Philip Kerr, the British thriller writer perhaps most widely known for winning the Bad Sex Prize a few years back from The Literary Review of London (in which he used "gnomon" to describe the phallus rampant, forever making Erasmus titter when looking at sundials), is one of Erasmus's favorite popular fiction authors. When asked to describe his books, Erasmus usually says, "Michael Crichton with a classical education," for Kerr, like Crichton, skips from topic to topic in building his books, but unlike Crichton, the topics which interest him are usually human, philosophical, or historical, rather than scientific or technological. Also, Kerr lards his prose with frequent and interesting allusions to history, mythology, etc. Erasmus considers his output quite uneven but very much worth following.
A brief review of Kerr's bibliography should give an idea of his breadth of interest. March Violets {ave}, arguably Kerr's best book, is a private-eye story set in the twilight of Weimar Germany as the Nazis are coming to power. The eponymous Märzveilchen are those late-coming Nazis who've sprung up like weeds, once the party's ascendancy seemed clear. Bernie Günther, the protagonist, reappears in The Pale Criminal {ave}, set during the war, and A German Requiem {Placet} set in Harry Lime's post-war Vienna. These three novels were later packaged into a single-volume trilogy under the name Berlin Noir.
Kerr's next book was A Philosophical Investigation {ave} which is a serial-killer hunt set "ten minutes in the future," in a Britain in which genetic screening is universal, and the gene which disposes one to become a sexually sadistic murderer has been identified. A series of men are murdered and eventually, a female detective puts together that they all appear on the NHS's top-secret list of potential serial killers (who are all given mandatory counseling from birth). And the killer? He must be on the list... or are genes perhaps not the last word in evil?
After such a promising start, Kerr's work becomes a bit less ambitious, but is still generally quite professional and worthwhile. Dead Meat {placet} was once of the first novels to explore the Wild East criminal world of post-Soviet Russia. Gridiron (UK) or The Grid (US) {non placet} is a tale about artificial intelligence, "smart buildings," et cetera. Alas, the architectural and technological flourishes didn't keep Erasmus from figuring out where the book was going and getting impatient for it to get there. (It's also the source of his "prize-winning" quote, "Detaching mind from over-eager gnomon and its exquisitely appointed, shadowy task, he began to make love to her.")
Esau {ave} is a marvellously entertaining adventure in the Himalayas, where explorers run into the last branch on our family tree, homo vertex, a/k/a mi rgod.
A Five Year Plan {placet} was a decent heist-at-sea novel, followed by two works Erasmus didn't particularly care for, a science-fiction heist novel, The Second Angel and a Kennedy-assassination alternate history, The Shot {non placent}.
Kerr returned to form with Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton {ave}, an intriguing mystery set in the tower of London while Newton was Master of the Mint.
His most recent book, Hitler's Peace, returns him to the apocalyptic 1940s, with the world at war. It's 1943, and becoming clear to the Nazis that the war is lost. Some, like Hess, are trying to broker a separate peace with the Allies, while others prepare for a Götterdämmerung. Meanwhile, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, are preparing to meet in Tehran (or in the spelling current at the time, Teheran). The Teheran Conference was unusual in a number of ways still not clarified by historians, as most of the documentation remains in classified archives. Kerr, in his afterword, explains some of the questions around which he has built an intriguing, occasionally breathtaking speculative-history novel.
The novel begins in Washington where Willard Meyer, a logical-postivist philosophy professor working as a German expert for the OSS (consequently slightly nervous about his youthful flirtation with Communism and the NKVD coming to light), is enlisted by President Roosevelt to get up to speed on some dossiers in preparation for what he eventually learns is the Teheran Conference. Meanwhile, a State Department diplomat is assassinated and framed as homosexual. Kerr gets a few period details wrong in the Washington section, Erasmus believes, and his portrait of Roosevelt is a bit too bookish to be entirely accurate, I'd guess, but overall, the effect is quite well done.
The action shifts to the Nazi side, where the machinations are darker and deadlier. Then, as the professor steams across the Atlantic on a battleship with FDR and his delegation, another murder occurs, which may be tied to the first. A Nazi assassin may lurk in the delegation. An SS commander in Berlin plots a mass assassination of the Big Three (the actual Operation Long Jump). The Roosevelt delegation travels through North Africa and Cairo, with more murders following, and some risky espionage related to the Katyn Massacre. Finally, with great difficulty, Meyer et alii reach Tehran.
The book seems rather scattershot, as my summary implies, but some 300 pages in, it all comes together in a turn of events Erasmus found genuinely surprising. And then Kerr gets to the heart of what he's at here. First, could the compromise with evil inherent in the alliance with Stalin extend to a truce, the peace of the title? Kerr answers yes, and Erasmus finds it hard to disagree. In one of the book's most chilling passages, a Nazi who's come to talk truce addresses Roosevelt and Stalin (Churchill has refused to listen).
"...I would say that the notions of what is proper in war and peace have little to do with political reality. Morality has no place at the negotiating table, and the only truths we need recognize are the truths of pragmatism and expediency."Roosevelt beamed like a benevolent uncle and nodded happily...
In another key passage, Professor Meyer reflects on how the academic parlor-games of modern philosophy have hideous, depraved consequences in the world of men and mores. Having contemplated the character of Adolf Hitler as an OSS analyst, Meyer has a shattering epiphany.
...I felt an understanding of what the Führer and I were: two men for whom the entire spectrum of moral values had no meaning, who had no real need of the humanities and the immaterial world. Here was the obvious extension of everything that I, as a logical positivist, believed in. Here was a man without values. And I suddenly perceived the bankruptcy of all my own individual endeavors. The meaninglessness of all the meanings I had striven to find. This was the truth of Hitler and all rigid materialism: it had absolutely nothing to do with being human.
How Professor Meyer attempts to redeem himself provides an interesting ending that will not be dramatically congenial to many but which Erasmus found a realistic decision of a man desperate to justify his life.
Hitler's Peace is Kerr's best work in a very long time and a fascinating set of portraits, even if a detail here or there seems a bit out of place. It is popular fiction of the highest order, and a successful attempt to address themes with which much more self-consciously literary works grapple far less successfully.
Ave.
And, no, Erasmus has not yet read Kerr's children's novel, Children of the Lamp: The Akhenaten Adventure, though he does have a copy on his night table...
