Under the pitiless sun, a lengthy tradition of Grecian crime and murder stretches back to the bloodletting of Greek tragedy and continues in the work of such novelists as Petros Markaris. Over the years, the Scottish-born crime writer Paul Johnston has proved to be one of the most protean practitioners in the field, the effortless master of a variety of genres. Many readers fondly remember his near-future thrillers featuring eccentric detective Quintilian Dalrymple. But given the author’s long residence in Greece, it’s hardly surprising that some of his finest writing has involved this sun-baked country. A good example is the recent The Black Life, a strongly written novel told in alternating chapters which sets present day Greece against the years of the Holocaust. Johnston’s protagonist, half-Greek, half-Scottish private eye Alex Mavros, is the perfect conduit through the bifurcated narrative, which is as much an examination of Greek identity as it is of the horrors of the Second World War. The book is both truthful and (occasionally) excoriating about the writer’s adopted country, but Greece is now clearly embedded in the DNA of this talented novelist. Which is why I asked Paul (never slow to voice an opinion) for a snapshot of crime à la grecque. He told me: ‘Crime writing in modern Greece has a shorter history than in other European countries, but has made up for that in recent years. An interesting forerunner is The Murderess (1903) by Alexandros Papadiamandis, described by the author as “a social novel”. It certainly is that – the main issue being the harsh lives of island women – but the story is also a meditation on crime and punishment and a skilful psychological analysis of the old woman, Frangoyiannou, who kills infant girls to save them from lives of toil. Papadiamandis is often seen as the Greek Dostoyevsky. Many late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels in the ethnographic tradition describe criminal activities, but usually at the familial and village level. It was only with the influx of over a million Greeks from Turkey in the early 1920s that industry and the urban conditions for crime fiction were established. Such was the political control over the heavily policed pre-World War Two society that crime only really featured in the “rebetika” musical tradition, often compared with the blues in its concentration on the poor, the outcast and small-time criminals. Illicit love and drugs are often the subjects of songs, the instrumentation based on the plangent notes of bouzouki and baglamas.
‘Post-war Greece saw the development of pulp crime fiction, available from pavement kiosks rather than bookshops. The undisputed godfather of Greek crime writing was Yannis Maris (pseudonym of the left-wing journalist Yannis Tsirimokos, 1916–79) who was the author of The Man on the Train (1958). Starting in 1953, he wrote over forty short and well-plotted novels that have only recently been accepted as classics of the genre. His detective, Inspector Bekas, became an institution and has inspired a contemporary TV series. Maris was also an inspiration for Petros Markaris (b. 1937), whose Inspector Haritos is the best known current fictional detective in Greece. His novels – such as Zone Defence, The Late-Night News and Che Committed Suicide – have been translated into English and numerous other continental languages. Haritos is an engaging character, devoted to his daughter, keen on his wife’s cooking and a habitual reader of the dictionary, but also smart and dogged, if rather conventional. He has been accurately described as the Greek Maigret. More recently Markaris has written a trilogy about the Greek financial crisis. Numerous sacred cows are skewered and social concerns are to the fore. In Greece everything is political and Markaris’s hugely popular works show how disillusioned people have become with the establishment.
‘Greek crime fiction now attracts attention from serious publishers and reviewers – probably more so as regards the latter than in the UK. In 2010 the Greek Crime Writers’ Club was set up and now has around 30 members. Much of their work is worthy of translation and covers many aspects of historical and modern Greece. While crime fiction was traditionally seen as a summer beach read, it now has year-round appeal. Sergios Gakas has written a fine example of Greek noir: his Ashes (2011) reeks of graft, violence and the need for revenge. And two literary novelists who use the tropes of crime fiction are also worthy of note: Alexis Stamatis’s Bar Flaubert (2006) has a protagonist in search of himself via a mysterious manuscript; while Ioanna Bourazopoulou’s What Lot’s Wife Saw (2013), which won the Athens Prize for Literature, is a blend of, among other things, Thomas Pynchon and Agatha Christie. Finally, it is striking that a large amount of foreign crime fiction is translated into Greek. Andreas Apostolides, as well as producing excellent novels such as Lobotomy, 2002, has translated James Ellroy and numerous other writers. This means that readers of crime fiction in Greece are well informed about the genre internationally, and writers primed to adapt the best models to the local milieu.’
We should consider in more detail one of the novelists mentioned above by Paul Johnston. Petros Markaris was born in Istanbul in 1937 and lived in Athens, where he became Director of the National Book Centre of Greece. His bestsellers are published in 14 languages, with The Late-Night News and Zone Defence published in the UK by Harvill Secker, while Che Committed Suicide and Basic Shareholder were published by Arcadia Books. My ex-literary editor at the Independent, Boyd Tonkin, was fulsome in his praise. ‘Markaris is no formula-bound hack,’ he said, ‘but a versatile author who, in his mysteries, turns the hero’s sleuthing into a spotlight on a fast-changing Greek society.’ Che Committed Suicide, translated from the Greek by David Connolly, is a contemporary crime novel, a book that examines the social fabric of Greece today, a country still very much at the top of the news agenda, although, perhaps, for all the wrong reasons. It’s 30 years after the end of the military dictatorship, and former Junta-opponent Favieros is a successful man. His building company is flourishing and preparations for the 2004 Olympic Games are in full flow. What, then, has made him decide to shoot himself on live television in front of a million viewers? Nobody suspects foul play, with the exception of the methodical Inspector Costas Haritos, on medical leave, and looking for any excuse to relieve his boredom and to escape the suffocating atmosphere at home. The event awakens his curiosity, and propels him to launch his own investigation. Then, when two equally spectacular public suicides – of a politician and a famous journalist – take place, indifference turns to panic amongst the police, who have little to go on. Inspector Haritos is called upon to help unveil the secrets buried in the victims’ past, and it seems that the key to the mystery is inextricably linked to the political scene in modern-day Greece, examined in nuance and intriguing fashion by Markaris.
Winner of the Athens Prize for Literature in 2008, the bizarre What Lot’s Wife Saw (translated by Yiannis Panas) is set in a post-apocalyptic world, ruled by a mysterious business consortium where commerce has replaced belief: a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. The book heralds an unusual talent in Ioanna Bourazopoulou who weaves a fabulist sensibility, crime tropes, sociopolitical critique and linguistic wordplay into a heady but surprisingly nourishing brew. It’s been twenty-five years since the Overflow flooded Southern Europe, drowning Rome, Vienna and Istanbul, and turning Paris into a major port. At the Dead Sea, the earth has opened up to reveal a strange violet salt to which the world has become addicted, and a colony has been established by the mysterious Consortium of Seventy-Five to control the supply. Run by murderers, fugitives and liars, the Colony is a haven to those fleeing Europe, especially the privileged ‘Purple Stars’. But when the governor of the Colony dies suddenly and mysteriously, the six officials turn on each other, sparking a terrifying chain of events. Tensions and old enmities are reignited as the leaderless officials battle each other, threatening the Colony’s very existence. In Europe, Phileas Book, the greatest crossword compiler of his age and creator of the ‘Epistleword’, is recruited by the sinister Consortium. Presented with the epistolary confessions of the six, he is ordered to sift truth from lies. Who killed the unpopular Governor Bera? What happened in the Colony? And why is Phileas Book the only one who can solve the mystery?
What Lot’s Wife Saw, occasionally incoherent, is still an iconoclastic, exuberantly written novel about the layers of guilt and regret that beset the human psyche. A massive bestseller in Greece, it is a darkly sardonic parable with an Old Testament morality at its heart.