The Nights of the Long Knives, about a fictitious 6-man squad of SS hit men. All of these novels featured humor and satire, with leading characters often shown positioning themselves as outspoken, ardent Nazis during the Third Reich era before effortlessly flipping to become equally ardent in their claims to have been anti-Nazi and 100% pro-democracy or pro-communist after the tide turned. Kirst also wrote about the July 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in Aufstand der Soldaten (1965), which was translated into English as Soldiers' Revolt. Kirst's non-World-War-II-themed novels included The Seventh Day (1957), a nuclear holocaust story that received worldwide acclaim and was dubbed "so convincing, that it doesn't seem like fiction at all". Using a wide array of viewpoint characters, most of them Germans, it describes – step by step and day by day – how in just a single week a chain of small incidents escalates into bigger incidents, small-scale fighting, all-out war, resort to nuclear arms and finally a worldwide nuclear exchange with Europe totally destroyed by the Seventh Day and "the Days of Humanity were numbered". Symbolic characters are a pair of star-crossed lovers, a West German boy and his East German girlfriend, who spend the entire book desperately searching for each other finally to find and run towards each other but before they can touch a nuclear explosion vaporizes both of them in a split second. Die letzte Karte spielt der Tod (1955) is a fictional account of the life of Soviet spy Richard Sorge, published in the United States as The Last Card and in the United Kingdom as Death Plays the Last Card. In 1965 Kirst was nominated for an Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America for his 1962 book Die Nacht der Generale, translated into English as The Night of the Generals. The book dealt with an investigation into a series of murders of prostitutes during and after World War II committed by one of three German generals. The book was made into a 1967 film of the same name, which starred Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole. Kirst also wrote the Konstantin Keller series of detective novels set in Munich in the 1960s and published in English translations as Damned to Success (and also as A Time for Scandal), A Time for Truth and Everything has a Price. In 1972 Kirst was a member of the jury at