The Polish author Marek Krajewski sets readers a knotty challenge in his rich and idiosyncratic Breslau novels. Atmosphere and piquant period detail positively saturate the pages, and push these books into the upper echelons of literary crime. But Krajewski’s cynical, sybaritic Criminal Councillor Eberhard Mock – with his eternally unslaked appetites and cruel brutality to his beautiful wife Sophie – has the reader wondering: do we really want to spend time in the company of this unattractive protagonist? Krajewski, however, has second-guessed this possible objection. Mock, however unappealing, is not as off-putting as many of the characters he encounters in this privileged, decadent society, so we reluctantly accept him as our guide. Death in Breslau (2008) had critics scrabbling for superlatives, and The End of the World in Breslau, published in 2010, gleaned similar endorsements in Danusia Stok’s pellucid translation. 1920s Breslau is a cornucopia of lowlife crime and aristocratic debauchery. Eberhard Mock, locked in a violent relationship with his young wife in a sumptuous mansion, is at home in this society, indulging in its vices with enthusiasm. The body of a man has been discovered bound and walled up alive, another has been dissected, his fingers chopped off. The victims have nothing in common – one is a locksmith, one a musician – but both are found with a calendar page with the date of their death marked in blood. Krajewski’s caustic protagonist takes time off from his disintegrating marriage to plunge headlong into the bordellos, gambling joints and bathhouses of Breslau to track down a particularly savage murderer. Mock is hardly in a position to make too many moral judgements, but even he is given pause by a series of drug-fuelled aristocratic orgies that have been concealed by an ingenious use of hypnosis. Meanwhile, Sophie, chafing at the abuse from her husband, has initiated her own journey of sexual indulgence with her friend Elizabeth – and she comes into contact with a cryptic figure who is somehow feeding the apocalyptic fever sweeping 1920s Breslau.
Those exhausted by crime fiction set in the violent council estates of modern Britain will pounce on this ferocious odyssey into a lost world of decadence, class and deception. It’s not a comfortable journey (particularly in the louche company of its anti-hero Mock), but Krajewski, as before, performs the key function of the skilful novelist: providing an entrée into a world so far from our own that the Breslau depicted here seems like some bizarre science fiction landscape. If you’re looking for an evocation of a more comforting age in your historical crime fiction, you’d better steer well clear of the lacerating narratives of Marek Krajewski.
Sometimes an author arrives sporting an utterly individual style that decisively marks them out from fellow writers; Krajewski is clearly in that august company. Discerning readers are discovering his work, which marries literary weight with sheer narrative nous. Krajewski’s protagonist, Abwehr Captain Eberhard Mock, has long shown signs of becoming an essential travelling companion for many aficionados of crime in translation. The Minotaur’s Head (2012, translated by Danusia Stock) might almost be said to function as a signature book, with all the writer’s virtues shiningly in evidence. Breslau 1939. Eberhard Mock is summoned from a New Year’s Eve party to a notably blood-boltered crime scene which gives even the hardened detective pause. A young girl (who has been suspected of espionage), recently arrived by train from France, is discovered murdered in a hotel room, the skin ripped from her cheek by the teeth of her murderer. In Poland, a series of equally horrific crimes in the same vein has the populace in terror. Mock makes the journey across the border to assist his colleague Commissioner Popielski (with whom he shares a taste for a sybaritic lifestyle and the pleasures of the mind), and this idiosyncratic duo is soon on the trail of a particularly grotesque killer. As in earlier books by Krajewski, it is hard to know what to praise first here: the pithily realised foreign locales, the subtly inflected sense of period or the Ancient Mariner-like storytelling grip. In the final analysis, though, it is probably the luxuriantly realised characterisation of the two slightly eccentric coppers that sounds the most piquant note; their interchanges are one of the particular pleasures of the book.
The publisher Bitter Lemon has long been a barometer for the best crime fiction in translation, and that reputation was consolidated by Entanglement, a trenchant piece of crime writing from Poland. A monastery in Warsaw is the subject of an unforgiving therapy encounter. A man has been murdered, his eye socket transfixed by a roasting spit. Dogged State copper Teodor Szacki is handed the case, and finds he has his hands full with a colourful dramatis personae – not to mention an earlier murder several years ago, when communism was in full flower. This is flinty, quirky crime writing with a pungent sense of locale and a nicely jaded protagonist in Szacki, the past-his-sell-by-date copper energised by the case. Miloszewski is another interesting name for the Bitter Lemon stable.