‘Field Grey’ written by best selling and prize winning author Phillip Kerr will be published by Quercus in October 2010. It will be the seventh in a series of modern historical novels featuring Kerr’s very novel creation of a German detective. Bernie Gunther is tenacious, and uncompromising, smart but cynical and insubordinate.

These stories chronicle Bernie Gunther’s chequered police career as a homicide cop in Berlin’s Kriminal Polizei (KRIPO) in the early 1930’s and then, as a Private Investigator, his often hair raising career throughout the late 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. They are an engaging and compelling blend of historical characters and events skillfully woven together with Kerr’s fictional characters and ingenious interlinked plots. They are, in fact, anything but grey. Kerr’s meticulous, one might say almost German, research will place you on the streets of a 1930s Berlin in a state of political and moral decay with its gangsters, political and criminal, murders, sleaze and disease. Through Bernie Gunther you experience the full menace and brutality of the rise of the Nazis, the final collapse of the Weimar republic, establishment of the Third Reich, and the corruption surrounding the Olympic Games of 1936. You will tread very carefully through the streets of a destroyed and divided post war Berlin before moving on to Munich, Vienna, Buenos Aires and Cuba.

A veteran of WW1, the last thing Bernie wants is to experience the horrors of another one. He hates the Communists and the Nazis in equal measures. When his boss,Police Commissioner Arthur Nebe joined the National Socialist Party on July 1st, 1931 the process of Nazification of the KRIPO began and it continued until in July 1936, the KRIPO was eventually merged with the Gestapo forming the Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO) under the command of Reinhard Heydrich. Refusing to join the Nazi party was guaranteed to get you chucked out of the department if not murdered. As Bernie, cynically, observed to a colleague at the time, “How can we be expected to solve murders occurring on a daily basis when most of them are actually committed by the police?” He becomes a hotel detective at the Adlon and then a Private Investigator specialising in missing persons – plenty of missing persons – especially Jewish ones.

As a P.I. Bernie has a perilous relationship with the Nazis who often need a real policeman to solve real crimes or to obtain evidence against their rivals in the party. He survives the intrigues of Arthur Nebe, Heydrich, Göring and then the war. Afterwards, after being framed as a war criminal, come the dangerous, sometimes murderous, attentions of the Americans, the Russians, the Jewish death squads, the Perons, Baptista, Meyer Lansky and even Castro! For Bernie Gunther survival doesn’t get any easier!

Now that ‘Jack Bauer’ is taking a long rest after his exertions in 24 Day 8 I think that some enterprising film company should approach Philip Kerr and Kiefer Sutherland to discuss filming these high tension thrillers. Kiefer has the physical attributes and is just the right age to be able to play both the younger and the older Bernie. Kiefer has also played a German before. He was Dr Schreber in the Sci-Fi thriller’ Dark City’, Alex Proyas, 1998, – and, hopefully, he has perfected his limp by now!

Here’s Philip Kerr talking about Bernie:

The Germans are fascinated why Phillip Kerr created Bernie Gunther.
Here is his interview with Deutsche Welle (the German equivalent of the BBC World Service) where he explains why he did it.

Philip Kerr’s previously published Bernie Gunther novels are:

Berlin Noir:

( ‘March Violets’
( ‘The Pale Criminal’
( ‘A German Requiem’

‘The One From The Other‘
‘A Quiet Flame‘
‘If The Dead Rise Not’

You have time to read ALL these before ‘Field Grey’ is published – so get on with it!