Berlin Noir (the Bernie Gunther novels) - Philip Kerr

When the lead character is likeably flawed, I love a good private detective series.
 
The fictional world has to be convincingly real and the stories must have pace, and you can play around with the paradigm, but you can’t beat the purity of the classical format.
 
Kerr dreams up his own suitably hard-boiled, cynical, battle-scarred, tough guy and what kind of benign milieu does he give Bernie to operate in? 1930s Berlin, with the rise of Nazism as the background narrative, and semblances of ordinary decency in police work and society at large being eradicated.
 
It’s the lone crusader archetype that gets me. Independent, but not egotistical. Successful, but not always. Unorthodox, but not too much. With a conscience, but a stained one. Philip Kerr’s wife, Jane, wrote: “He loved to paint Bernie into an ethical corner ‘so he can’t cross the floor without getting paint on his shoes.’”
 
Each book in the series gives us a self-contained case and a darn good mystery to be solved. We accompany Bernie Gunther as he deals with corrupt, unsavoury individuals and historical political villains in his own inimitable way, speaking his mind with dark irony and pithy observations on the human condition in such a way that he just about manages to get away with it. Goebbels, for instance, might have shot another man, but the straight-talking, politically suspect Gunther he finds amusing, and provisionally spares him.
 
The Bernie story develops and extends beyond Germany and the original time frame, so that we also find him pursuing malfeasants in Argentina and the French Riviera.
 
Philip Kerr was very unwell and struggling by the end of the series, so that Metropolis just doesn’t have the dynamic verve of the rest, but don’t let that put you off. Bernie Gunther is your definitive anti-hero and you have a solid oeuvre of fourteen thrillers to enjoy him in.