Meny
Portrait of Philip Kerr © Ed Lederman/PEN American Center
CC BY 2.0

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Kerr, Philip

Philip Kerr was a Scottish author born in Edinburgh. His family were Baptists. Kerr read law and philosophy at the University of Birmingham with a special interest in German philosophy. After graduating he worked for a while as a copywriter until he became a full time novelist at the end of the 1980s. He was married to the author Jane Thynne. The couple had three children and lived in Wimbledon,...

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Literary figures

Penny (Pennington) Wise

Gender: Male

The young and rather self-assured Pennington ‘Penny’ Wise is an artist, as well as a famous – at any rate in the books by Carolyn Wells – ‘psychic’ detective. It means that he solves cases that seem to be inexplicable, and often have supposedly ‘supernatural’ elements. Which do, of course, in the end transpire to have completely natural explanations. His assistant is the teenage film actress Zizi.

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