No-crime zone, Part II (Croatia)

Here in Split on the Dalmatian coast, residents love their city and country and are fond of sailing, staying out late, and reading lots of books. The latter does not include not much crime fiction other than the occasional Agatha Christie, though, according to a native informant. Though Split missed the heaviest fighting during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, enough activity spilled over into Split and the waters of the Adriatic to have generated some war-zone crime writing a la Philp Kerr or Don Fesperman.

Of course, neither of those two novelists is a native of the war and post-war zones about which he wrote. Perhaps people who have recently lived through war have other things to do than write detective stories about it. Maybe Croatia needs a few more years as peaceful, "normal" country (May it happen speedily and soon!) before its authors begin to discover possibilities in crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007