The End of the World in Breslau: Krajewski, Kafka, and aspic

The good folks at Melville House, whose international crime list includes Detectives Beyond Borders stalwarts such as Derek Raymond and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, among many crime writers you ought to be reading, hit the street today with Marek Krajewski's The End of the World in Breslau.

End of the World ... is the second of Krajewski's five novels about about cop and counsellor Eberhard Mock to be translated from Polish into English and the first that I'm reading. A Wikipedia article calls the books "Chandleresque," but the opening pages are both stark and deadpan funny, more like Kafka meets Ken Bruen.

In particular, Krajewski has a knack for juxtapositions humorous in their oddity:

"`Turn it down and stop jumping about at the wheel,' the passenger said ... `We're not in Africa, on some banana plantation.'

"`Motherfucking racist.' Mynors' words were drowned out by the happy chorus ..."

or

"Rast sprang away as Erwin all but demolished the door as he fled the room. The boy thrust a cap onto his head, wrenched on his somewhat too tight coat and ran into the street.

"`Here is the dessert, ladies and gentlemen: Silesian poppy cake.'"

This, I think, is what critics mean when they write that a novel has texture. I think I'll enjoy reading more of it. (Speaking of texture, one of Melville House's irrepressible marketing force has this to say about the Breslau series: "One of these days I'm just going to go through those books and count how many things embedded in aspic they eat.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Good sentences, period.

Catering to the proverbially shrinking attention span of today's readers (but really to that of this blog's writer), here are some enjoyable excerpts from Detectives Beyond Borders' recent crime reading. Who says context is everything?

"Smolorz, you'll draw up a list of all private menageries in Breslau and the neighboring regions, also a list of eccentrics who sleep with anacondas."

— Marek Krajewski, Death in Breslau 

"The dick books ["Dick books" = true-crime pulp magazines. ed.] are shot. I figured I'd hang on till I retire, but I don't see them lasting five years."

— Joseph Koenig, False Negative 

"The puns and double entendres that he purged from his writing he saved for Greenstein, who mistook him for a wit."

— ibid. 

"He'd considered himself the glue that held the Press together, and was disappointed in a way that it hadn't fallen apart immediately without him."

 — ibid. 

"Sneaking in back doors was for weak men and Canadians."

—Johnny Shaw, "Blood and Tacos,"  featuring Chingón, the World's Deadliest Mexican 

"In ten minutes I had a clean and tight dressing on my ear and he hadn't spoken once about the Bhagavad Gita."

—Eric Beetner, Dig Two Graves 

"(N)either man felt like chatting. Instead their silence included Lars neglecting to tell Trent that the green salsa was the hottest one."

— Eric Beetner, The Devil Doesn't Want Me

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Yet another place for crime fiction

I should have mentioned this earlier, but Norm of Crime Scraps, one of the foremost former dentists in the world of crime fiction, posted a worthwhile interview here and here with Marek Krajewski a few weeks back. Among the remarks from the author of Death in Breslau:

"In Poland between the wars there was a very faint tradition of crime writing, then, during the communist period authors were writing under pseudonyms [most often English, eg. Joe Alex = Maciej Slomczynski, a popular translator of Shakespeare] or created ideologically loaded police novels.

"The situation changed after 1989, now we have many Polish crime writers, including me."

I'm always interested in the origins of crime fiction in a given country, especially if those origins are recent. I have read a theory that German crime fiction did not get going until the 1960s because the country's dreadful recent history made Germans skittish about portraying lawbreakers. And it was Boris Akunin, if memory serves, who said that the Russian public, who had once read and discussed just the classics, turned to crime fiction only after the Soviet Union fell apart. Then there are the Palestinian territories, where Matt Rees has said an interviewer had to explain to readers the concept of investigating a crime and seeking the truth.

What about you, readers? What interesting stories and theories have you heard about national crime-fiction traditions and how they began?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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