Philip Kerr

Kerr wrote the first of the eleven Hitler-era thrillers in the 1980s. At that time, bringing Nazi-era Berlin to life was a feat of imagination, research, and physical effort. ‘I tramped the streets endlessly,’ he says. ‘This was before the Wall came down when Berlin was probably the most atmospheric city on earth. I didn’t know I would write a thriller, but the more I got into it, the more I realized that I was the detective; exploring the historical Berlin was like working on a case.’

The flesh-and-blood outworking of this literary investigation is Bernie Gunther. The first novel is set in 1936, three years into Nazi rule. Gunther is a jaded ex-cop, one victim of the purge of the Berlin police service that presaged the Nazi takeover. He is sharper than a Pickelhaube helmet, but his personality is as dark as the turbulent water of the River Spree and as damaged as the burned-out hulk of the Reichstag.

Gunther is, in other words, a gumshoe in the grand and seamy tradition of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. But he surely has the toughest beat in detective fiction – not least because the definition of crime in his world is so strange, so skewed by ideology. ‘The National Socialist regime had a weird and perverted idea of crime,’ says Kerr. ‘It was far more interested in rounding up Jews and Communists than solving real crimes. And they spent a lot of time covering up true crime when it did happen so that it didn’t reflect badly on the authorities. More than that, professional criminals could apply for SS and Gestapo jobs. It didn’t matter that they were not committed Party members; the Nazis were masters at delegating cruelty.’

Throughout the books, Gunther discovers nasty truths while trying desperately not to get sucked into Nazism’s gaping maw. Does that make him a hero, a kind of reluctant resister? Kerr says not. ‘It’s perfectly possible to be a hero on a Monday and a coward on a Wednesday. Gunther is morally ambiguous. As a patriotic German watching his country being hijacked by a bunch of thugs, he has a dilemma: how to stay alive and try and prosper without selling out. I want to paint him into a corner so he can’t cross the floor without getting paint on his shoes.’

Gunther’s task gets harder with each book in the series. As time passed, he had to deal not just with the Nazi system but with war and the postwar occupation by Soviet troops. His work eventually takes him out of the shattered German capital to Buenos Aires, Havana, and elsewhere – but wherever he goes, he is always a Berliner. ‘He has that black and brittle Berlin sense of humor that is also my sense of humor,’ says Kerr. ‘He is an outsider and a cynic, set against the world, and I have a lot of sympathy for him.’