post-Nazi Munich, and there is plenty of work for a private investigator: finding missing people while helping others disappear. Former war criminals want to escape prosecution and Gunther knows how to get them out of the country. It may disgust him, but it enhances his meager bank account.

There may have been a 15-year-gap in Gunther’s literary career, but Mr. Kerr hasn’t forgotten how Chandler wrote, nor how he was able to fill those rather large shoes himself.

Adolph Eichmann makes an appearance, and is brought to life in a single paragraph. “Eichmann pulled a face,” Mr. Kerr writes, “which wasn’t difficult. His normal expression was a sort of grimace and his mouth was usually a cynical rictus.Whenever he looked at me I thought he was going to tell me he didn’t like my tie.” Another character is distinguished by having teeth that “were big and yellow, as if he usually ate grass for dinner.”

Even Mr. Kerr’s cheap humor is, well, humorous. When a pretty girl flutters her eyelashes at him, Gunther assumes it’s “the new suit I had bought at Oberpollinger. It fit me like a glove.” But the suit worn by the girl’s boss was better. “It fit him like a suit.”

As “The One From the Other” begins, Gunther is managing a charming but badly run-down hotel a mile from the Dachau concentration camp — not exactly a major tourist attraction. His wife has been institutionalized with what doctors described as acute catatonic schizophrenia. He decides to sell the hotel and go back to the job he knows how to do, which is being a private investigator. A fabulously wealthy baron hires Gunther to find a witness who will help the Baron’s son, on trial as a war criminal, and then a beautiful, though badly scarred woman hires him to find her husband. She doesn’t want her husband back; she wants to marry someone else.

The woman’s husband was in charge of the most brutal of all concentration camps. Jews and other undesirables were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, often enduring horrible torture. Opened as a factory using Jews as forced labor in the manufacturing of weapons for the war, it changed when her husband was put in charge of Russian SS officers. They did not kill their victims systematically, but as each pleased: shot, stabbed, drowned, strangled, crucified — whatever appealed to a guard. Children were used as target practice. No atrocity was regarded as too heinous.

Not surprisingly, the monster who organized and encouraged the brutality was on the run. He had long since abandoned his wife, and she needed proof he was dead, if he was. When Gunther agrees to find out for her, he quickly finds himself caught up in a world of betrayal and double-crossing unlike any he had ever encountered. Odessa, the CIA, old war criminals, well-meaning doctors and scientists who would kill (and have) in pursuit of their goals each have reasons to want Gunther just to go away.

In the tradition of all hard-boiled fiction, of course, he persists in his quest, and it costs him dearly. When Philip Marlowe got unlucky, he got beat up, but was back at work the next day. Gunther isn’t quite so fortunate.

The series has one oddity. Although most of the characters are German, the narrative is in English, as, of course, is the dialogue. Yet, in spite of perfectly good colloquial English in every way, characters are referred to as Frau, Fraulein, and Herr instead of Mrs.,Miss, and Mr. It’s not a flaw — merely a curiosity.

It is to be sincerely hoped that a very large number of readers buy this book so that Mr. Kerr won’t be tempted to abandon Bernie Gunther again, and that his adventures will continue for many years. Even if the author wants to torture his hero, he shouldn’t do it to his readers.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com