I read a piece by Reed Farrel Coleman the other day in which he named a certain series of books as a major influence and inspiration to his own Moe Prager series. I had to chime in here with a hearty Amen.
In the early nineties Philip Kerr published a short series of novels set against the backdrop of 1930s Berlin and featuring an ex-cop turned PI named Bernie Gunther. Actually the first two, March Violets and The Pale Criminal were pre-war. The third, A German Requiem, was post and set in Vienna—a time and place rich for entertaining and provocative fictions like one of my favorite movies, Carol Reed's The Third Man from Graham Greene's screenplay and more recently Joseph Kanon's The Good German, which was also the basis for Steven Soderbergh's film of the same name.
About ten years ago I was working at a bookstore and knew Kerr's name to recommend to folks looking for more technology-based thrillers in the vein of oh, say Michael Crichton, but I knew nothing of the Bernie Gunther books, which were out of print at the time, until a pal placed the collected novels in anthology form called Berlin Noir into my hands. Wow. Those books rocked. I burned through them and was, for once, hungry for more of a series character (kinda rare, folks). But, alas, Bernie was done.
Or so I thought.
Five years after I'd finished the trilogy and nearly fifteen years since Requiem's publishing, Bernie was inexplicably back in The One from the Other... and there was much rejoicing.
Where did these new ideas come from? How much cultural and personal guilt could one good, (but not blameless), man shoulder? Oh, man, I want to find out. Kerr has been turning out new Gunther titles annually since (A Quiet Flame and If the Dead Rise Not), and I hope he's got an end game. I really want to see the series wrap up well, but I'm on board for the foreseeable future. The new stories find him Nazi hunting in South America and becoming involved in Cuban affairs, (another historical subject Kerr touched on in The Shot). There are also gaps in Bernie's past coming into focus and providing layers of complexity to an already well-rounded character.
So, have you too been caught up in the Bernie Gunther chronicles? Is there another historical series you follow?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
