I was entertained by the colorful cast of screwed-up characters, and I thought the far-fetched plot was fun. Krajewski liked to give us detailed directions whenever a character went from one location to another. I wasn't so impressed by those GPS moments, but overall the novel moved quickly and was enjoyable. I would definitely read more books in the series.

I’ve heard a lot about Marek Krajewski and I knew he must be great writer as his book were translated into english. Literature isn’t common export in Poland, so if polish book is translated into english, it means it must be good. I got “Death in Breaslau” as a gift so it was great opportunity to finally dig into Krajewski’s work.

“Death in Breslau” starts with really good prologue. It’s plants interest in you and makes you automatically go to first chapter for more. Personally, for me it was even more attention chaining as prologue is set in asylum and I’m fascinated by madness and mental diseases.

Whole history takes place just before II World War in german city Breslau (today it’s polish Wrocław). Plot is built over two main characters - Eberhard Mock and Herbert Anwaldt. They’re both policemans with dark pasts which is often dragged up to show what made them people they are now. Though we get to know almost all their sins and dim motives, you find yourself actually liking them and keeping their side whatever they do. Relationship between Mock and Anwaldt is interesting itself; they become somehow like father and son which is for them weird and alleviating at the same time; Mock always wanted to have kids but never had whilst Anwaldt is and orphan which dreamt about having at least one true parent all his life.

The main thread is a ritual murder of Marietta von der Malten - a daugther of aristocrat - which becomes a burden for Mock and Anwaldt. But the real solution turns out to be even more troublesome…

Book is full of sexuality, naturalism and psychological deliberations. Sex becames a factor which you cannot ingore while reading the book and some readers maybe disgust more than once and not only because of it. What I found the most irritating were the descriptions of city. Too many german names of streets made me skip half-a-page too many times. Even though I found Krajewski’s style strange (I cannot find any other word) I enjoyed reading his book and got myself involved in it.

blog review
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Marek Krajewski is a Polish classical philologist and expert in Latin linguistics. His series of detective novels about Eberhard Mock received awards for best crime stories. Death in Breslau is part of that series, and, God help me, I don’t know why he got the awards.

Just a short overview of the plot before I get on with eviscerating the book. A girl brutally is murdered on a train and there are strange letters written on the train cart, and there are also scorpions around. The events take place in Wroclaw (Breslau) under Nazi rule. The chief detective is Eberhard Mock and Herbert Anwaldt. There’s Gestapo involvement, possible secret societies, conspiracy theories, torture, drugs and old cars. All in all a good recipe for a page turner. But NO, it most definitely is not!

I’m gonna give you my reasons in bullet point form (because I’ll be imagining each bullet point being an actual bullet piercing the book, and perhaps the editor and the translator)

- Each chapter is divided into sub-chapters that have titles like this: “Dresden, Monday, July 17th, 1950 / five o’clock in the afternoon” and the following is the same as that one only with the time stamp of midnight. If your narration doesn’t make it clear to the reader that time has progressed by several hours, you are a bad writer and/or you have an idiot for an editor.

-There are random italicized segments of text in parentheses that just make no sense: “Into the ruined tomb peers a hairy goat”. They are not thoughts of the character, neither are they comments from the narrator. They don’t add anything to the plot or to the atmosphere. They just stand there, staring at you like “exiled children.” And in other places the text in the parenthesis is not italicized, but there is no difference between the two!

- Every couple of pages there is some kind of interrogation but there are NEVER any answers from the suspects, just the reactions from the investigators. I know that Poirot was a master at reading between the lines, but even he needed some lines to read between!

- Idiotic phrases/words that make no sense: “blue-black of the azure vault” (do you even know colours), “[he] attacked the mucous membrane of his stomach with nicotine” (= he lit a cigarette) (How the fuck does he smoke? Does he swallow instead of inhale?)

- Endless descriptions that lead to nowhere – several paragraphs on a drive down a road and at the end of the drive— nothing.

- giving the exact brands of the cigarettes a character smokes. It’s not one brand, so we might get a clearer image of the character, but DIFFERENT brands!

- Really really bad writing/translation: “Anwaldt gave a start and experienced the action of that hormone which, in human beings, is responsible for making bodily hair stand on end.” This is just, I don’t know. It’s like it was written by an AI. D00d! do you even human?!

- Using the same unusual word in two consecutive sentences: “quivering;” using the same phrase in two consecutive paragraphs: “despite the early hour”
and the pièce de résistance

- A HALF PAGE LONG VERBATIM REPETITION OF A CONVERSATION! Verbatim! A whole conversation! 11 pages apart! WHY!? WHY?

I just, I just can’t any more. There are so many more things that were wrong with this, and please, have in mind that this book is less than 250 pages long!

This book just shows us that not everyone should publish/edit/translate. Perhaps they should try being lawyers, that way I won’t get angry at them and try to find them and shoot them.

You know what, perhaps I should have been drunk or high while reading this… perhaps…

I love reading crime fiction from other countries, so I eagerly snapped up this first book of a Polish series featuring a police detective working in the German city of Breslau in the years leading up to World War II. As the city (including the police department) is carved up into fiefdoms representing different factions of German politics, the bodies of two women are found on a train. One of them is the teenage daughter of a prominent Baron, and with the murder pinned on a Jew, Inspector Mock sets out to uncover the truth.

As a guide to pre-war Breslau's streets, brothels, bars, and political intrigues, the book is a great success. Very evocative and detailed, even if trying to keep track of just who is allied with who among the mix of characters requires a scorecard. However, as a crime story, it left a lot of be desired. There's a lot of tooing and froing, and threatening and torturing people in the service of justice, but it's kind of hard to care about any of it.

Mock is kind of a nasty antihero, and his sidekick is mostly a nonentity. There are a few colorful characters here and there, but mostly the book is populated with the lost and damned -- drug users, Nazi sympathizers, obsolete Prussian aristocrats, and the like. And when the killings are eventually tied back to the Crusades and the Yazdis, I threw up my hands in frustrated disbelief at the silly conceit.

If the time period and setting is what intrigues, you're better off seeking the first three of Phillip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series, packaged as the Berlin Trilogy. I'll be skipping the rest of this Inspector Mock series and moving on to try a different Polish crime series, featuring a state prosecutor, starting with Entanglement.

A stunning mystery. 1934, Breslau, Germany. Engaging characters. Suspenseful plot. Brilliantly translated. The first in a series of four.