PBS Masterpiece - 7 Fictional Female Detectives to Discover Now

Over on the PBS Masterpiece website you can find a wide range of information on their various shows including schedules, podcasts and special features. Their latest post is about fictional detectives.

(From the website)

With three separate take-charge women solving crimes and defying stereotypes on MASTERPIECE on PBS this fall, now’s the perfect time to explore the fascinating range of similar protagonists—from books. We asked crime fiction reviewers, authors, and insiders for their favorite female crime fighters, and they delivered a list stretching from an 11-year-old sleuth to a forensic archeologist. Whether you’re interested in cozy mysteries or futuristic police procedurals, there’s plenty to love in these seven recommendations.

Some well known authors, mystery folk and reviewers (Including myself) have contributed to some surprising choices.

The 7 fictional female detectives can be seen here.

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.

SEE LESS

Books to Look Forward to from Head of Zeus

July 2018

What would you do for the perfect life? Would you LIE? Would you CHEAT? Would you KILL? Cecilia Wilborg has THE PERFECT LIFE. A handsome husband, two beautiful daughters and a luxurious house in the picture-postcard town of Sandefjord.  But Cecilia also has A DARK SECRET. A secret so damaging it can never be brought to light.  Then Tobias enters her life. He is a small, friendless eight-year-old boy who just wants to find a home. But he threatens to bring Cecilia's world crashing down. The Boy at The Door is by Alex Dahl.

The End of Days has been predicted for the last two thousand years, but now it is upon us.  A secret war was raged for millennia, a bitter conflict as old as time itself: the battle between Good and Evil. Brother and sister Emma and Bravo Shaw now stand at the epicentre of the confrontation, for they possess the only copy of The Book of Deathly Things - the fallen Archangel Lucifer's first and last Testament.  While Emma and Bravo struggle to decipher the book's dreadful secrets, Lucifer's advance guard, the Fallen, are awakening. Should they can reclaim the Testament, Humankind will be irrevocably enslaved by the forces of evil. Time is running out, leviathan is coming, the apocalypse is nigh.  Four Dominions is by Eric Van Lustbader.

September 1939. A new day dawns in Sackwater, not that this sleepy backwater is taking much notice...  Inspector Betty Church - one of the few female officers on the force - has arrived from London to fill a vacancy at Sackwater police station. But Betty isn't new here. This is the place she grew up. The place she thought she'd left behind for good.  Time ticks slowly in Sackwater, and crime is of a decidedly lighter shade. Having solved the case of the missing buttons, Betty's called to the train station to investigate a missing bench. But though there's no bench, there is a body. A smartly dressed man, murdered in broad daylight, with two distinctive puncture wounds in his throat. While the locals gossip about the Suffolk Vampire, Betty Church readies herself to hunt a dangerous killer. Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire is by M R C Kasasian.

August 2018

In southeast London, a young mother has been accused of an unthinkable crime: poisoning her own child - and then leaving him to die.  The mother, Ellie, is secretive and challenging - she's had a troubled upbringing - but does that mean she's capable of murder?  Balancing the case with raising her disabled five-year-old son, criminal defence lawyer Sarah Kellerman sets out in desperate pursuit of the truth. But when her own child becomes unwell, Sarah realises she's been drawn into a dangerous game.  In The Blood is by Ruth Mancini.

You have to know when to say no. That's one of the first things they tell you. But from the first day I arrived in Los Angeles, I said yes. Jessica Harris is a struggling Hollywood reporter hungry for her big break. When her editor asks her to profile movie star Clark Conrad, Jessica is sure her luck is on the turn. Clark is an A-lister with access to everyone. If Jessica can impress him, she's made it.  When she arrives at Clark's mansion in the Hollywood Hills, he is just as she always imagined. Charming, handsome yet disarmingly vulnerable. But then things take a darker turn. Clark's world is not as straightforward as it seems and Jessica's puff piece soon becomes something much more delicate - and dangerous. As Jessica draws herself deeper into Clark's inner circle, events begin to spiral out of her control.  Transfixing, insightful and unsettling, Through His Eyes drops is by Emma Dibdin and drops you into the mind of a young woman with everything to play for - and everything to lose...

The Psychology of Time Travel is a time travel murder mystery by Kate Mascarenhas.  1967: Four female scientists invent a time travel machine. They are on the cusp of fame: the pioneers who opened the world to new possibilities. But then one of them suffers a breakdown and puts the whole project in peril...  2017: Ruby knows her beloved Granny Bee was a pioneer, but they never talk about the past. Though time travel is now big business, Bee has never been part of it. Then they receive a message from the future - a newspaper clipping reporting the mysterious death of an elderly lady... 2018: When Odette discovered the body she went into shock. Blood everywhere, bullet wounds, that strong reek of sulpher. But when the inquest fails to find any answers, she is frustrated. Who is this dead woman that haunts her dreams? And why is everyone determined to cover up her murder?

Joe Brody is just your average Dostoevsky-reading, Harvard-expelled strip club bouncer who has a highly classified military history and a best friend from Catholic school who happens to be head mafioso Gio Caprisi.  FBI agent Donna Zamora, the best shot in her class at Quantico, is a single mother stuck at a desk manning the hotline. Their storylines intersect over a tip from a cokehead that leads to a crackdown on Gio's strip joint in Queens and Joe's arrest.  Outside the jailhouse, the Fed and the bouncer lock eyes, as Gordon launches them both headlong into a non-stop plot that goes from back-road gun running to high-stakes perfume heist, and manages to touch everyone from the CIA to the Triads. Beneath it all lurks a sinister criminal mastermind whose manipulations could cause chaos on a massively violent scale. The Bouncer is by David Gordon.

September 2018

Gallows Court is by Martin Edwards.  LONDON, 1930.  Sooty, sulphurous, and malign: no woman should be out on a night like this. A spate of violent deaths - the details too foul to print - has horrified the capital and the smog-bound streets are deserted. But Rachel Savernake - the enigmatic daughter of a notorious hanging judge - is no ordinary woman. To Scotland Yard's embarrassment, she solved the Chorus Girl Murder, and now she's on the trail of another killer.  Jacob Flint, a young newspaperman temporarily manning The Clarion's crime desk, is looking for the scoop that will make his name. He's certain there is more to the Miss Savernake's amateur sleuthing than meets the eye. He's not the only one. His predecessor on the crime desk was of a similar mind - not that Mr Betts is ever expected to regain consciousness after that unfortunate accident...Flint's pursuit of Rachel Savernake will draw him ever-deeper into a labyrinth of deception and corruption. Murder-by-murder, he'll be swept ever-closer to its dark heart - to that ancient place of execution, where it all began and where it will finally end: Gallows Court.

In Kossuth square, Lajos Kolompar, a local politican is found dead, face down in a pond in front of Parliament. With his blood alcohol nudging fatal levels, he's believed to have fallen and drowned Gypsy cop Balthazar Kovacs of the Budapest murder squad reads of Kolompar's death in the news. It stays in the back of his mind until his old girlfriend, journalist Eniko Szalay, receives a tip-off from the coroner's office that Kolompar's autopsy results were tampered with.  And his body accidentally cremated.  Soon, Kovacs is drawn into the Budapest underworld of people smuggling, blackmail and violent political tensions - always caught between the two worlds of the Gypsy and the non-Gypsy, of the law and family loyalty.  Kossuth Square is by Adam Lebor.

The Accusation is by Zosia Wand.  Eve and Neil live in the beautiful Cumbrian town of Tarnside. After years of trying for a baby, they are in the final stages of adopting four-year-old Milly.  They just have to pass the 'settling in' period - three months of living together as a family under watchful eyes - and then they can make it official.  For Eve, her heartbreak is nearly at an end. She now has this perfect little girl in her life, a little girl who calls her mummy.  But Eve's dream of a happy family is fragile. Any hint of trouble and the adoption could collapse. One misunderstanding, one rumour, one accusation, could smash Eve's family to pieces.

October 2018

She arrived into Heathrow after a difficult week at work. Her bag had been stolen. Her whole life was in there - passport, wallet, house key. When she tried to report the theft, she couldn't remember her own name. All she knew was her own address.  Now she is at the door of Tony and Laura, a young couple living in Wiltshire. She says she lives in their home. They say they have never met her before.  One of them is lying. But which one?  Forget my Name is by J S Munroe.

Christmas whodunits starring Poirot, Marple, Rebus, More, Rumpole, Sherlock, Cadfael and many many more. Festive felonies, unscrupulous santas, deadly puddings, and misdemeanors under the mistletoe...  From Victorian detective stories to modern mysteries, police procedurals to pulp fiction, comic gems to cozy crime, there's something for every festive mood in this must-read collection starring sixty of the world's favourite detectives.  Featuring an all-star cast of authors including Isaac Asimov, Mary Higgins Clark, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Colin Dexter, Thomas Hardy, H.R.F. Keating, Ngaio Marsh, John Mortimer, Ellis Peters, Sara Paretsky, Robert Louis Stevenson and - of course - Agatha Christie, this is the biggest and best Christmas crime anthology in print today.  The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries is edited by Otto Penzler.

November 2018

Imagine inheriting two billion dollars. Then imagine the money is left to you by your mortal enemy...  Blind Special Ops agent Jenny Aaron has just survived the worst thirty-six hours of her life. She has a standing offer to re-join the Department, the secret elite unit she used to belong to before she lost her sight. But first she must rest, and think.  Then Aaron receives a message that changes everything. The man she hates most in the world has left her an enormous fortune. The money is life-changing - but why is it in her hands?  A Shadow Falls is by Andreas Pflüger.

After much tragedy and violence, Jack Taylor has at long last found contentment. Of course, he still knocks back too much Jameson and dabbles in uppers, but he has a new woman in his life, a freshly bought apartment, and little sign of trouble on the horizon.  But once again, trouble comes to him, this time in the form of a wealthy Frenchman who wants Jack to investigate the double-murder of his twin sons. Jack is meanwhile roped into looking  after his girlfriend's nine-year-old son, and is in for a shock with the appearance of a character from his past.The plot is a chess game and all of the pieces seem to be moving at the behest of one dangerously mysterious player: a vigilante called 'Silence', because he's the last thing his victims will ever hear.  In The Galway Silence is by Ken Bruen.

Swords in the East is by P F Chisholm.  1592. Courtier Sir Robert Carey and Carey's surly, larcenous, and loyal henchman Henry Dodd, Land Sergeant of Gilsland, are back in Carlisle and the Debateable Lands.  As Carey struggles to solve the murder of a local minister, he battles with his deep adoration for Lady Elizabeth Widdrington, while despising her elderly, abusive husband - will the man never die?  Plunging readers straight into the raucous world of late-sixteenth century border reivers and unfettered Elizabethan intrigue, Swords in the East, the third chronicle of Sir Robert Carey's adventures, collects the novels A Chorus of Innocents and A Clash of Spheres under one volume.