Field Gray [Hardcover]

Philip Kerr (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 14, 2011

Philip Kerr delivers a novel with the noir sensibility of Raymond Chandler, the realpolitik of vintage John le Carré, and the dark moral vision of Graham Greene.

"Bernie Gunther is the most antiheroic of antiheroes in this gripping, offbeat thriller. It's the story of his struggle to preserve what's left of his humanity, and his life, in a world where the moral bandwidth is narrow, satanic evil at one end, cynical expediency at the other."
-Philip Caputo, author of A Rumor of War

"A thriller that will challenge preconceptions and stimulate the little grey cells."
-The Times (London), selecting Field Gray as a Thriller of the Year

"Part of the allure of these novels is that Bernie is such an interesting creation, a Chandleresque knight errant caught in insane historical surroundings. Bernie walks down streets so mean that nobody can stay alive and remain truly clean."
-John Powers, Fresh Air (NPR)

Bernie on Bernie: I didn't like Bernhard Gunther very much. He was cynical and world-weary and hardly had a good word to say about anyone, least of all himself. He'd had a pretty tough war . . . and done quite a few things of which he wasn't proud. . . . It had been no picnic for him since then either; it didn't seem to matter where he spread life's tartan rug, there was always a turd on the grass.

Striding across Europe through the killing fields of three decades-from riot-torn Berlin in 1931 to Adenauer's Germany in 1954, awash in duplicitous "allies" busily undermining one another-Field Gray reveals a world based on expediency, where the ends justify the means and no one can be trusted. It brings us a hero who is sardonic, tough- talking, and cynical, but who does have a rough sense of humor and a rougher sense of right and wrong. He's Bernie Gunther. He drinks too much and smokes excessively and is somewhat overweight (but a Russian prisoner-of-war camp will take care of those bad habits). He's Bernie Gunther-a brave man, because when there is nothing left to lose, honor rules.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Bernie Gunther's past catches up with him in Kerr's outstanding seventh novel featuring the tough anti-Nazi Berlin PI who survived the Nazi regime (after If the Dead Rise Not). In 1954, Bernie is living quietly in Cuba, doing a little work for underworld boss Meyer Lansky, when he runs afoul of the U.S. Navy and lands in prison in Guantánamo. Later, at an army prison in New York City, FBI agents ask him about his service in WWII, in particular as a member of an SS police battalion on the Eastern Front. Another transfer sends him to Germany's Landsberg Prison, where Hitler was imprisoned in 1923. Officials from various governments question and torture him, but grimly amusing Bernie, who's smarter than any of his interrogators, successfully strings each one of them along. Vivid flashbacks chronicle Bernie's harrowing war experiences. Series aficionados and new readers alike will take comfort knowing that Kerr is hard at work on the next installment. Author tour. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Philip Kerr is the author of many novels, but perhaps most important are the five featuring Bernie Gunther—A Quiet Flame, The One from the Other, and the Berlin Noir trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem). He lives in London and Cornwall, England, with his family.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: A Marian Wood Book/Putnam; First Edition edition (April 14, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399157417
• ISBN-13: 978-0399157417
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #197,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Kerr was born in Edinburgh in 1956 and read Law at university. Having learned nothing as an undergraduate lawyer he stayed on as postgraduate and read Law and Philosophy, most of this German, which was when and where he first became interested in German twentieth century history and, in particular, the Nazis. Following university he worked as a copywriter at a number of advertising agencies, including Saatchi & Saatchi, during which time he wrote no advertising slogans of any note. He spent most of his time in advertising researching an idea he'd had for a novel about a Berlin-based policeman, in 1936. And following several trips to Germany - and a great deal of walking around the mean streets of Berlin - his first novel, March Violets, was published in 1989 and introduced the world to Bernie Gunther.
"I loved Berlin before the wall came down; I'm pretty fond of the place now, but back then it was perhaps the most atmospheric city on earth. Having a dark, not to say black sense of humour myself, it's always been somewhere I feel very comfortable."
Having left advertising behind, Kerr worked for the London Evening Standard and produced two more novels featuring Bernie Gunther: The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991). These were published as an omnibus edition, Berlin Noir in 1992.
Thinking he might like to write something else, he did and published a host of other novels before returning to Bernie Gunther after a gap of sixteen years, with The One from the Other (2007).
Says Kerr, "I never intended to leave such a large gap between Book 3 and Book 4; a lot of other stuff just got in the way; and I feel kind of lucky that people are still as interested in this guy as I am. If anything I'm more interested in him now than I was back in the day."
Two more novels followed, A Quiet Flame (2008) and If the Dead Rise Not (2009).
Field Gray (2010) is perhaps his most ambitious novel yet that features Bernie Gunther. Crossing a span of more than twenty years, it takes Bernie from Cuba, to New York, to Landsberg Prison in Germany where he vividly describes a story that covers his time in Paris, Toulouse, Minsk, Konigsberg, and his life as a German POW in Soviet Russia.
Kerr is already working on an eighth title in the series.
"I don't know how long I can keep doing them; I'll probably write one too many; but I don't feel that's happened yet."
As P.B.Kerr Kerr is also the author of the popular 'Children of the Lamp' series.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#51 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#61 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical

#51 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Historical

#61 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 57 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The autobiography of Bernie Gunther April 14, 2011

By TChris TOP 50 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Field Gray begins in 1954 when Bernie Gunther is persuaded to smuggle a woman out of Cuba. Once they are at sea, Gunther's boat is stopped by an American naval vessel and Gunther is taken into custody. After brief stays (accompanied by beatings) in Gitmo and a military prison in New York, Gunther is rendered to Germany where Americans interrogate him about war crimes. As Gunther begins to reveal his past, the novel shifts in time; ensuing chapters alternate between 1954 and earlier times in Gunther's life: the 1930's and 1940's in Germany and France and Russia. As a captain in the SS, Gunther commanded a firing squad that executed Russian POWs; in occupied Paris he was nearly murdered; as a POW in a camp near Stalingrad he conducted a murder investigation. These and many other snippets of Gunther's checkered life are linked (more or less) by Gunther's on-and-off involvement with Erich Mielke, who (in the real world) served for many years as the minister of state security in the German Democratic Republic.

In some respects, Field Gray reads like the autobiography of Bernie Gunther. Unfortunately, the narrative shifts ground so often, and Gunther seems so detached from the story he tells, that the novel fails to create an emotional resonance between the reader and its subject. What makes Field Gray worth reading is Philip Kerr's creation, in Gunther, of a morally complex man, one who is neither entirely good nor primarily bad, who tries to survive in an evil environment without becoming wholly corrupted by it. At one point Gunther is described as "a victim of history," an apt label that gives him an interesting perspective upon the era that is the novel's focus. That perspective is most often one of anger, broadly directed at Americans, Russians, the French, and other Germans, although he's more forgiving of the British (perhaps because Kerr is British).

The story's pace is a bit uneven; unfortunate since Kerr doesn't have the kind of absorbing prose style that rivets a reader's interest when the plot begins to lag. Kerr's writing style is nonetheless capable; I never considered abandoning the story despite its occasional dull moments. Staying with it paid off in the form of an unexpected ending. While I liked the choices made in the last few pages, I suspect some will not, particularly readers who want the good guys to triumph; there are no "good guys" in this novel. But the ending is true to the story that precedes it, and I thought it was both clever and satisfying. Readers who stay with Field Gray and who aren't turned off by moral ambiguity should have a rewarding reading experience.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Pawn in the Great Powers' Chess Game April 14, 2011

By Maine Colonial TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In BERLIN NOIR, the trilogy that begins Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, we are introduced to Bernie Gunther in the pre-war Nazi-era Berlin, and then we see him again shortly after the war ends. Author Philip Kerr let fifteen years and many other books go by before bringing Bernie Gunther back in THE ONE FROM THE OTHER, set in 1949. The next book, A QUIET FLAME, finds Bernie on the run in 1950 and living in Argentina under an assumed name.

These first five novels in the Bernie Gunther saga made me wonder about Bernie in the years before the Nazi assumption of power and what Bernie was doing during the war. In the sixth novel in the series, IF THE DEAD RISE NOT, we learn the answer to the first question. The book begins with Bernie having left Argentina for pre-Castro Havana, but it then flashes back to Berlin in 1934, as the Nazis consolidate their power.

Now, in FIELD GRAY, the seventh novel in the series, we see what Bernie did during the war, during the chaos of the immediate postwar period and in 1954, when he is spirited back to Europe and made a pawn in the deadly espionage games of the various spy agencies engaged in the Cold War.

In recent years, long-secret documents about Russian activities during WW2 and the actions of the East German secret police before the fall of the Berlin Wall have been made available. It is apparent that Philip Kerr has some familiarity with the history revealed by those documents. This book is packed with information about so-called police actions in eastern Europe during the war, the treatment of German POWs by the Russians, the Russians' treatment of their own returning POWs and the machinations of the victorious Allied powers as the joy of defeating the Nazis gave way to the Cold War struggle for advantage in Europe, particularly in Germany.

Bernie Gunther is in the thick of these historic events. He is an intelligence officer and part of a police battalion during the war, a prisoner of the Soviets in several nightmarish camps, imprisoned again in France, and then a reluctant field agent for both the French and US intelligence services.

A thread running through all of Bernie's history in FIELD GRAY is Erich Mielke, a communist Bernie saved from death by a Nazi gang in the 1930s. Mielke is then accused of murdering two Berlin policemen and flees to the Soviet Union. He later crosses paths with Bernie when he is interned in southern France after the Spanish Civil War, again when Bernie is a POW and yet again when Bernie has been put into play by the CIA in 1954.

The book's plot focuses on the years-long chess game between Bernie and Mielke, and Bernie's role as a pawn in the ambitions of one power after another: the Nazis (particularly Reinhard Heydrich), the Soviets and the intelligence services of France, the Soviet Union and the US.

The story is enthralling, though I have to deduct one star for the confusing way the story jumps from one time and place to another, and for some lack of clarity in the description of the double- and triple-crossing of the various players in the spy games. Anyone who has enjoyed the previous Bernie Gunther books and who has an interest in the historical events described should find this a worthwhile read despite these flaws. I'm looking forward to finding out more of Bernie's history.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Welcome to Guntherland June 20, 2011

By I. Yeates

Format:Hardcover

Philip Kerr is a new addition to my list of favorite authors. The varied consensus speculates that one should read the "Bernie Gunther" series in order. Personally, I believe Field Gray unequivocally succeeds as a stand-alone fictional biography of its unconventional protagonist through multi-layered flashbacks.

On the surface, Bernie Gunther appears a bit vapid, but quite emphatically he is a combustible, cunning and knowledgeable former Kripo homicide detective whose photographic memory unfailingly alters even the direst circumstances to his personal advantage. Most compelling in this voluminous and mesmerizing thriller is Kerr's unerring impeccable research which leaves the reader enthralled not only by the intricately woven plot and its irreverent main character, but also pondering the comprehensively accurate historical tidbits peppered throughout.

Perhaps, the cover art of Kerr's books failed to entice me, a regrettable error as it is best not to judge a book by its cover.