Bernie Gunther Books in Order
Part ofPhilip Kerr Books in OrderSee all the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr in order, with story summaries, series timeline, historical background and tips on where to start reading.
Last updated: June 7, 2026
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Publication Order
14 books
March Violets
by Philip Kerr
1989
In 1936 Berlin, ex cop turned private investigator Bernie Gunther is hired by an industrialist to recover a stolen diamond necklace and look into the deaths of his daughter and son in law. The job drags Bernie into Nazi power games, Gestapo attention and a brutal visit to Dachau.
The Pale Criminal
by Philip Kerr
1990
Set in 1938, Bernie Gunther is blackmailed back into official work and forced to investigate a serial killer targeting blond German girls while also handling a sordid blackmail case. As he hunts the murderer he has to navigate Gestapo rivalries and the growing madness of the regime.
A German Requiem
by Philip Kerr
1991
In the winter of 1947, Bernie travels to ruined Vienna to help an old police colleague accused of killing an American officer. Among Allied occupiers, ex Nazis and black marketeers, he uncovers a web of espionage and escape networks that shows the war is far from over.
The One from the Other
by Philip Kerr
2006
Munich, 1949. Working again as a private eye, Bernie is hired to find a missing SS war criminal and confirm whether he is dead. The search leads him through amnesty campaigns, Vatican and American escape routes and Jewish vengeance groups, forcing him to decide who deserves his help.
A Quiet Flame
by Philip Kerr
2008
After being mistaken for a war criminal, Bernie is smuggled to Buenos Aires in 1950 and given a new identity by the Perón government. Local police push him into investigating a mutilated girl and a missing banker’s daughter, crimes that echo an unsolved Berlin case from before the war.
If The Dead Rise Not
by Philip Kerr
2009
As house detective at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon in 1934, Bernie juggles a stolen Chinese box, a dead body and a glamorous American journalist while Olympic contracts are quietly fixed around him. Twenty years later in Batista’s Havana, an old flame and a vicious gangster drag him back into that unfinished story.
Field Gray
by Philip Kerr
2010
In 1954 Bernie finds himself in American custody and is grilled about his wartime past. His story unfolds through flashbacks that take him from prewar Berlin to the Eastern Front, French prisons and Soviet labour camps, as he is repeatedly forced to choose between survival and complicity.
Prague Fatale
by Philip Kerr
2011
In 1941 Bernie is summoned by Reinhard Heydrich to a country estate outside Prague, where Nazi officials gather for a weekend of drinking and intrigue. When murder strikes inside the heavily guarded house, Bernie must untangle personal grudges and political loyalties before the Protector of Bohemia loses patience.
A Man Without Breath
by Philip Kerr
2013
It is 1943 and Bernie has been drafted into the Wehrmacht’s War Crimes Bureau. Sent to Smolensk to investigate mass graves in the Katyn Forest, he is meant to produce a verdict useful for Nazi propaganda, but instead finds himself pulled into army plots against Hitler and fresh killings at the front.
The Lady from Zagreb
by Philip Kerr
2015
Ordered by Joseph Goebbels to assist a dazzling Croatian film star, Bernie is drawn into her search for an estranged father and into the propaganda machinery of the Third Reich. The trail takes him from Berlin studios to war torn Yugoslavia and neutral Switzerland, where personal desire clashes with political horror.
The Other Side of Silence
by Philip Kerr
2016
On the French Riviera in 1956, a world weary Bernie is working as a hotel concierge when writer and former spy Somerset Maugham asks for help with a blackmailer. What begins as a discreet favour soon entangles Bernie in Cold War secrets, old betrayals and a dangerous woman with her own agenda.
Prussian Blue
by Philip Kerr
2017
Bernie is on the run from the East German Stasi in 1956, trying to slip out of France before his pursuers catch up. As he travels, he remembers an earlier assignment in 1939 at Hitler’s mountain retreat in Bavaria, where he had just days to solve a politically explosive shooting.
Greeks Bearing Gifts
by Philip Kerr
2018
In 1957 Bernie has reinvented himself as an insurance claims investigator in Munich. A case involving a sunken ship takes him to Athens, where questions about wartime looting, missing Jewish gold and a murdered former Wehrmacht sailor pull him into the shadow of old atrocities and new enemies.
Metropolis
by Philip Kerr
2019
Berlin, 1928. Newly promoted from Vice to the Murder Commission, young Bernie Gunther is thrown into a city of veterans, cabarets and rising political thugs. As he chases a killer scalping prostitutes and another targeting disabled ex soldiers, he begins to understand the darkness gathering around him.
Series background & context
The Bernie Gunther novels follow a Berlin detective whose life tracks some of the darkest decades of the twentieth century. The books mix classic hard boiled storytelling with meticulous historical detail, so you always feel the pressure of real events around the cases.
At the heart of the series is Bernie himself, an ex policeman with a sharp tongue, a stubborn sense of fairness and no interest in joining the Nazi Party. In March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem he moves from private work in 1930s Berlin into the ruins of postwar Vienna, discovering that corruption and cruelty survive whatever uniforms people happen to wear. Later, in Metropolis, we see his first days on the Berlin Murder Commission in 1928, chasing a serial killer in the dim light of Weimar cabarets.
Across the fourteen novels Kerr deliberately scrambles chronology. One book might drop Bernie into the Hotel Adlon in 1934, investigating stolen jewels and a suspicious death while Olympic contracts are quietly fixed. Another sends him to Buenos Aires in 1950, where a mutilated body on the streets of Perón’s Argentina echoes an unsolved Berlin killing. In Field Gray he is yanked back and forth between CIA interrogators in the 1950s and earlier episodes on the Eastern Front and in Soviet camps.
What ties it all together is Bernie’s job. Sometimes he is a private eye, sometimes a Kripo homicide man, sometimes a reluctant SS officer or a hotel concierge who cannot help asking questions. The cases begin as blackmail investigations, missing persons or single murders. They almost always swell into something larger, touching war crimes, resistance networks, Olympic propaganda, or the early manoeuvres of the Cold War.
Real historical figures walk in and out of the books. Reinhard Heydrich, Joseph Goebbels, Erich Mielke and even Somerset Maugham share scenes with fictional gangsters, film stars and ordinary Berliners. Kerr uses those encounters to show how ideology, vanity and simple self interest shape the choices people make when the law itself has been twisted.
For new readers, one easy route is to start with the original Berlin Noir trilogy, then move on to The One from the Other and A Quiet Flame as Bernie is pushed out of Germany. Others like to begin with a later, wider angle novel such as If The Dead Rise Not or Prussian Blue and then loop back. However you approach it, the series offers a long, bleakly funny journey through history seen from eye level.
The mood is often sardonic and occasionally very dark, but the books are driven less by shock than by curiosity. Bernie keeps asking how much room is left for decency in a corrupt system, and every investigation gives a slightly different answer.
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