I haven’t really tackled Polish mystery novels all that
often on this blog. I wrote something about them as a guest post for Beneath the Stains of Time— which was
still known as Detection by Moonlight
at the time. And last year I read a book by “Joe Alex”, a Polish author named
Maciej Słomczyński who was the only person to have translated all of
Shakespeare’s works. I hope that this year I’ll be able to cross the language
barrier a bit more often and give readers a small taste of the stuff that is
currently being written in Polish… and hey, we might even get a novel that
slips through the cracks and gets translated into English.
What are the odds of that
happening, you might ask? Well, the odds are better than you might imagine,
because I’ve found one. Zygmunt Miłoszewski is an award-winning Polish author,
author of one of the few Polish crime novels to cross the language barrier into
English. The novel is Uwikłanie,
translated as Entanglement and published
by the Bitter Lemon Press in 2010.
The setting is modern-day Poland and our hero is Teodor
Szacki, a public prosecutor in the nation’s capital, Warsaw. He’s about 35 or
thereabouts, and he’s married and has a daughter. He’s also got a tough job, one
that can get depressing as hell. Take this latest case, for instance. A body
was found in a Catholic convent, rented as a retreat centre. At the time, it
was being used by a psychotherapist for a weekend of group therapy sessions,
where each session revolved around a different person. The point of each
session was for the participants to role-play as important people in X’s life,
and X would have to come to terms with [insert your favourite psychological
issue here]. One pseudo-scientific explanation later, we find out that a child’s
heart disease can be caused by his father’s failure to attend his parents’
funeral. Sounds like a fun time!
