Inspector Mortka is someone I would really not like to meet. He is a grizzled, grumbling, old school detective in the style of Morse, but with a worse temper, prone to violence, breaking the rules, ignoring his bosses, failing to make payments to his divorced wife, not really enjoying being with his kids, in short, a bit of a bastard, but, as is the way in detective novels, he is the one who solves the crimes that others can't or don't want to puzzle out. Plus his sidekick, Kochan, is a rude drunken type, suspected of beating his wife and child. So, none of the genteel sleuthing of Midsomer Murders here; we are in snowy, grimy Warsaw and life is tough for everyone except, of course, the big cheeses, within or outside the law.
Pyromane by Wojciech Chmielarz is an excellent, bleak and gritty police novel, full of interesting characters and plot twists and turns. There are no heroes in this story, but there is a extensive range of flawed personalities
. The bad news is, that as far as I can tell from the Amazon and Waterstones websites, Pyromane has not yet been translated into English, nor have any of the other handful of books Chmielarz has written. I found this edition in French on the foreign language shelves at Watford Central library. In the back it advertises that another Mortka story has been published in French in 2018: I shall keep an eye out for it.
Just to add that I have been reading French novels off and on since I took an A level French course in the 1980s, never sat the exam, other things in my life swept away that ambition, but I enjoyed reading the set books and have kept going, mainly with thrillers; I cut my teeth on Maigret stories, but have chewed through many other books since. Nowadays reading foreign languages is made so much easier by the help from Google translate, which is always in your pocket when you carry a smartphone around. That reminds me: when I was taking history at Reading University, one of the European History lecturers announced that all his students should be able to read articles in any Romance language with the aid of a dictionary. He promptly gave a us a reading list including texts in almost every European language you have ever heard of e.g. a piece on the outbreak of the First World War in Serbo-Croat. Not sure I ever read any of them!
I will keep my eye out for an Inspector Mortka novel in English; I think many people would enjoy this book.
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