Scottish writer known for his Berlin Noir novels
Born: February 22, 1956;
Died: March 23, 2018
PHILIP Kerr, who has died of cancer aged 62, was a Scottish novelist who became best known for writing a series of novels set in Germany, specifically Berlin during the Second World War. As the Nazis rose to power, Kerr’s chain-smoking, hard-drinking, morally ambiguous detective Bernie Gunther would use his often dubious contacts to solve the crimes that the Nazis didn’t care about. It was a new genre of novel that became known as Berlin Noir.
For Kerr – as so often happens with crime writers who create popular detectives – the success of what was initially a trilogy of novels, starting with March Violets, meant that his readers wanted more Bernie Gunther while Kerr wanted to write something else. He did go on to write standalone thrillers and a series of children’s books under the pseudonym PB Kerr but eventually he returned to the Berlin novels after a 15-year absence. The One from the Other in 2006 was the first of a new run of Berlin Noir novels.
Kerr had always been fascinated by Berlin but grew up in the Corstorphine area of Edinburgh. His parents were members of the Free Church of Scotland before becoming evangelical Baptists and church was a regular, powerful and frustrating part of his life. As a child, he attended church three times a week, sometimes more, but knew from an early age that Christianity was not for him.
A particular fear for him, particularly for a boy who could not swim or bear to have his head under water, was the idea of full-immersion baptism. He recalled the horror he felt when his parents took him along to such events.
“Someone would stand in front of the whole congregation,” he said, “and basically say why they had asked Lord Jesus Christ into their life, and the minister took them into this kind of mini swimming pool and dunked them under the water like John the Baptist did to Jesus himself.” Kerr knew pretty much there and then, he said, that he and Jesus were not going to get on.
School for Kerr was Stewart’s Melville College in Edinburgh, but that, too, was not a happy experience: he was dark-skinned so was racially abused. He was much happier when the family moved to Northampton, although it took him a while to adjust to being a Scot in Edinburgh. He was, he says, “offensively Scots” and vigorously defended every aspect of Scottish identity. Eventually though he became tired of it, he said, and smoothed himself out. Certainly, in later life, there was no trace of the Scottish accent he had had when he moved south.
After school, various careers beckoned. Kerr wanted to study English, but his father encouraged him into law and after Birmingham University, he worked in accountancy for a while. Writing, however, was always to the forefront of his mind. While at school, he had written a fruity novel inspired by Lady Chatterley’s Lover which he read to his schoolmates for money and while working as an accountant he spent whatever free time he had writing fiction.
His first novel, March Violets, was published in 1989 and his early critical success led to him being listed, with fellow Scots AL Kennedy and Iain Banks, as one Granta’s best young British novelists under 40. He followed March Violets with The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem, which took Gunther through the Second World War and into the early days of the Cold War.
By the 1990s, though, Kerr was keen to try something else. “I didn’t sign up to be a writer to write the same thing for the rest of my life and that’s what publishing wants: more of the same,” he said. Instead, a futuristic thriller A Philosophical Investigation appeared in 1992 followed by Gridiron, a novel about a building that starts to kill its inhabitants.
The film rights to Gridiron were quickly optioned (by the company that made Four Weddings and A Funeral) – something which happened to Kerr many times in his career - Stephen Spielberg bought the film rights to Kerr's Children of the Lamp series of children’s books. It made Kerr a lot of money but – to date – none of the films have actually happened, although his crime novel Grushko, about the Russian novel, did make it as a television series starring Brian Cox in 1994.
Kerr continued writing right up to the end of his life – his latest novel Greeks Bearing Gifts, will be published posthumously. He sometimes returned to Scotland but said that he felt conflicted when he did. “I feel a sense of schizophrenia,” said. “The Scottish boy has been the father of the more or less English man, so whenever I go back I feel like a different person. The sense of having a double life is quite important to me, having an English adulthood and a Scottish childhood.”
Kerr married the journalist Jane Thynne, who survives him along with their three children.
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