Scots crime thriller author picks up a Dagger for latest murder mystery

Published on Friday 30 October 2009 21:21

A DETECTIVE yarn set in Nazi Germany by a Scottish novelist scooped a major crime writing award yesterday.

Philip Kerr, born and educated in Edinburgh, has been penning crime thrillers for 20 years – but two top awards this year have suddenly netted him more than 100,000 in prize money.

If The Dead Rise Not, the latest in his series on Berlin policeman Bernie Gunther, last night won the Crime Writers Association's (CWA) prize for best historical crime fiction.

The CWA's Dagger award is prestigious, but worth just 3,000. Last month, however the same novel won Kerr the 125,000 (111,000) RBA prize, from a Spanish publisher, for international "noir" fiction, easily the biggest cash prize for crime writing in the world.

If The Dead Rise Not was Kerr's sixth Gunther novel. The first was published in 1989, but after the third, he turned away from the character.

"I always thought I would come back to it, but I didn't write another for 16 years. Normally if you have a character you either flog it to death, or kill him off," he said.

"This is my best book, to be honest. Some of them have been better than others. The CWA is the first crime-writing award I have won in this country. I've been at it for 19 years."

His only prize previously was the tongue-in-cheek Bad Sex award for a sex scene in one thriller, Grid Iron.

If The Dead Rise Not begins with Gunther, sacked from his job as a Berlin cop, working as a hotel detective in Nazi Germany. A murder is tied to contracts being awarded for the 1936 Olympic Games.

The action later shifts 20 years later, as the plot carries forward into the setting of Havana before the Cuban revolution. Kerr's books often move between periods and settings.

The CWA's judging panel said of the book: "A tightly controlled plot twists and turns in a wryly witty narrative and the historical settings breathe reality."

Kerr, a former advertising copywriter and journalist, has written 11 novels for adults and a children's book series. The Gunther series has been translated into more than 30 languages.

"I sometimes think he is better received in other countries than he is here," he said. "There is a greater international appetite, in the US, Spain, France and really in Germany."

Kerr wrote a BBC television series broadcast in the early 1990s, Grushko, about the Russian mafia, based on his novel Dead Meat. But the Gunther novels have yet to be made into television or films. Nor were they recognised with any awards until this April, when A Quiet Flame, the 5th, won the French Quai du Polar award, given out by Le Point magazine. That earned Kerr a case of wine.

If The Dead Rise Not did not win the favour of The Scotsman's reviewer, the writer Allan Massie. He said it was "agreeably readable" but lacked the promise of Kerr's early books, without convincing characters or plot, and even suggested the author "pension off" Bernie Gunther.