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Detective Story
  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784872182
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $27.99
Categories:

Detective Story

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 Sept 2017
EBook
1 July 2010
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Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality.

‘A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power’ Times Literary Supplement

From his prison cell, Antonio Martens, an interrogator for the recently fallen dictatorship, awaits execution. His charge? Multiple counts of murder; the murder of those disappeared by the state. Bereft of authority, and unable to avoid the consequences of his actions any longer, Martens turns his story to his involvement in the assassination of the high-profile Salinas family, and with it peers into the murderous mechanics of a regime bent on achieving its ends - no matter the means.
  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784872182
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $27.99
Categories:

About the author

Imre Kertész

Imre Kertesz was born in Budapest in 1929. At age 15 he was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, and finally to a subcamp at Zeitz, to labor in a factory where Nazi scientists were trying to convert coal into motor fuel. Upon liberation in 1945 he worked as a journalist before being fired for not adhering to the Communist party doctrine. After a brief service in the Hungarian Army, he devoted himself to writing, although as a dissident he was forced to live under Spartan circumstances. Nonetheless he stayed in Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, continuing to write plays and fiction in near–anonymity and supporting himself by translating from the German writers such as Joseph Roth, Freud, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. He remained little–known until 1975, when he published his first book, Fatelesseness, a novel about a teenage boy sent to a concentration camp. It became the first book of a trilogy that eventually included The Failure and Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Subsequent titles include Liquidation, Union Jack, and, most recently, a memoir, The File on K. In 2002, Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.
portrait photo of Imre Kertész

Also by Imre Kertész

Fiasco
The Union Jack
Liquidation
Fateless
Kaddish For An Unborn Child
See all

Praise for Detective Story

The narrative is neat, lucid, written with admirable economy

Alan Massie, Scotsman

A dark, disturbing novel, from a writer with a profound understanding of a dictatorship's inner workings

The Times

A sophisticated and brilliant dissection of nihilistic power

Times Literary Supplement

A powerful and troubling new novella

Daily Mail

A suspenceful, bleak comic parable

Observer

One of the most inspired originals at work today...an astonishing performance, as terrifying as Kafka and as plausible...candid and as black as night, remarkable, alluring... How these pages shimmer with irony and astute observation

Irish Times

Compelling, chilling, bitter little sigh of a novel

Scotland on Sunday

A timely moral fable, then, but a gripping story too. With impressive economy, Kertesz creates enough round characters to populate a novel five times as long

Daily Telegraph

Genuinely haunting and lyrical... memorable and thought-provoking

New Statesman

A masterful addition to his other translated novels

Financial Times