Philip Kerr
Estate
Agent
Assistant
Melissa Tombere
MTombere@UnitedAgents.co.ukBiography
Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh in 1956. He studied law at Birmingham University and qualified as a barrister. After a brief period as an advertising copywriter, he left to pursue a career as a writer. His first novel was MARCH VIOLETS, set in pre-war Berlin and featuring private eye Bernie Gunther. THE PALE CRIMINAL and A GERMAN REQUIEM followed, also featuring Bernie and making up the original BERLIN NOIR trilogy. Philip returned to the series with the twelfth book, PRUSSIAN BLUE, published in 2017 and the next installment, GREEKS BEARING GIFTS was published in April 2018. The final installment of the Bernie Gunther series, METROPOLIS, was published posthumously in April 2019.
He has edited two anthologies, THE PENGUIN BOOK OF LIES and THE PENGUIN BOOK OF FIGHTS, FEUDS AND HEARTFELT HATREDS. Philip has published ten other novels: A PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATION; DEAD MEAT; GRIDIRON; ESAU; A FIVE YEAR PLAN; THE SECOND ANGEL; THE SHOT; LEVERAGE; DARK MATTER and HITLER’S PEACE.
P B Kerr is the pseudonym under which he published his series of children’s fantasy stories, collectively entitled THE CHILDREN OF THE LAMP, which enjoyed worldwide success and was translated into 26 languages. His most recent children’s novel was THE WINTER HORSES (Walker, 2014).
He has also written a trilogy (JANUARY WINDOW, HAND OF GOD, FALSE NINE), published by Head of Zeus, about Scott Manson, a football team coach for London City FC who finds the game becoming a matter of life and death..
DEAD MEAT was made into the BBC television series GRUSHKO and nearly all of his novels have been sold outright to Hollywood studios. His works have been translated into 36 languages. In 2009, he won the British Crime Writers’ Association Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award and Spain’s RBA International Prize for Crime Writing for his Bernie Gunther series.
Philip died in March 2018, days before the publication of his 13th Bernie Gunther thriller, GREEKS BEARING GIFTS. METROPOLIS, the final outing for Bernie Gunther, was published posthumously in 2019. Philip lived in London and is survived by his novelist and journalist wife Jane Thynne and their three children.
The Bernie Gunther novels are being adapted for television (Bad Wolf, Apple) starring Jack Lowden and Colin Firth.
Publications
Fiction
Berlin, 1928, the dying days of the Weimar Republic shortly before Hitler and the Nazis came to power. It was a period of decadence and excess as Berliners – after the terrible slaughter of WWI and the hardships that followed – are enjoying their own version of Babylon. Bernie is a young detective working in Vice when he gets a summons from Bernard Weiss, Chief of Berlin’s Criminal Police. He invites Bernie to join KIA – Criminal Inspection A – the supervisory body for all homicide investigation in Kripo. Bernie’s first task is to investigate the Silesian Station killings – four prostitutes murdered in as many weeks. All of them have been hit over the head with a hammer and then scalped with a sharp knife.
Bernie hardly has time to acquaint himself with the case files before another prostitute is murdered. Until now, no one has shown much interest in these victims – there are plenty in Berlin who’d like the streets washed clean of such degenerates. But this time the girl’s father runs Berlin’s foremost criminal ring, and he’s prepared to go to extreme lengths to find his daughter’s killer.
Then a second series of murders begins – of crippled wartime veterans who beg in the city’s streets. It seems that someone is determined to clean up Berlin of anyone less than perfect. The voice of Nazism is becoming a roar that threatens to drown out all others. But not Bernie Gunther’s …
When his cover is blown, former Berlin bull and unwilling SS officer Bernie Gunther must re-enter a cat-and-mouse game that continues to shadow his life a decade after Germany’s defeat in World War 2…
The French Riviera, 1956: Bernie’s old and dangerous adversary Erich Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, has turned up in Nice–and he’s not on holiday. Mielke is calling in a debt and wants Bernie to travel to London to poison a female agent they’ve both had dealings with. But Bernie isn’t keen on assassinating anyone. In an attempt to dodge his Stasi handler–former Kripo comrade Friedrich Korsch–Bernie bolts for the German border. Traveling by night and hiding by day, he has plenty of time to recall the last case he and Korsch worked together…
Obersalzberg, Germany, 1939: A low-level bureaucrat has been found dead at Hitler’s mountaintop retreat in Bavaria. Bernie and Korsch have one week to find the killer before the leader of the Third Reich arrives to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Bernie knows it would mean disaster if Hitler discovers a shocking murder has been committed on the terrace of his own home. But Obersalzberg is also home to an elite Nazi community, meaning an even bigger disaster for Bernie if his investigation takes aim at one of the party’s higher-ups.
Everyone knows football is a matter of life and death.
But this time, it’s murder.
Scot Manson: team coach for London City FC and all-round fixer for the lads. Players love him, bosses trust him.
But now the team’s manager has been found dead at their home stadium.
Even Scott can’t smooth over murder… but can he catch the killer before he strikes again?
September 1941: Bernie Gunther returns from the horrors of the Eastern Front to find his home city of Berlin changed, and changed for the worse. The blackout, rationing, the RAF, the S-Bahn murderer and Czech terrorists are all conspiring to make life very unpleasant. Now back at his old desk on Homicide in Kripo HQ, Alexanderplatz, Bernie starts to investigate the death of a Dutch railway worker, while starting something – of an entirely different nature – with a local good-time girl.
But he is obliged to drop everything when his old boss, Reinhard Heydrich of the SD, the new Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, orders him to Prague to spend a weekend at his country house. It’s an invitation Bernie feels he would gladly have been spared, especially when he meets his fellow guests – all of them senior loathsome figures in the SS and SD.
The weekend turns sour almost immediately, when a body is found in a room that was locked from the inside. The spotlight falls on Bernie to show off his investigative skills and solve this seemingly impossible mystery. And if he fails to do so, he knows what is at stake – not only his reputation, but also that of Heydrich, a man who does not like to lose face.
So begins the most diplomatically sensitive case of Bernie Gunther’s police career.
Willard Mayer: philosopher, tough nut, and spy; once a communist, occasionally a womaniser, and now a friend of President Franklin D Roosevelt. In the autumn of 1943, Willard finds himself at a new level of American intelligence, entrusted by the President with investigating a horrific massacre by the Russians. He quickly discovers that his mission is greater than it seems; he is involved in planning a top secret meeting which, if it happens, could be the most historic gathering of world leaders in his time. Moving between the murky world of the German secret services and Willard’s journey towards the Middle East, Philip Kerr’s brilliantly conceived novel combines the dark comedy of the noir thriller with the brutal facts of the Second World War. Hard-boiled and harrowing by turns, and spiced with sardonic humour, the novel takes us to the heart of Europe’s tangled political web and Willard’s own theories of truth – to a point where he himself can affect the course of history.
