Philip Ballantyne Kerr (22 February 1956 – 23 March 2018) was a British author, best known for his Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers.

Early life

Kerr was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where his father was an engineer and his mother worked as a secretary. He was educated at a grammar school in Northampton. He studied at the University of Birmingham from 1974 to 1980, gaining a master's degree in law and philosophy. Kerr worked as an advertising copywriter for Saatchi & Saatchi before becoming a full-time writer in 1989. In a 2012 interview, Kerr noted that he began his literary career at the age of twelve by writing pornographic stories and lending them to classmates for a fee.

Career

A writer of both adult fiction and non-fiction, he is known for the Bernhard "Bernie" Gunther series of 14 historical thrillers set in Germany and elsewhere during the 1930s, the Second World War and the Cold War. He also wrote children's books under the name P. B. Kerr, including the Children of the Lamp series. Kerr wrote for The Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, and the New Statesman. He was married to fellow novelist Jane Thynne; they lived in Wimbledon, London, and had three children. Just before he died, he finished a 14th Bernie Gunther novel, Metropolis, which was published posthumously, in 2019.

Awards and honours

In 1993, Kerr was named in Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists. In 2009, If the Dead Rise Not won the world's most lucrative crime fiction award, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing worth €125,000. The book also won the British Crime Writers' Association's Ellis Peters Historic Crime Award that same year. His novel, Prussian Blue, was longlisted for the 2018 Walter Scott Prize.

Death

Kerr died at age 62 from bladder cancer on 23 March 2018.

Publications

Novels

Bernie Gunther

Scott Manson novels

Stand alone novels

Non fiction

Children's fiction (as P. B. Kerr)

Children of the Lamp

Stand alone fiction