Tangled Web UK Review April 2008
Death in Breslau by
Marek Krajewski
hbk out March 08
Published by Quercus
at £12.99
There have been few protagonists in crime fiction, it is probably safe to say, quite like Kriminaldirektor Eberhard Mock, of the Police Praesidium in the German city of Breslau.
We first meet him at Madame le Goef’s partly police-funded out-of-town brothel during his regular Friday night session playing chess with two obliging young women ("every successful move was assigned a specific erotic configuration" and is celebrated upon the nearby sofa). On this occasion however "whilst playing out an interesting Sicilian defence", he is interrupted by the arrival of an assistant. The 17 year-old daughter of a local aristocratic family has been found on the Berlin-Breslau train raped and murdered, her governess violated and the corpses of both the girl and one of the carriage staff infested with scorpions. The carriage walls are daubed with a mysterious script, written in blood.
Mock’s considered course of action, after first setting in motion his initial investigation, is to fit up one of the local villains with the crime. Morse, or even Rebus, he is not. But this is 1933, Nazism rules and Mock must continually steer a course between the Masonic interests of the local aristocracy to which Mock owes his position, and the Nazis eager to discredit (and worse) anyone who gets in their way. Mock’s dilemma is in fact solved by the Gestapo themselves. They torture a confession from an epileptic Jewish importer of exotic pets and promote Mock as the price of his silence. But Mock’s patron is far from satisfied...
So far, so good. The tone is European noir, the atmosphere fetid, cloying and corrupt. But Krajewski is a lecturer in Classical Studies at the University of Wroclaw, once German Breslau before it was reallocated to Poland in the territorial reshuffles after World War II. His predilections result positively in adding depth and complexity to the striking character of Mock (along with Anhaldt, his alcoholic sidekick) but negatively in the introduction of an excessively baroque sub-plot (shades of both Dan Brown and Umberto Eco) to explain the initial murder. Academic rivalries follow, along with differing interpretations of the script found at the murder scene. All this adds colour to the narrative, but also slows it down. Similarly Krajewski’s secondary project, to restore the topographical splendours of 30s Breslau, occasionally borders on the obsessive.
Not at times then an easy read, and not helped by the occasional clumsiness of the prose (or perhaps the translation). Finally however, what wins out is Krajewski’s often violent, sensual or hallucinatory vision of a city heaving with the conflicts of intellect and libido, culture and ideology. Unique and fascinating. The remaining three books in the Mock quartet should be worth exploring.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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