Philip Kerr
Creator of the detective Bernie Gunther, a character whose morality could at times be ambiguous
PHILIP KERR, the novelist who has died of cancer aged 62, was the creator of Bernie Gunther, a wisecracking private eye in the Raymond Chandler mould whose beat is Hitler’s Germany. The books transcended pastiche to become some of the most widely admired works of contemporary British fiction.
He decided to invent a Berlin detective as an expression of his affinity for Berliners. “Berlin people have always been awkward-squad Germans, which is probably why I admire them. Hitler didn’t like them at all,” he observed. Kerr was clearly temperamentally suited to capturing the way in which for Berliners (as Gunther observes in one novel) “black humour was a religious calling”.
Although Gunther is fundamentally an honourable man with a loathing of Nazis, Kerr would often risk alienating readers’ sympathies by making him complicit in atrocities. “It’s perfectly possible to be a hero on a Monday and a coward on a Wednesday. Gunther is morally ambiguous,” he said.
Kerr’s first novel, March Violets (1989), had Gunther sleuthing at the Berlin Olympics and going undercover at Dachau; two sequels, The Pale Criminal (1990) and
A German Requiem (1991), followed. On the strength of these Kerr was included in Granta magazine’s decennial list of the best British novelists under 40 in 1993.
He then turned to other projects, but after a 15-year gap revived Gunther in The One from the Other (2006) and proceeded to publish a new Gunther novel every year from then on; the 13th, Greeks Bearing Gifts, will be published next week. The series ranges backwards and forwards over Gunther’s career, from working for Reinhard Heydrich during the war to helping Somerset Maugham deal with blackmailers on the Cote d’azur in the 1950s.
Kerr wrote more than a dozen other thrillers. Many critics, and Kerr himself, thought that his best novel was
A Philosophical Investigation (1992), a cerebral and morally chewy futuristic thriller in which an apparently altruistic murderer nicknamed Wittgenstein kills men whom genetic testing suggests are disposed to become serial killers.
Gridiron (1995) featured an artificially intelligent building in Los Angeles that starts killing the humans inside it. The book received the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, with Kerr, never one to accept criticism lightly, giving a notably ungracious acceptance speech.
In the mid-1990s Kerr was the subject of breathless newspaper reports about the astronomical sums he received for the film rights to his books; Tom Cruise reportedly paid him $1.7 million for the rights to A Five-year Plan (1997) before it was even written. This contributed to a dip in critical favour – “the biggest kickings I get are for making money”, he observed. No feature films have yet been made of his books. More recently Kerr, a devoted Arsenal fan, published three light but enjoyable novels about Scott Manson, a Premier League coach turned detective.
As PB Kerr he also wrote several children’s books, including The Children of the Lamp series about two New York children who discover that they are descended from genies.
Philip Ballantyne Kerr was born in Edinburgh on February 22 1956, the son of William Kerr and his wife Anne (née Brodie).
His parents were devout Baptists and he would often attend church three times on Sundays. His father, an aspiring politician, tried a number of professions with limited success and the family was fairly poor.
Kerr first made money as an author when he was 12 years old, writing and renting out pornographic stories to his schoolmates. One, The Duchess and the Daisies, was discovered in the hands of a schoolmate and the author’s identity made public. Instead of a beating, his father devised a brilliantly sadistic punishment: Philip was made to read the work to his own mother. “She fled the room after a couple of sentences, thank God,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2012. “But it gave me quite an insight into the power of words.”
Philip was dark-skinned and endured racist bullying at Melville College. When he was 14 the family moved to Northampton and he subsequently lost all trace of a Scottish accent.
To please his father he studied Law at the University of Birmingham, but he professed to loathe law and lawyers and his father’s death at the age of 46 removed the compunction to pursue a legal career, as well as any lingering religious feeling. He worked as a copywriter for Saatchi & Saatchi, among others, writing six unpublished novels, which he described as “sub-martin Amis” before hitting on the idea for Bernie Gunther.
Kerr, who was possessed of striking saturnine good looks, claimed to have no close friends other than his wife, but was entertaining company and, despite his repeated claims that most crime fiction was formulaic and boring, he was much liked by his fellow crime writers.
He displayed little in the way of modesty about himself or his work. He vocally shared many people’s surprise that for many years the Crime Writers’ Association failed to award him its annual prize for historical fiction. When he was finally announced as the winner in 2009, he withdrew from his pocket a victory speech smothered in dust, which he blew off ostentatiously.
With typical determination, Kerr managed to complete one more Gunther novel, Metropolis, during his final illness; it will be published next year.
Philip Kerr married, in 1991, Jane Thynne, the sometime media correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, who herself became a noted historical novelist. She survives him with their daughter and two sons.
Philip Kerr, born February 22 1956, died March 23 2018