A Life Less Damnable

Jack Roberts’s detective novel is set in Szeged, in the South of Hungary in 2000 and it represents the symbiosis of political and personal life in post-Communist Hungary in a university context. When the retired professor of history dies, the question of motive is this: was the crime committed because of political or personal reasons, and the reconstruction of the crime follows up both agendas in minute detail. The text relies on the framework of the hard-boiled detective novel to expose a difficult moral dilemma of manipulation and being manipulated through tightly composed psychological close-ups worthy of a Modernist novel. This mix of features results in a very much regional but at the same time philosophical novel.