Philip Kerr

• Born: February 22, 1956
• Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
• Died: March 23, 2018
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Hard-boiled; historical; police procedural; private investigator; thriller

Principal Series: Bernie Gunther, 1989-

Contribution

Philip Kerr enjoyed a stellar literary debut. March Violets, the first of his Bernie Gunther novels, appeared in 1989 to wide critical appreciation. By the time the third novel in the series was published two years later, Kerr’s reputation was established. As eminent a literary voice as Salman Rushdie hailed him as brilliantly innovative, and in 1993 the literary review Granta named Kerr among the top twenty living British authors. His subsequent techno-thrillers attracted further admirers: He was called the Michael Crichton of the 1990s. His A Philosophical Investigation (1992), Gridiron (1995), and The Second Angel (1998) are considered benchmarks for crossover genre fiction.

Kerr became noted for two qualities: the detailed realism of his historical settings and the intricacy of his plot-driven novels and their intellectual tenor. The novels typically contain long discussions of philosophy, science, and technology, all fundamental to the plots. Although many reviewers found his depictions of historical characters (such as Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, and Franklin D. Roosevelt) to be believable, others complained that his emphasis on story in preference to characterization resulted in stereotyping and oversimplification. Moreover, Kerr received the unwelcome distinction of a Bad Sex Award, an annual antitribute from Britain’s Literary Review for a purple sex scene in an otherwise good novel. Some critics complained of his gruesome violence and gloomy tone. The majority, however, found that Kerr's novels successfully blended aspects of genre and literary fiction.

Biography

Philip Ballantyne Kerr said that he wanted to be a writer from the very first moment he could read. His family, however, had different plans for him. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on February 22, 1956. His father, a property developer, and his mother raised him in a strict household, imbuing him with a Scottish-Protestant work ethic and the desire to make something of himself. Education and their Baptist church were of central importance. The family moved south to Northampton, England, while he was in grammar school.

Kerr began writing early, completing his first short story when he was ten years old, and during his last year in secondary school, he won the Stopford Sackville English Prize. Still, his father insisted that he become a lawyer. In 1974 Kerr entered the University of Birmingham and finished a master’s degree in law in 1980. However, feeling that the legal profession did not suit him, he took a job at an advertising agency. He later worked as a copywriter for the prestigious firm Saatchi & Saatchi. At this profession, too, Kerr felt out of place. He later claimed that he never wrote a single successful advertising slogan and that he felt he was living a double life. He spent his days at the agency and his nights writing fiction at home.

After his first novel, March Violets, was published in 1989, he devoted himself to writing full time. In addition to writing novels, he compiled two anthologies, The Penguin Book of Lies (1990) and The Penguin Book of Fights, Feuds, and Heartfelt Hatreds: An Anthology of Antipathy (1992). He also wrote teleplays, including Grushko (with Robin Mukherjee), a television movie version of his novel Dead Meat (1993) aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1994. Thereafter, he continued to be successful selling scripts based on his novels to Hollywood studios. This success gave Kerr considerable leverage in the publishing industry, and he made lucrative deals for his novels, including record advances and as many as fifteen contracts for translations into foreign languages.

Long wanting to write books for children as well as for adults, Kerr began writing one after 2000, initially as a way to encourage his own children to read instead of playing video games. The result was The Akhenaten Adventure (2004), a tale of two young American genies on a quest to find and defeat an ancient pharaoh, set in modern Egypt and England. It was meant only for a private printing. His agent, however, was able to sell the book and two sequels to a publisher (as well as film rights and translations), and it appeared in 2004. A sequel, The Blue Djinn of Babylon, was published in 2006. In the meantime, Kerr continued writing historical mysteries and thrillers, returning to the Bernie Gunther series in 2006 with The One from the Other. He went on to write ten more Bernie Gunther books between 2008 and his death in 2018; the last, Metropolis, was slated to be published posthumously in 2019. The 2009 Bernie Gunther novel If the Dead Rise Not won the RBA Prize for Crime Writing and the British Crime Writers' Association's Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award. Another entry in that series, 2017's Prussian Blue, was longlisted for the 2018 Walter Scott Prize. In addition to these books, his works in the twenty-first century included three novels about professional soccer coach Scott Manson, who investigates murders and mysterious deaths related to the sport, and a number of stand-alone novels; however, the Bernie Gunther books have remained his most popular and critically acclaimed works.

Kerr was married to novelist Jane Thynne, and they had three children. He died of bladder cancer on March 23, 2018, in London, at the age of sixty-two.

Analysis

Philip Kerr remarked in the afterword to one of his novels that thrillers and mysteries are merely children’s books for adults in that they are fantasy entertainment. Nevertheless, his novels treated a variety of momentous themes, frequently delve into the corruption and conflicts of famous historical eras, and ponder the nature of evil in the human psyche, often through characterizations of historical luminaries. Even if they are fantasies, his novels still impel readers to ponder fundamental questions about human behavior.

Several of Kerr’s novels examined international politics and society. Hitler’s Peace: A Novel of the Second World War (2005) concerns secret negotiations among Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Tehran in 1943 and the factions in each nation that tried to ruin the meeting. A German Requiem (1991), the third Bernie Gunther novel, unfolds in post-World War II Vienna, where the Soviets, French, British, and Americans ostensibly coadminister the city but in fact devote themselves to spying on each other, even supporting organizations made up of former Nazi leaders if they will aid them; the international presence has less to do with reconstruction of Germany than with the looming conflict between the communist Soviet Union and the democratic West. In Esau (1996), events unfold against the background of an escalating conflict between India and Pakistan, thus raising another of Kerr’s major international themes: the danger of technology (in this case, nuclear weapons) both to civilization and to the environment. A third international theme is anti-Semitism. Persecution of Jewish people forms a pervasive undercurrent to the first three Bernie Gunther novels and is the major motivation for events in the fourth. Kerr demonstrates that anti-Semitism not only harms those persecuted but also causes a moral degeneracy in the persecutors that haunts them long after World War II. A fourth international theme concerns the growing disparity between a small privileged class of the wealthy and a large underprivileged class. In The Second Angel (1998), a techno-thriller set in 2069, this gap is given symbolic force. Humanity is split into two classes, those who are infected with a slow-acting virus that is uniformly fatal and those who are free of infection. The only way to cure the disease is through complete replacement of diseased blood with healthy blood, and accordingly pure blood becomes the most valued commodity in society, jealously guarded by the healthy from the diseased.

Kerr also addressed the unforeseen pernicious effects of technology within a society. In Gridiron, for instance, arrogant developers build a skyscraper run by a single advanced computer. It turns vicious, destroying the developers and their clients. In A Philosophical Investigation, genetic screening and sophisticated computing allow England to identify potential serial killers. The system enables authorities to track and offer preventive treatments to these proto-murderers, but any technological system, however well intended, can be compromised and misused, Kerr implies. One of the proto-murderers hacks into the computer system to erase his own file and then identify all others like him. He then sets out to murder them. The overarching irony is that a preventive program produces a killer who kills those it is intended to prevent from becoming killers—the principal component of the novel's complex satire.

Kerr’s plots typically develop in nations that are degenerating because of corruption, crime, and political extremism, and critics widely praise the detailed accuracy of his settings. In the Bernie Gunther novels, the fascist statism of the Nazi Party, rife with corruption and competition among leaders, provides a violent, hypocritical, seamy context for the detective’s investigations. In A Five-Year Plan (1998) and The Shot (1999), the connivance among organized crime, espionage, and law enforcement create opportunities for a cunning lone character to exploit the corrupted institutions for his own benefit. In Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton (2002), political intrigue among religious and political factions leads to murders during England's attempt to revamp its debased coinage.

Although Kerr's novels focused more on plot than characterization, the characters are nevertheless often their leading attraction, and he employs a variety of traditional detective styles. Bernie Gunther comes from the tradition of hard-boiled detectives, made famous by Raymond Chandler—always tough, often abused by clients and enemies, but at base compassionate and crusading. Kerr also uses a traditional police-procedural inspector in A Philosophical Investigation and intellectual detectives, most notably Sir Isaac Newton, in Dark Matter. Kerr draws from real statesmen for his secondary characters as well and emphasizes reputed historical traits: for instance, an affable but paranoid Hitler; a Machiavellian (and foulmouthed) Roosevelt; and a romantic, superstitious Heinrich Himmler.

March Violets

In March Violets, hard-boiled private investigator Bernie Gunther, called by some critics the German Philip Marlowe, makes a precarious living investigating missing persons in the late 1930s, especially for the relatives of Jewish people who have disappeared. A former inspector in the Kripo, Berlin’s police department, he is famous for having cracked a difficult murder case. His reputation brings him a job to track down the killers of the daughter and son-in-law of a powerful German industrialist. During the investigation, related in the first-person point of view, Gunther comes into contact with Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler, as well as a host of Gestapo agents, shady characters, and a beautiful actress, in the middle of a political battle. He uncovers corruption everywhere, and the concluding scene, involving rape and murder, leaves him with a solved crime that harms everyone involved and reflects a society fast sinking into depravity. Even the best efforts by an honest man like Gunther are of no avail and only mark him as someone to be manipulated by the powerful.

Dark Matter

Dark Matter takes place in late seventeenth century England, where the government, immersed in a costly war with the French, finds that the realm’s coinage is badly corrupted by counterfeiters. To correct the problem, the Great Recoinage is undertaken, overseen by Sir Isaac Newton, newly appointed as warden of the Mint. He hires a feisty young gentleman, Christopher Ellis, as his personal assistant to help him investigate a series of grisly murders at the Mint that threaten the recoinage. The story is related from Ellis’s first-person point of view. Ellis and Newton learn that the murders are part of a larger plot by radical Protestants to stage a massacre of Roman Catholics within the country as revenge for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots in France. The plot involves much about coding and late Renaissance English politics and shows an amiable Newton using his genius to save his nation from disorder and the incompetence of lesser men in government.

The One from the Other

Set in 1949, The One from the Other has Bernie Gunther trying to make a living as a hotel manager, but the hotel, located next to the Dachau concentration camp, is failing, and his wife is dying. Desperate for money, he relaunches his private investigator business. Ironically, although he once made a precarious living helping Jewish people in prewar Germany, he quickly earns a lot of money uncovering information about German war criminals who persecuted Jewish people, information that is used in their defense.

Gunther’s third case embroils him in the Comrades, a secret network of former SS officers. The reader learns that during the war Gunther also had been in the SS, although unwillingly, and that he nearly died as a Russian prisoner of war. As in previous novels, he is made a dupe: Because they look alike, Gunther is tricked into being arrested as Eric Gruen, a Nazi concentration camp doctor guilty of horrible medical experiments that killed thousands with malaria. He soon finds himself on the run from the International Police, the Central Intelligence Agency, assassins of the Haganah (an Israeli intelligence organization), and former SS generals. In the end he escapes on a boat to Argentina through a secret organization that helps war criminals escape punishment. Despite his anti-Nazi history, he must start a new life as a fugitive, just like Adolf Eichmann, who is on the same boat.

Collusion between Western intelligence agencies and former Nazis creates a nightmarish atmosphere of corruption, intrigue, greed, and fear that besmirches everyone involved, whether innocent of war crimes or not.

Principal Series Character:

• Bernie Gunther is a wisecracking, hard-drinking, private eye/police inspector in Germany who during the 1930s and 1940s attracts women and becomes entangled in high-level Nazi plots in approximately equal proportions. He prefers to work alone and undercover but inevitably must rely on politically dangerous characters who cause him grief. His ethical code moves him to help underdogs, especially beleaguered Jews, but he also earns the grudging respect of high-ranking Nazi, Russian, and American intelligence agents and police, who try to manipulate him for their own ends.

Bibliography

Diemert, Brian. “’How Do You Describe the Indescribable?’ Representing History in Detective Fiction: The Case of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir Trilogy.” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 35, no. 2 (Summer, 2002): 331-53.

Glover, David. “The Thriller.” In Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Horsely, Lee. The Noir Thriller. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Leonard, John. “Blood on the Tracts.” The Nation 256, no. 22 (June, 1993): 788-800.

Sandomir, Richard. "Philip Kerr, 62, Author of ‘Gunther’ Crime Novels, Is Dead." The New York Times, 27 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/obituaries/philip-kerr-62-author-of-gunther-crime-novels-is-dead.html. Accessed 9 Apr. 2018.

Scaggs, John. “Missing Persons and Multicultural Identity: The Case of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir.” In Race and Religion in the Postcolonial Detective Story, edited by Julie H. Kim. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005.