Deadline in Athens

"The significance of Petros Markaris is not that he writes crime novels that are very mysterious. His career rests on the way that he describes everyday life in Athens. The mystery is an alibi, a way of talking about ordinary people in an ordinary city that is not New York, London or Paris. He knows and loves the city itself. He’s a very urban novelist, and the fact that so many people in so many counties read Markaris proves that Athens and the Athenian life can attract foreigners. This novel, the first in a series, focuses on the murder of a prominent TV journalist, struck down in the studio just before she was due to break some very sensitive news. Inspector Costas Haritos, a junta-trained homicide squad leader, is called to the scene. He’s a very conflicted character, racked with regrets over a dark past in which he almost certainly assisted the military regime in the torture of leftist prisoners; married to a woman with no aim apart from to watch the next soap opera but father to a fiercely ambitious daughter at law school; and bemoans the loss of Greek traditions while loving imported foods. He seems in many ways to be an embodiment of the awkward symbiosis of past and present, idealism or myths and reality you’ve described. “The main character of Markaris’s novel is Athens, the city itself” He’s a typical Greek character, a middle-aged guy. You can’t say he’s extremely well educated but he knows many things. He’s an ordinary person, not especially good-looking or brave. He lives like a petit-bourgeois in Greece. He’s a nice person, over all, with a wife and daughter. And at the same time, he solves mysteries. He has these small passions, you know, like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple; and one of these small passions is for dictionaries. He collects dictionaries and tries to learn all the meanings of words. Really, though, the main character of Markaris’s novel is Athens, the city itself. It’s the city liberated from its myths: the Athens of small flats, narrow roads where you can’t find where to park your car, and kiosks where you buy papers and cigarettes, and many, many cafes. Where people live so close to Acropolis and yet so far from it. Here, someone can spend all his life a kilometre from the hill of Acropolis and seldom look at it. You forget where you are—as with the pyramids of Cairo. If you are so close to such a monument you have not other choice but to become blind to it. Exactly the same."