![]() ![]() While working on the third volume in his crime series, Miłoszewski published Priceless (2013), a thriller with a plot centred on the search for Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, which went missing during the Second World War. Using Sandomierz in 2009 as his model, Miłoszewski superbly recreates the mentality of a provincial town, exposes the means by which prejudices are formed (not just racial ones), and shows the dangerous power of stereotypes. Now he is working in Sandomierz, where there is an eighteenth-century painting hanging in the local cathedral that shows Jews committing the ritual murder of Christian children. For good reasons, Miłoszewski has made Prosecutor Szacki leave Warsaw. Once again, a conventional crime plot (involving a mysterious murder) is intensified by an issue of public concern (in this case anti-Semitism). ![]() This novel continues the creative method he had elaborated for Entanglement. Another issue at the heart of the novel is the state’s failure to bring members of the secret police to book for their past crimes, or on a wider scale, the scandalous neglect of decommunisation and exposure of communist-era collaboration.Ī few years later, once Entanglement had transferred to the cinema screen (2010, directed by Jacek Bromski), Miłoszewski’s next crime novel, A Grain of Truth (2011), appeared, the second in the Szacki series. The entanglement of the title takes various forms the main topic is political intrigue, or rather political crime, because the central murder under investigation – committed in 2005 – turns out to have links with the criminal activities of a special unit of the communist-era secret police dating back to 1978. But the success of the novel was clinched by a different quality – the care devoted to the sub-plots. ![]() Once again, though new to the genre, he had an excellent sense of it: Entanglement has everything a well shaped, suspense-filled crime novel should have (a complex investigation, a clear-cut hero in the foreground, in other words a smart detective, and his personal trials and tribulations, in this case an affair with an attractive woman, etc). Not surprisingly, his next publication was a short novel for children, The Adder Mountains (2006), an unusual book in terms of form, combining elements of the classic fairy tale with fantasy, and to some extent it is also a pastiche.īut the turning point in Miłoszewski’s literary career came with his next novel, Entanglement (2007), the first part of a crime trilogy starring Prosecutor Teodor Szacki, which gained positive reviews and a large readership. True to the rules of the genre, strange things start to happen that disturb the bourgeois idyll at first they’re just unsettling, but soon they become grisly in the extreme.įrom the very start, Miłoszewski steered clear of highbrow literature recognising that his skills lay within the sphere of popular fiction, he set about proving that he was capable of taking up any challenge. The action is set in the present day, and the main characters are a young married couple who have moved into a modern block of flats on a Warsaw housing estate. Miłoszewski handled the genre very well, producing a neatly constructed, convincing novel with all the right ingredients. His first novel, The Entryphone (2005), is an ambitious attempt at the classic horror story, a form of fantasy fiction that is poorly represented in Polish literature. His first publication was a short story submitted to a literary competition organised by the weekly news magazine Polityka. Ovelist and screenwriter Zygmunt Miłoszewski was born in Warsaw in 1976.
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