Philip Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther novel, March Violets, was published 30 years ago. From the start, the format was a winner: take a cynical, wisecracking private eye modelled on Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade and transplant him to Nazi Germany. Metropolis is the 14th in the series and unfortunately, since the untimely death of its author last year, presumably the final instalment.
Thirty years is also the rough fictional timespan of Bernie’s career. Emerging from the trenches of the first world war, he has served for 11 years as a homicide detective in Kripo (Berlin’s criminal police). He’s a tough, morally ambivalent but essentially sympathetic character. Naturally — it goes with the format — women find him remarkably attractive.
March Violets began when the rise of the Nazis to power cost Bernie his job. As the series progressed, he worked as an investigator in a variety of roles, among them with the SS, often tangling with senior members of the Nazi hierarchy including Heydrich and Goebbels. His story continued after the war and into the 1950s.
For his last novel, Kerr has chosen to take Bernie back to 1928, when he was a rising star of the Berlin murder squad during the glory days of the Weimar Republic. Still scarred by his wartime experiences, he’s drinking heavily while managing to investigate two separate serial killers. Someone is methodically murdering and scalping prostitutes; and someone else is shooting .25 calibre bullets into legless veterans begging in the streets.
All this is happening in a city that’s bursting with creative energy, sexual experimentation and political conflict. Fritz Lang has just released Metropolis, and Bernie enjoys of spot of dalliance with Lang’s screenwriter wife, Thea von Harbou. George Grosz, a leading light of the Weimar Dada movement, sketches him in a bar.
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