Bernie Gunther, TV Detective?

I’ve been a shameless devotee of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther private-eye series ever since 1989, when I picked up a hardcover copy of March Violets, the first of those 14 novels. Much later, I was privileged to interview him for both The Rap Sheet and Kirkus Reviews, and I finally met and spoke with him briefly in 2016 during a book signing in Seattle. When Kerr passed away in 2018, aged 62, I wrote that, although the author himself was “gone from the community of crime-fiction writers, … I still have his books. For that, I’ll be forever grateful.”

So you can imagine how chuffed I was to read this in Deadline:

Apple TV+ has greenlit a long-gestating TV adaptation of the late Philip Kerr’s popular Berlin Noir books from Oscar-winning Conclave writer Peter Straughan, Doctor Who producer Bad Wolf, and Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman’s Playtone.

The untitled drama is based on Kerr’s final book Metropolis, which told the iconic detective’s origin story. Set in 1928, Metropolis follows newly promoted police officer Gunther in the intimidating elite Berlin Murder Squad, investigating what seems to be a serial killer targeting victims on the fringes of society. Gunther’s Berlin is described as a “city of unprecedented freedom and dizzying turbulence, the Nazis a distant nightmare waiting in the wings.”

We are told Apple is kicking off with Gunther’s origin story but there is scope to adapt more Berlin Noir books via the studio’s option. Gunther was made famous by Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy comprising March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem, all of which were published around the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Kerr penned a further 11 Gunther books, which sold in droves worldwide, finishing with Metropolis before he died in 2018. Metropolis was published posthumously a year later.

Bernie Gunther is a captivating character, pessimistic, persistent, and crafty, with what Kerr’s Web site accurately describes as “a rough sense of humor and a rougher sense of right and wrong.” I have long thought that he’d make a splendid TV protagonist, but remain skeptical that the complicated, sometimes incongruous aspects of his personality could be satisfyingly portrayed on the screen. It may help that Kerr’s widow, the novelist Jane Thynne, owns the copyright in the Gunther novels, and might have some say in their TV adaptations.