Bernie Gunther's First Gimlet - by Kenneth Mills
I CAME TO Philip Kerr (1956-2018) —and to his greatest creation, detective Bernhard Günther— oddly. Deliciously. It was in Madrid.
During the course of a conversation over fish and wine with my friend and fellow-historian of things early modern and Spanish James Amelang, we uncovered a mutual appreciation for beleaguered chief inspectors. Trading authors and our reasons, Jim put me on to Kerr.
Philip Kerr's fourteen historical novels about Gunther are set, first and most famously, in 1930s Berlin, then in Nazi Germany and on the Eastern Front, and finally, amidst the chaos, compromises, and desperate flights of several “Cold War” aftermaths.
That the stories took me so far from my usual readerly bailiwicks has surely been part of their appeal. Even though the final Gunther novel —2019’s Metropolis (itself a prequel)— followed its author’s death, I can’t quite break the habit of scanning the shelves of my favourite bookstores for the latest Philip Kerr.
BERNIE GUNTHER IS a Berliner at heart and by temperament. As such, he is as sure to stand out in Munich as in Havana.
Formerly a sergeant in the Great War, his wife died of the Spanish flu in 1918. With the National Socialists’ take over and purge of non-party members from the police force and other institutions, Bernie, with his Weimar affiliations, abandons his eleven years as a distinguished homicide detective in Berlin’s Kriminalpolizei (KRIPO).
Well connected and quick to prove useful to all sides, Gunther makes his perilous way. He is a house detective in the employ of the Hotel Adlon on Wilhelmstrasse.
Resigned to the omnipresence of human foibles and ruthlessness, unlucky in love, always learning the hard way, Bernie disappears into his work.
“Running a good hotel is about predicting the future,” Kerr has him muse about the Adlon in If the Dead Rise Not (2009), “and then preventing it from happening.”
Bernie Gunther is a noticer, hiding in plain sight.
He is the one ordering a large schnapps at the corner stool. He knows just who to ask for, and not only in his headquarters at the Hotel Adlon. He sets up shop, too, at the Café-Bar Pavilion in Europa Haus.
And at the Excelsior, “the Gestapo’s favourite watering hole,” all he need do is sit tight and listen. For the stray lines of braggarts.
With “their light brown tunics and red armbands,” the clumsily brutal, womanising regional members of the Nazi Labour Front remind Bernie Gunther of so many “pheasants. You didn’t have to know anything about them personally to want to shoot one.”
I WONDER WHERE Herr Gunther tried his first gimlet?
I like to think to think it was in the gardens of the Villa Mauresque. Up in the hills above the old fishing port of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the old French Riviera.
Bernie is operating under an assumed name as a concierge in the Grând Hotel in Cap Ferrat, only to find himself in the clutches of the British novelist W. Somerset Maugham and his entourage.
In the post-war south of France, people of means and multiple languages —dragging their differently twisted pasts— gather to play bridge. A lot.
At the Villa Mauresque there is a grotto, a pool, an outrageous bronze gong, and a butler named Ernest who is somehow always with “a jug of cold gimlets” at the ready.
A few kilometres west of Cap Ferrat is Villefranche-sur-Mer, where Bernie retreats for solitude and space to think.
“Shadowy, secret, and full of awkward, fish-eye angles,” full of “hidden Escher stairways, high tenements . . . dark, winding cobbled streets” and lost tourists, it’s is a perfect place for “a deracinated wanted man living quietly under a false name.”
Kerr’s Bernie Gunther reprises a distinguished line of anti-heroes in a genre he has helped to define. He has a soul that has “looked into the abyss so many times it feels like Dante’s walking stick.”
In the back streets of Villefranche-sur-Mer, he seeks out the vaults of a dark, crypt-like bar on “—of all places— the Rue Obscure” that reminds him somehow of Berlin.
“La Darse Bar is a crummy, sepulchral sort of place,” Philip Kerr has Bernie explain, “with sawdust on the floor and sticky wooden tables and looks like it’s been in existence since the time of Charles V.”
But there’s this “house rosé they serve in earthenware pitchers.”
If you've enjoyed this post, and my Dispatches, please subscribe and share via these buttons just below. I’d like gently to grow readership, and you can help.
* Thanks to James Amelang.
** Watercolours by Kenneth Mills
ncG1vNJzZmijlaO7psDHpqClpKNjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89omZ6qnp6ybrPUp6uhnaKoeqe10ayrZp%2BZormmwA%3D%3D