Che Committed Suicide

"So on this imaginary trip to Greece, if you have young children and you’re mainly on the beach, this is the book to read. You can read a chapter at a time, a page at a time, put it down and pick it up. It’s your classic whodunnit detective story. The protagonist is a detective who is normally investigating a series of murders. His job is to figure out who’s doing it and uncover the context. Nearly every time, it’s something to do with modern Greek society, with its neoliberal elements, that’s uncovered in the process of trying to solve the crimes. Che Committed Suicide is one of his earlier ones and was very successful (‘Che’ refers to Che Guevara). For complicated reasons, a series of highly successful entrepreneurs are forced to commit suicide in public. It’s a form of blackmail, and he doesn’t know why. [SPOILER ALERT]. It turns out that they had all been left-wingers in the 70s. They’d been at the forefront of overthrowing the junta, demonstrating against the police state, etc. Then, through the left, they made their way into the higher echelons of society. They made lots of money, threw away their morals, and sacrificed their comrades and society as a whole in order to gorge on the wealth of Greek society at the expense of everybody else. These former left-wing radicals are now entrepreneurs who eat sushi and things like that. The detective is very Greek and lower middle class. He likes his food. He has a traditional marriage with his wife, with the usual back and forth. He’s completely dedicated to his daughter. With his traditional Greek eye, he uncovers this new society that’s unfolding around him. Later on, Petros Markaris did another series about the economic crisis, which was catastrophic for Greece. All of his books have a tendency to be about uncovering something rotten in the socioeconomics of modern society. In his case, it’s about Greece, but it’s pretty much recognizable to anybody."