Field Grey: A Bernie Gunther Thriller
Philip Kerr
Quercus
Rs: 499
Pp: 468
The Ghost of Philip Marlowe is enjoying good health. There is the enduring popularity of The Big Sleep, in which Bogey made being a laconic, cynical and hard-boiled private investigator into an especial art form. The man behind the character, Raymond Chandler, explained it clearly: ?Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour.?
Stephen Soderberg, George Clooney and countless emulators of the historical whodunnit, the police procedural, the legal thriller, the spy novel and the many murder mystery avatars spawned over the last century remain fascinated by this mean man of honour. How are some to spring out from shelves crowded with more and more books and DVDs? Philip Kerr’s formula to fame was to birth his detective Bernie Gunther against the greatest crime of them all, the crime of the millennium, the Holocaust.
The seventh in the Gunther series, Field Grey, is now out and it has got good reviews. Gunther has a nightmare of a life, what with being born in Germany in 1896, what with being a homicide cop and then a private detective through the two harrowing wars that wrecked the world in the first half of the following century. He is ideally at one with the bile that makes up so much of Marlowe. He is cynical and world-weary and has done quite a few things he isn’t proud of. He has also served in the SS. So, Kerr is showing some gall here. Asking us to fall for a man who wore field grey. Why do we go along?
Set in 1954, but with flashbacks aplenty, this volume has Gunther?s past being interrogated by everyone from the CIA (he gets a good view of the Statue of Liberty looking like it was ?giving the Hitler salute?) to the French counter-espionage agency (?almost as many Frenchmen as Germans had been Nazis?), from Cuban cops to the Red Army. If you ?enjoyed? seeing Clooney?s fingernails getting ripped off in Syriana, this is the book for you.
Once you adjust to being bewildered, the dizzying play of crosses, double crosses and triple crosses will feel alluring. Gunther will allure as the exceptional Everyman who is trying to survive lashing tides with sanity. ?It didn?t seem to matter where he spread life?s tartan rug, there was always a turd in the grass.? Some critics see the historical analysis underlying Gunther?s world as superficial, its moral centre too slippery to trust. But that?s Berlin noir for you, dark in its diachronic humanism. Battling compromised, Draconian systems, just the act of survival seems to render characters heroic, distinguished. Of course, Gunther has other attributes as well. He can look through lies, Hitler?s lies, Red Army?s lies, the lies of the intelligence people who dreamed up the Cold War, the phoniest war of them all. He is a good detective because he is deeply curious. He survives so much because he is uncommonly dogged. He slides with the tides but never without knowing his strokes fully. ?Well, I decided that I?d rather die at the hands of my own countrymen than get rich in the pay of some foreigners.?
Kerr is fond of saying he doesn?t understand why people bother caring who killed Roger Ackroyd; Agatha Christie?s settings are so parochial. But here?s Field Grey?s nugget on Gunther?s particular cleverness: ?To be a good detective you have to understand people and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself.? Is Jane Marple?s study of human nature vastly different at core? To ask this is not in any way to suggest that Kerr?s landscape feels like St Mary Mead or his protagonist has much in common with the lady with faded blue eyes and masses of snowy hair. This would be like saying Gunther?s humour has a whiff of PG Woodhouse, which is absolutely not the case no matter how much Kerr avers he likes the latter.
The big riddle that critics have tried to solve is why there was a gap of 15 years between Kerr?s first three Gunther novels and those that have followed thereafter. The Scotsman claims he was just trying to do the Kubrick thing, defy publishers who want the same thing written over and over again. Granted that the ?second generation? of Gunther?s adventures have been performing some such defiance, one must also consider the point that Kerr thought he was about to break into Hollywood. He hasn?t, yet.
But fans go on fighting hard over whether Kiefer Sutherland, Peter Stormare, Russell Crowe, Stellan Skarsg?rd or Viggo Mortensen should play Gunther. Clooney is sort of a back-bencher on this one.