NEW YORK — Philip Kerr, a Scottish-born writer whose popular novels feature a Nazi-era detective named Bernie Gunther, whose hard-boiled style made him literary kin to Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s classic private eye, died Friday in London. He was 62.
The cause was bladder cancer, according to his publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Through 13 novels, including “Greeks Bearing Gifts,’’ which will be published next week, Mr. Kerr drew Gunther as a savvy and cynical Berlin criminal police investigator who hates Hitler and quits his job when the Nazis take over. He becomes a private detective, but is then pressed into gumshoe jobs for the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the Final Solution.
Gunther is “one of crime fiction’s most satisfying and unlikely survivors: the good cop in the belly of the beast,’’ Jane Kramer, The New Yorker’s longtime European correspondent, wrote last year.
Some of the novels bring Gunther into postwar intrigues in Argentina, Cuba, France, Greece, and other countries.
Mr. Kerr wrote fantasy novels for children (the “Children of the Lamp’’ series, under the name P.B. Kerr), a mystery novel involving Sir Isaac Newton, and thrillers set in the world of soccer. But he was most successful at the Gunther series, which began with “March Violets’’ in 1989.
After two follow-ups, Mr. Kerr set Gunther aside for 15 years, taking an approach to his creation far different from that of Sue Grafton, who cast her private detective, Kinsey Millhone, in 25 alphabet-spanning novels that began in 1982 and ended with her finale, “Y Is for Yesterday’’ (2017), which was published four months before her death.
Mr. Kerr recalled that he had other interests and did not want to be typecast as a Gunther-only writer.
“I sort of packed it in after three because I thought three’s a nice number,’’ he told the radio host Leonard Lopate of WNYC in 2015. “I hadn’t signed up to do the same thing for the rest of my life.’’
Mr. Kerr leaves his wife, Jane Thynne, who is also a novelist; a daughter, Naomi Kerr; two sons, William and Charlie; and a sister, Caroline Kerr.
