The news Sunday night was akin to a car bomb exploding outside our home. Philip Kerr, best-selling British crime novelist, died Friday at age 62—the same age as Bernie Gunther, the street-smart German detective created by Kerr, in the 13th and last of his thriller books.
Kerr died barely a week before the latest Gunther saga was scheduled to hit Amazon and the bookstores. Titled "Greeks Bearing Gifts," it finds Gunther—former Berlin cop and later private detective, a Nazi-hater from the start, and cynical to the core—working as an insurance claims investigator in Munich.
While investigating claims in Athens, he learns that art may have been seized from Greek Jews sent to Auschwitz and a vicious killer from wartime may be back in Athens—or may have never left.
With situations that only one with a finely-jeweled imagination could create, author Kerr also had a sense of history and a near-tireless knack for research that could bring a place and an era to life two generations later.
"After I read 'March Violets' [the first of the Gunther novels], I wondered if the subway system Bernie took to the Berlin Kriminalpolizei Studium [Criminal Police Headquarters] in 1932 was in fact the way Kerr described it," German television journalist Jorg Thadeusz told me. "So I went to the library and got a map of the system from 1932—the route, the names of the stops, the name of the coffee shop you saw crossing over to the Stadium."
He paused, sipped a drink, and said: "It was exactly the way Kerr wrote about it."
On dozens of scenes in his books, from Zurich to Zagreb, this was Philip Kerr's signature. He brought to life places precisely as they were before and during World War II, and gave them true-to-life individuals as if he had interviewed them personally.
In "The Lady from Zagreb," Bernie sees first-hand the killing fields of Croatia under the regime of ultra-nationalist Ante Pavelic ("He's 'the Poglavnik,' the way we have a 'fuehrer'"). At one point, he is offered a ride by a young Austrian intelligence officer named Kurt Waldheim. The future UN secretary general and Austrian president was indeed stationed in Yugoslavia in 1942, when the novel takes place.
Gunther is hired by author W. Somerset Maugham to find out who is blackmailing him in "The Other Side of Silence." Here the reader is treated to an insider's look at Maugham's Villa Mauresque estate on the French Riviera and the parties that include the wide circle of closeted gay friends of "Uncle Willie."
But it is Bernie Gunther himself that made all 13 of Kerr's books major best-sellers and won the author a long list of prestigious honors—from the RBA International Prize for Crime Writing to the prestigious Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award.
A World War I veteran and Berlin detective, Gunther leaves the police force in 1933 rather than submit to oversight by the Nazis he hates and forms his own detective agency.
He solves a case during the 1936 Olympics, is drafted into the SS and forced to work for such Nazi bigwigs as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels ("Mahatma Propagandi" to Bernie), is a P.O.W. and later de-Nazified, ends up in Argentina and Cuba (arriving on the same boat as the diabolical Dr. Mengele), and ends up back on the French Riviera and back in Germany by 1956.
Kerr's numerous awards and story-telling acumen led to his being likened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. But he was also compared to Raymond Chandler, whose "Farewell My Lovely" launched the two-fisted private eye Philip Marlowe.
Inevitably, he was compared to Mickey Spillane's, as Bernie Gunther's observations and fisticuffs (in which he was frequently on the losing end) evoked Spillane's Mike Hammer.
But Philip Kerr and Bernie Gunther were unique in that the reader saw history coming to life as the gumshoe-hero dodged bullets and fists to solve a mystery that often had international implications.
A lawyer by trade ("I was the only male in my study group and slept with all the women"), the young Kerr worked for the Saatchi and Saatchi advertising firm. While crafting underwear ads, he started researching Germany and in 1989, came out with his first novel about Bernie Gunther.
And after a 15-year hiatus following three successful novels, Kerr returned to Bernie Gunther's saga and never left it.
"You will always have an interest in Germany in the Nazi era and the Germans—incredibly—still thrive on it," Kerr once told me during a book-signing event. "Hey, a restaurant in Munich has a sign proclaiming 'Hitler's Favorite Strudel' is served here."
The author also spoke of how he was asked to conduct a tour of Berlin in Hitler's day for a group of French businessmen.
Kerr noted that "they asked to see the bunker, but I explained it was gone. It had been beneath the Adlon Hotel parking lot & I pointed to a Volkswagen and said - 'that's where the entrance was.' So - I swear to God - they started taking pictures of the Volkswagen! You can't make this stuff up."
Philip Kerr made up some powerful and intriguing stuff. But he did so with a unique blend of historical characters and incidents that captivated readers worldwide. He—and Bernie Gunther—will be missed, but not forgotten.
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