THERE’S a vivid moment in Philip Kerr’s latest novel when two prominent Nazis, Martin Bormann and Rudolph Hess, argue the toss over correct procedure. Should Hitler be told that a man has been shot dead on the terrace of the Berghof, the Fuhrer’s holiday retreat above Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps?

As they bicker, a murder detective from Berlin, on the trail of the killer, is taking a sledgehammer to a fireplace in search of a murder weapon. Bormann, Hitler’s deputy chief of staff, and Hess wander off, still arguing, while the detective, Bernie Gunther, calmly goes about his work.

“That was just the way I liked it: two very important Nazis arguing loudly about their positions in the government’s odious pecking order”, he confides to the reader. Gunther, himself no Nazi, is an insolent, independent-minded type, an excellent detective, and not naturally given to respect authority.

Prussian Blue, which is published on April 11, is Edinburgh-born Kerr’s 12th Gunther novel. The series began with March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1900) and A German Requiem (1993). The first two were set in 1930s Berlin, the third in 1947. They were jointly republished in the single-volume Berlin Noir.

After A German Requiem Kerr wrote a number of non-Gunther novels before returning to his sardonic anti-hero with The One from the Other (2006). Gunther adventures have followed pretty steadily since then. Critical acclaim has piled up, and Kerr has also received a number of coveted awards. Fellow authors such as Lee Child and Alan Furst have spoken highly of his Gunther novels. To Simon Sebag Montefiore they are “modern classics”.

So just who is Gunther? “He’s a detective who works in Nazi Germany,” Kerr told Craig Ferguson on the latter’s US TV chat show four years ago. “He is an anti-fascist, he’s slightly on the left, he doesn’t like the Nazis but because he’s a good copper, an efficient copper, they like to use him. So consequently he finds himself at the sharp end of Nazism, as it were.”

In some previous books, as well as Prussian Blue, Gunther finds himself working for General Reinhard Heydrich. The new book has a twin thread: in one, set in October 1956, Gunther is on the run from some menacing figures from his past; in the other, set in April 1939 – not long before war breaks out – he is investigating, on Heydrich’s orders, the shooting of the man on the terrace of the Berghof. There is, as there are in the other Gunther books, a real sense of time and place and, in the 1939 strand, a sense of what it was like to be an ordinary German on the eve of another bitter, costly war.

A mini-series based on Gunther’s adventures is currently being developed by HBO, in partnership with Tom Hanks’s production company, Playtone. An online report on Deadline Hollywood in 2012 said Playtone was in talks to acquire the Berlin Noir series. Kerr himself told Mystery Scene Magazine as he promoted A Man Without Breath, in 2013: “These things take time. But perhaps we are now at the end of the beginning. As to who should play Bernie I very much like and admire Michael Fassbender. He is part German, and a fantastically good actor. But when I first started I thought of Klaus Maria Brandauer. He had a cheeky grin and a twinkle in his eye and he was, very, very German.”

Interestingly, actor Woody Harrelson told a Zurich Film Festival press conference last October: “There is one [TV] project that I would go back to do. It’s based on a series of books — the Bernie Gunther novels … He’s a detective during the 30s and 40s in Berlin. He kind of hated Hitler, and was really kind of a rebel in a lot of ways. But he was a hard-core investigator and got into so much trouble… You have various people from the German government, the Nazi government that he comes into conflict with. It’s fascinating.”

A 2012 Daily Telegraph interview with Kerr said he first made money as an author at the age of 12, when he wrote and rented out pornographic stories for his classmates’ pleasure. When he was outed as the creator of The Duchess and the Daisies, his first one, his father made him read his words to his own mother.

"She fled the room after a couple of sentences, thank God,” Kerr recalled, “but it gave me quite an insight into the power of words.”

Kerr read law at university, staying on as a post-graduate to read law and philosophy, most of it in German. He later worked for ad agencies, including Saatchi & Saatchi, but spent most of his time researching an idea for a novel about a Berlin-based copper in 1936. He made a number of trips to Germany and tramped the streets of Berlin, and began work on the novel that would become March Violets.

In 1993 he was one of the literary magazine Granta’s Best Young Novelists (others on the list included Kazuo Ishiguro and Iain Banks). He has written 30 books, in all, including standalone thrillers and some books for young adults.

To Bernie Gunther’s fans, however, the good news is that their hero is back, doing what he does best, over the course of 545 pages of his latest, challenging assignment.

• Prussian Blue, Quercus Books, £18.99; April 11.