The Metropolis That Awaits Us

In my office, which is in fact our family dining-room (due to a change in professional circumstance), rests one solitary novel on that table’s congested surface.

I sit at one end of the dining table, back to the window, facing my PC screen, with a printer to my right, and a growing series of books, piles of novels on the left. On the table, ahead of me are my file-cards, folders, newspaper clippings, stacks of paper, my notebooks, my array of pens, stationary, thesaurus, dictionary, history books and the usual writing clutter; the ephemera for those who find joy in playing with words and the imagination.

There is one solitary novel resting on the table’s surface. It breaks my rule, the sacred rule of the novels of others, only to be resting in piles to the left of me – never on the actual table’s surface, where my own writing, my scribbled notes and ephemeral thoughts reside. That novel is about a Detective, a rule-breaker, a maverick, an outsider or stranger. The novel is entitled Metropolis, and is the last outing of Bernard [‘Bernie’] Gunther, who at times is laconic, reflective, while at other times is the wise-cracking observer of the brutal absurdity that surrounded him.

Like Gunther’s creator, the novelist Philip Kerr was also a gregarious loner, a character who was different from the others that surrounded him. Gunther was a man who juggled the horrors of the world he existed in, with wit and action, a world striated with moral ambiguity, where brutality and horror had to be confronted with violence and with intellect.

Literary Renaissance Man, Publisher, Editor and Bookseller New York’s Otto Penzler noted, that stylistically Gunther, had a legendary precursor -

[Philip] Kerr wrote the nearest pastiche to Raymond Chandler’s quintessentially American literary style yet achieved, transcending the scores—no, hundreds—who had attempted it before he did.

Read more from Otto Penzler HERE

I was in London for a few days, an escape from my Office (aka, our family dining room). I got thinking about the nervous anticipation I have for this Novel, Metropolis, the last adventure of Bernie Gunther, the final work from Philip Kerr and soon to be published posthumously. He was taken so tragically young, and at the peak of his narrative skill as a novelist. He was barely older than I; a thought that troubled me from time to time.

Those thoughts were triggered by a chance encounter over a literary lunch with Robert Goddard and Tom Bradby, hosted by Patsy Irwin and Becky Short of PenguinRandomHouse’s UK imprint Transworld. I will be detailing that extraordinary lunch in due course, but I don’t wish to digress at this point, so back on topic.

Once the lunch plates and cutlery had been cleared away, Mike Ripley and I found ourselves seated with Political Journalist / Broadcaster Tom Bradby, a familiar figure due to his career at ITN News. Some may not know that Tom Bradby is also an elegant thriller writer. So as we sipped our coffee, we got talking about thriller writing and of thriller fiction. This was in context to Bradby’s own upcoming political thriller SECRET SERVICE, a book I was currently reading, and will be reviewing before its publication on 30^th of May, 2019.

I’ve come to understand that the most elegant of thriller writers, are those who are the most well-read.

Tom Bradby is no exception.

The conversation got around to who we read, and who we consider ‘the point men and women’ in thriller writing. I mentioned to Bradby that Mike Ripley and I attended Philip Kerr’s funeral last year [which I detailed HERE]. Bradby’s eyes grew animated as he told us that he was a huge, huge fan of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels. He’d read them all, some, several times, and then the three of us talked, and we talked, and we talked until we could talk no more about those Philip Kerr novels, those treasures that featured a former German Soldier turned Detective, called Gunther.

Tom Bradby considers those Bernie Gunther novels, like many of us, as sitting at the high table, shoulder to shoulder with the masters of the crime and thriller genre.

I told Bradby that I was apprehensive as well as eager (as counter intuitive as that may appear), to crack the spine of METROPOLIS, that novel that sat at the edge of my office desk.

It would have sounded too weird, if I told him it actually resided on our family’s dining table.

I told Bradby that I had just read a truly emotional as well as insightful essay, by the novelist Jane Thynne, Phil Kerr’s wife. It details much about what that last salute to Bernie Gunther had in store for its readers, from the pen of Philip Kerr, and I urged him to look it up.

It Began -

In July 2017, in the inappropriately sunny office of a London cancer clinic, Phil learned that he had stage 4 metastatic cancer and it was incurable. With characteristic courage he asked the doctor how long he had. Between one and two years, she suggested. Plainly keen to impart more optimistic news, she volunteered that she had once, in a long career, known a single patient at the same stage live for five years.

When we got into the car, Phil exhaled. ‘So I’ve got five years.’ In the event, he had eight months.

Read the full essay from Jane Thynne HERE

Later I found myself seated on a bench in Soho Square, with coffee, with pages of  notes, with a shoulder-bag full of books - and only pigeons at my feet for company.

I was alone with my thoughts. I thought of Philip Kerr, a man I didn’t know that well, apart from snatched conversations at book launches and over shared drinks at literary events. I thought that we rarely know these loners, for they hide themselves in plain sight, masking themselves as characters in what they write, in their novels. Philip Kerr was such a man, solitary, but also larger-than-life [as counter-intuitive as that sounds].

I did get to know his character Bernie Gunther rather well, from my reading over the years, commencing with March Violets.

Philip Kerr and I shared one strand that was common in our lives, it was one that marked us out as different from the others, back when we were schooled, he in private education, while I sat within the public system. However, in both our childhood situations, we were clearly visible as being ‘different’ – not unlike the character Philip Kerr would create, that loner, that fish-out-of-water, Bernie Gunther.

I recall talking with Kerr, discussing his tough school experiences [which he widely recounted] and that I considered became character traits, visible in Bernie Gunther, which would always make him smile, as he had a love-hate relationship with his creation, the outsider, the stranger who does not fit into the world he finds himself in, and is not accepted; a feeling I too share, from time to time.

Read More about my reflections HERE and from Jeff Pierce, in a most detailed and very rare interview with Philip Kerr HERE

So, as I took a break from Tom Bradby’s novel SECRET SERVICE, on that park-bench in Soho Square; I thought of that one novel that sat on my family dining table, Metropolis; the last hurrah for Bernard Gunther.

Philip Kerr treats readers to his beloved hero’s origins, exploring Bernie Gunther’s first weeks on Berlin’s Murder Squad.

A portrait of Bernie Gunther in his twenties: He’s young, but he’s seen four bloody years of trench warfare. And he’s not stupid. So when he receives a promotion and a ticket out of Vice squad, he knows he’s not really leaving behind the criminal gangs, the perverse sex clubs, and the laundry list of human corruption. It’s 1928 and Berlin is a city on the edge of chaos, where nothing is truly verboten. But soon a new wave of shockingly violent murders sweeps up society’s most vulnerable, prostitutes and wounded ex-soldiers begging on the streets.

As Bernie Gunther sets out to make sense of multiple murders with different MOs in a city that knows no limits, he must face the fact that his own police HQ is not immune. The Nazi party has begun to infiltrate the Alex, Berlin’s central office, just as the shaky Weimar government makes a last, desperate attempt to control a nation edging toward to the Third Reich.

It seems like the only escape for most Berliners is the theatre and Bernie’s no exception. As he gets deeper into the city’s sordid underground network, he seeks comfort with a make-up artist who is every bit a match for his quick wit and increasingly sardonic view of the world. But even this space can’t remain untouched, not with this pervasive feeling that everything is for sale in Berlin if you’re man enough to kill for it.

So as METROPOLIS arrives on 4^th April 2019 from Quercus Publishing in the UK and Ireland, and on April 9^th 2019 from PenguinRandomHouse in the US and Canada, I hope you will join me, and the millions of other readers in discovering Philip Kerr’s last novel, a journey into the past, to see a young Bernie Gunther – as portrayed in the novel METROPOLIS, the one that sits at the far edge of our family dining table; now my office, waiting for me, to read and to review, with my personal commentary.

If you’ve not discovered the work of Philip Kerr, I’d suggest clicking THIS LINK, and ordering MARCH VIOLETS and pre-ordering METROPOLIS - the Alpha and the Omega of Bernie Gunther, created by a writer named Philip Kerr.

I notice it’s Valentine’s Day, so my words are surreally apt when I talk of Bernie Gunther on this particularly sunny day. It is a day that despite the warmth of the Sun on my face, it feels melancholic within, and that is not counter-intuitive. 

Ali Karim, 14^th February 2019

Postscript 

Have a fine day in these politically confusing times. I’ll end with a line that indicates the possible truth a novelist can bring to bear to the surface of our reality, to provoke thought in matters that perplex.

 “I didn’t know you were interested in politics,’ I said. ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘But isn’t that how Hitler got elected in the first place: too many people who didn’t give a shit who was running the country?” 

Philip Kerr

Berlin Noir: March Violets / The Pale Criminal / A German Requiem

Philip Kerr treats readers to his beloved hero’s origins, exploring Bernie Gunther’s first weeks on Berlin’s Murder Squad.

A portrait of Bernie Gunther in his twenties: He’s young, but he’s seen four bloody years of trench warfare. And he’s not stupid. So when he receives a promotion and a ticket out of Vice squad, he knows he’s not really leaving behind the criminal gangs, the perverse sex clubs, and the laundry list of human corruption. It’s 1928 and Berlin is a city on the edge of chaos, where nothing is truly verboten. But soon a new wave of shockingly violent murders sweeps up society’s most vulnerable, prostitutes and wounded ex-soldiers begging on the streets.

As Bernie Gunther sets out to make sense of multiple murders with different MOs in a city that knows no limits, he must face the fact that his own police HQ is not immune. The Nazi party has begun to inflitrate the Alex, Berlin’s central office, just as the shakey Weimar government makes a last, desperate attempt to control a nation edging toward to the Third Reich.

It seems like the only escape for most Berliners is the theater and Bernie’s no exception. As he gets deeper into the city’s sordid underground network, he seeks comfort with a make-up artist who is every bit a match for his quick wit and increasingly sardonic view of the world. But even this space can’t remain untouched, not with this pervasive feeling that everything is for sale in Berlin if you’re man enough to kill for it.

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