BY STEWART SLATER

I have known Bernie Gunther for about 15 years and, although our contact has been sporadic, I know him well. I know about his job, and his troubles with colleagues and superiors. I know many of the women who have entered his life, and I know they have all left it again. I know about his travels. I know whom he hates. I know he smokes and drinks too much and has a tendency to chubbiness. I know what keeps him awake at night. I know he is a bad man in a worse world. And I know that I will know no more about him.

For Bernie is a fictional character, the hero, or perhaps better, protagonist of a series of novels by the author Philip Kerr (pictured below). Introduced in 1989’s March Violets, a couple more novels quickly followed, collectively known as the Berlin Noir trilogy, before a hiatus. Returning in The One for the Other in 2006, new instalments appeared regularly thereafter until Metropolis in 2019, written following the author’s diagnosis with bladder cancer and published after his early death at the age of 62.

Set in 1930’s Berlin, the initial novels introduce the conundrum which will dog Bernie for the rest of his life. A former police detective who loathes the Nazis, his skills make him useful to them, too useful to be ignored. And if Bernie is strong enough to make it clear that he is not in whole-hearted agreement with the new Germany, he is not strong enough to martyr himself to resist it, being dragooned into the SS by Reinhard Heydrich, who makes regular appearances in the series as a malign, if occasionally playful, puppet-master.

Sent to the Eastern Front during the war, fate gives him only bad options and spends the rest of his life punishing him for having chosen one. His forced involvement in the Einsatzgruppen leads to him being declared a war criminal, and the later novels generally follow a dual structure as post-war Bernie, now on the run having used one of the rat-lines set up by former SS officers, meets someone involved in a case solved by pre-war Bernie, the two stories told in parallel. Each time he appears to have out-run his past, it finds a way of catching up with him again.

A war criminal is an unlikely hero and it is testimony to Kerr’s skill as a novelist that Bernie remains a sympathetic character.

In part this is due to the structure of the series. Introducing him before the war shows that he is no Nazi and allows readers to see just how those who were got their claws into him. The dual narrative of the later books affords him plenty of opportunities to make his true feelings clear in the pre-war sections, while the post-war chapters detail the impact the conflict and his actions had on his life, not just in material terms, but in the nightmares and depression which (along with his memories of WWI’s trenches) stalk him. If he is not a hero, neither is he exactly a villain, almost a victim; a man dealt a bad hand of cards, who played them so as to maximise his chances of survival. If we cannot condone his actions, Kerr at least allows us to understand them.

That he should avoid the easy, Hollywood approach is no surprise for, if Kerr perhaps never achieved the popular fame that was his due, his work earned him the respect of critics and peers. Taking up his pen after an early career in advertising, the Berlin Noir trilogy and the stand-alone A Philosophical Investigation (a work of astounding originality, marrying Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with a murder mystery) won him a place on Granta’s 1993 list of Best Young British Novelists. 2009’s Bernie Gunther book, If The Dead Rise Not, won both the RBA Prize for Crime Writing and the Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award. If not well-known to the public, he was well-known to those who mattered – Ian Rankin, creator of Rebus, writes in his introduction to Metropolis, Bernie’s swansong, that reading the initial trilogy taught him that he had to “get drastically better or else give up”.

The product of a legal education, Kerr had a lawyer’s eye for detail and passion for research, the initial Bernie Gunther books coming about after “tramping the streets of Berlin endlessly”. Each contains a wealth of information, from the obvious – geography, brand names and so on – to the more surprising –  tours of Weimar Berlin’s sex clubs were offered by the respectable British holiday firm of Thomas Cook. From the second novel, The Pale Criminal, each ends with an author’s note providing details, both before and after the events of the story, of the real life characters and institutions with whom Bernie has interacted, creating a richly believable world for his protagonist.

But a vividly imagined backdrop is not enough. Historical fiction can sometimes read like the unhappy marriage between the history the author wanted to write and the fiction he felt he had to write. To succeed, it must work both as history and as novel. No amount of minutiae can compensate for deficiencies of plot and character.

Kerr’s storylines marry the twists and turns of classic detective fiction (Prague Fatale is an homage to an Agatha Christie locked room mystery, while the elevator pitch for the other novels might be “Raymond Chandler with Nazis”) with, in the post-war sequences, elements of the spy thriller, Bernie’s past making him a subject of interest to intelligence agencies of various stripes. But it is the character himself who elevates the series from the quotidian to the classic.

Like that other great, long-lasting figure of post-war British serial fiction, Flashman, he is fully self-aware, the first person narrative giving access to his inner world. If he is not quite as unsparing (he has, to be fair, fewer sins to spare) as the Victorian anti-hero who, in just the second paragraph of his “papers”, describes himself as “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward – and, oh yes, a toady”, neither does he pretend to be a good man. Leaving a meeting with Goebbels in A Man Without Breath at which he agrees to investigate the Katyn massacre, he spits on the ground, “in lieu of bending my own ear with accusations of cowardice and craven cooperation with a man and a government I loathed, it was nothing more – or less – than an expression of the dislike I now felt for my own person. Sure, I had told myself, I had said yes to Goebbels because I wanted to do something to restore Germany’s reputation abroad, but I knew this was only partly true. Mostly I agreed with the diabolic doctor because I was afraid of him.”

It is not that, like Flashman, Bernie lacks courage – the novel starts with him rescuing another character from the euphemistically named “Jewish Welfare Office” – nor that, as Rick claims in Casablanca, he sticks his “neck out for nobody” but his bravery is tempered with pragmatism. Not, like the heroes of Hollywood and airport fiction, an impossible figure who always does the right thing, but a realistic character who knows what the right thing is and tries to do it when he feels he can without undue risk. And hates himself for it.

For the world Bernie inhabits contains plenty of risk, not just to himself, but to others. Just pages after telling Angerstein, the gangster who has helped him in the 1920’s-set Metropolis, “Sometimes being a cop is difficult because the law says the guilty get treated the same way as the innocent. It sticks in the throat a bit to respect the rights of a man who’s a piece of shit. But this republic will fall apart if we don’t stick to the legal process”, he has decided to leave the case officially unsolved, coming to realise “Angerstein was just as right about that in the daylight as he had been the previous night. Identifying Reichenbach…looked like a quick way of bringing down not just Kripo [the criminal police], but also the fragile government coalition.” Justice must be done, and Bernie is not above bending the rules to see it done (the first quote above comes after a bout of “enhanced” interrogation), but not if the heavens fall.

It is this consistent inconsistency which elevates Bernie from the ranks of airport detective paperbacks to fully-fledged literary character. Not a cipher, but a human being for, as Kerr noted, “It’s perfectly possible to be a hero on a Monday and a coward on a Wednesday”. We may like to imagine that, in the events of the thirties and forties, we would have resisted, but the reality is that most of us would not – estimates for membership of the French Resistance, for example, run to 1-2% of the adult population. Faced with the same circumstances, Bernie forces us to confront the fact that, in all likelihood, we would have behaved no better, and quite possibly a good deal worse.

If he is no saint, he is, at least good company, dispensing the dark, wry witticisms of the hard-bitten ‘tec. “Looking at him I felt as if I had just met a powerful gorilla while at the same time being in possession of the world’s last banana” (The Lady from Zagreb). “It was a cold, beautiful day, the kind you can best appreciate with a fire to stoke and a dog to scratch. I had neither, but then there wasn’t any fuel about and I don’t like dogs.” (A German Requiem). “That’s the problem with real men, sugar. They expect women to behave like real women.” (Metropolis). It may be a defence mechanism, protection against the horrors of his world, but it is a recognisably human defence mechanism, adopted by those who care more than they can bear. Fate may have made him a cynic, but he is not an unaffected cynic – “the plane soon was hit by pockets of warmer air that the pilot called “turbulence”. This was so heart-stoppingly severe that two of the plane’s other passengers…were swiftly crossing themselves and praying out loud; I wondered how much good a prayer in German could be… a satisfactory hint that there might be some justice in an unjust world and the way I was feeling I would hardly have cared if our plane had met with a catastrophic accident.” (A Man Without Breath).

Bernie’s adventures (or perhaps, trials) are over and we will never know if he found peace, the final novel, Metropolis, dealing with a case from the start of his career. Greeks Bearing Gifts, the penultimate book left him in a good place, back in Germany after his exile but history shows that the king of the immortals has been reluctant to finish his sport with him.

But more than a sense of incompleteness, the end of the series also brings a sense of loss, for we often form a relationship of sorts with fictional characters. It is a one-sided friendship to be sure – we care about them, they cannot care about us – but a friendship of a sort nonetheless. Those who follow the twists and turns of soap operas do so because they have formed an affinity for the characters, they like them as people. As Kerr said of his creation, “He is an outsider and a cynic, set against the world and I have a lot of sympathy with him.” Like friends, we want to know what happens to our favourite characters and we are invested in the outcome, suffering when they suffer, rejoicing when they triumph.

With first person fiction, the effect is amplified. If drama and third person narratives show, it can tell. When a character in a soap opera interacts with another, we must guess at what they are feeling inside, with novels such as Kerr’s, they can tell us. “Only now did I realise the nature of my own guilt…it was that I had not said anything, that I had not lifted my hand against the Nazis. I also realised that I had a personal sense of grievance against Heinrich Muller, for as chief of the Gestapo he had done more than any other man to achieve the corruption of the police force of which I had once been a proud member…It was just possible that by seeking out Muller…I might help to clear my own guilt for what had happened.” (A German Requiem). First person characters can, by revealing their innermost thoughts, bring us into their confidence, in a way which only our closest real friends do and, by sharing their (often dark in Bernie’s case) secrets, bind us to them.

But friendship is a process not an event. Each meeting holds out the prospect of more in the future. More experiences to be shared, more stories to be told. Friendships, true friendships, have a sense of the future. While they may end, we do not, generally, know when ahead of time. But, now the series has come to a close, I know there is no more Bernie to anticipate. We have taken our leave of each other, never to meet again. It is still possible, of course, to return to the books and relive his adventures word for word, but, like flicking through a school yearbook, that is to reminisce about a past relationship, not to experience an ongoing one. There are good times to remember, but no more good times to come. The last page of the last book brings the particular sadness of the last words of my friendship with Bernie.

I know Harry Flashman too. I know about his job, and his troubles with colleagues and superiors. I know many of the women who have entered his life, and I know they have all (bar one) left it again. I know about his travels. I know whom he hates. I know that little keeps him awake at night. I know he is a terrible man in a less than perfect world. And I know why I am reluctant to read his last book.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.