When I lived in Munich, it was on a small street that ran between the university on Ludwigstrasse and the English Garden, on Kaulbachstrasse. Down the street was the residence used by Eugenio Pacelli when he was papal nuncio in Bavaria. Pacelli went on to become Pope Pius XII and remains controversial to this day for the Vatican’s failure to recognize the genocide of the Jews during World War II.

I had a great time in Munich. The university was on strike, so I spent a lot of time in the English Garden, which is a large park. It was interesting for me, then, to read a series by American author Peter Steiner featuring fictional detective Willi Geismeier, who fought in World War I and survived the Hitler years in Germany. Steiner once lived in Munich, and his familiarity with the city (and the language) made the series quite compelling.

The first book is The Good Cop; evidently, Steiner wasn’t sure there’d be a second, so the initial volume looked into the future and finished Willi’s story. The successive books — The Constant Man, The Inconvenient German, and The New Detective — jump around in time, but the reader gets used to it.

The Hitler events, from the aborted coup at the Feldherrnhalle (aka “the Beer Hall Putsch”) to his stay in prison and the eventual rise of the Nazis, are all captured vividly, making the series worth reading for the history alone. But it’s Steiner’s details about the city and the surrounding countryside that really fill out the picture. (Although I’m not sure this will be the case for those who haven’t been to Munich.)

Later, I spent 10 years in Paris and had a chance to visit most of France. It turns out that Steiner also has a series set in the Touraine region, and in it, he shows the same familiarity with France. However, that series, featuring former CIA agent Louis Morgon, has a tiresome and unbelievable plot in which the American secretary of state murders people and holds an unaccountable grudge against the protagonist. The first book, Le Crime, was okay, but I stopped reading when the second book, L’Assassin, returned to the same tedious setup.

Nonetheless, the series are well written, and it’s clear the author has lived both in Germany and in France. He’s a bit of a Renaissance man, too: His cartoons have been featured in the New Yorker since 1979.

Darrell Delamaide is a journalist and author in Washington, DC. He has published two novels and two works of nonfiction.