Tonight I’m excited to go see British writer Philip Kerr, author of the Bernie Gunther books - one of my all-time favorite PI series, speak at a nearby library. For the uninitiated, Gunther is a detective in the classic hard boiled tradition, an ex-policeman, unpopular with the brass and clinging relentlessly to a personal code while the world around him crumbles into moral chaos. But you can’t discuss the Gunther books without mentioning their setting. March Violets, Bernie Gunther’s introduction takes place in Berlin in 1936, and the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party frame his cases provocatively , perhaps undercutting the significance of an investigation into a single missing person or piece of property (standard PI plots) while magnifying the importance of keeping personal integrity (standard PI theme) against a tide of corruption threatening to claim a nation’s soul. And if the first two Gunther books (Violets and The Pale Criminal) are terrifying pictures of how easily hell can come to earth, A German Requiem and The One from the Other, (which take place primarily in Vienna after the war) deal with the stain and consequence of survival. Eye contact among German nationals is simply excruciating, each exchange of looks an accusation no one knows how to answer, ‘How did you let this happen?’ ‘What did you do to prevent it?’ And more pointedly, ‘What did you put on your conscience just to survive?’
But don’t get me wrong, they are not hard to read. The palpable charge of danger in the atmosphere that these books inhabit breaks into sudden storms of violence and sexual fruition as garishly Technicolor and satisfying as high-potency-pulp fiction. It’s only once you’ve finished the book that you realize it has hardly finished with you. I’ve spent more time considering the moral dilemmas and hard road to redemption for Bernie Gunther than just about any fictional character.
The series has followed Bernie into South America to hunt war criminals, (A Quiet Flame), into Cuba (If the Dead Rise Not) and the 1950s where he must make continual payment on his debt to humanity while unable to remain entirely clean in the present. In the latest, Field Gray, Bernie makes it to the United States, but it's as a prisoner of interest to the FBI. He may never find a quiet life, but I doubt Kerr will ever turn in a dull Gunther book. The series can be picked up and appreciated in any order, but if you wanna start at the beginning, you can pick up the first three Gunther books collected in the omnibus Berlin Noir.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
