Bringing Kerr’s Berlin to Television

We were already aware that the streaming service Apple TV+ intended to adapt the late Philip Kerr’s excellent Berlin Noir thrillers for the small screen. But the London Times brings news now that filming “is at last underway,” with Jack Lowden (Slow Horses) starring as Kerr’s Nazi-era detective, Berlin Gunther. As The Times explains,

The series will be based on Metropolis, which chronologically is the earliest Gunther story, although the last published by Kerr. It is set in 1928—hence the title’s nod to Fritz Lang’s film of the time—and features Gunther as a young policeman working the vice beat in the seething German capital immortalised by Christopher Isherwood.

Kerr’s early novels have been characterised as Raymond Chandler transposed to the period of Weimar and the rise of Nazism, with later books cutting between the war years and those before and after it. The hard-boiled Gunther, who served as a sergeant in the First World War and whose wife then died of Spanish influenza, certainly shares similarities with Chandler’s cynical gumshoe, Philip Marlowe. The common tone is one of world-weariness. Both are essentially disappointed romantics who have come to an accommodation with the powers that be. They try to do the right thing, particularly when there is an attractive woman involved, but often find themselves in the role of fall guy.

The paper goes on to remark that “Part of the appeal for Apple is doubtless parallels that could be drawn now with a period when extremism was also on the rise. It is in Metropolis, as he investigates a baffling series of murders of those living on the margins, that Gunther first encounters nascent fascism. The chief challenge, however, for screenwriter Peter Straughan, who adapted Wolf Hall for television and won an Oscar for Conclave, will be capturing Kerr’s ability to meticulously recreate the era, as well as the spirit of the other principal character in the books, Berlin and its hard-headed inhabitants. With luck, Kerr will finally get the popular recognition he deserves.” Tom Shankland will direct the new show.

In addition to Lowden, this historical drama will feature Oscar winner Colin Firth, playing “Paul Lohser, a brilliant but prickly Murder Detective with the Berlin Police. Meticulous, anti-social and well-educated,” according to Deadline, “he’s everything Bernie isn’t. And as his partner and unlikely mentor, Lohser is Bernie’s best and only hope of catching … a serial killer targeting victims on the fringes of society.”