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selenakNot the kind of fannish content I wanted to post, alas, but: I learned via the internet that yesterday, novelist Phiip Kerr died. I only discovered Kerr as a writer last year for myself, having been made curious by this article in The New Yorker. (Warning: it's pretty spoilery for the novel it reviews, Prussian Blue.) I read the first Bernie Gunther novel, March Violets, and then I had enough time at my hands, so I fell into the rabbit hole and read the rest of the Bernie Gunther series, all eleven of them, and Kerr's children's novel Frederick the Great Detective to boot. By which you may gather I really was captivated by those novels.
It's always an odd relationship one has as a reader with a novelist; there's no way of knowing what the person behind the book is like; maybe they are okay, maybe they are jerks, and when you're in really bad luck, they turn out to have been fine with child abuse, but in any case, their creations sparked something in you, made you think and feel, and so it's impossible to be indifferent to their existence despite the fact they're strangers you'll never meet. (Most likely. I did meet a couple of novelists whose books I encountered first in my time.) So: I have no idea what Philip Kerr was like as a person, but I feel sad he's gone now.
It's always an odd relationship one has as a reader with a novelist; there's no way of knowing what the person behind the book is like; maybe they are okay, maybe they are jerks, and when you're in really bad luck, they turn out to have been fine with child abuse, but in any case, their creations sparked something in you, made you think and feel, and so it's impossible to be indifferent to their existence despite the fact they're strangers you'll never meet. (Most likely. I did meet a couple of novelists whose books I encountered first in my time.) So: I have no idea what Philip Kerr was like as a person, but I feel sad he's gone now.
