Greuceanu - Novel with a Policeman

Writer and philosopher Stelian Turlea based his crime fiction 'Greuceanu' on a well-known Romanian fairytale, in which the eponymous hero battles with a number of Zmei [ogres], to bring back to the skies the sun which they had stolen. The novel transposes the fairytale to the reality of a provincial town which has been taken over by gangsters, now the town's masters. Greuceanu is a young policeman, at the bottom of the ladder. By chance, he gets rid of one of the feared gangsters, whose brothers and their wives come after him. Greuceanu defeats them all, and, as in the fairytales, he marries the emperor's daughter - in this case, the daughter of the town's mayor. With the unerring instinct of a popular children's author, Turlea locates, in Greuceanu, one of the major Pan European issues in contemporary times, the problem of organised crime. Turlea's villains are not moustachioed banditos. Instead they are the brothers and sisters of gangsters in every European city centre, and playing as he does with the characters of the town, he explores a number of insights into the role of organised crime in post-Accession civic life.