Here’s a first! We’ve never interviewed a Croatian crime writer on the site before – but today that changes as we welcome the Split-based journalist and author Jurica Pavičic. On 22 May, his work will appear in English translation for the first time with Red Water, a book that begins in 1989 and concludes in 2017.
This is a story that begins with the disappearance of a young woman called Silva Vela. However, with the country changing quickly it’s almost as though her case is swept under the carpet. While everyone else embraces the changes that are occurring and the rise of capitalism, her family remain desperate for answers.
Since the late 1980s, Jurica has been a cultural commentator in Croatia’s daily press, first in Split and now in Zagreb. He loves films, food and football, and the latter is the focus of his book Minute 88, about Hajduk Split FC. His first novel came out in 1997 and Red Water is his seventh book of 10 – not all of which are crime novels – and is his most successful to date. We decided to invite the author to the site to find out more about the Silva Vela case and Gorki Šain, the policeman who fails to solve it the first time around, but returns to have another go.
What will crime fiction lovers love about Red Water?
I wanted to write a book with everything we enjoy about crime fiction: a mystery, the solving of the mystery, unsolved puzzles, thrills, a clockwork mechanism. At the same time, I always try to avoid repeating the cliches common to crime novels, such as a corpse found by the pool on page three, an investigation, interviews with witnesses, and the answer at the end. I always want that my thrillers to have a distinctive structure, unique to each book. In this case, I used the perspectives of seven different characters, shifting points of view between them and the story has a very long timeline. From the crime to its resolution takes 26 years. I used that time span to write about 26 years of history in Croatia and the Eastern Adriatic, from communism to tourism. In another country it might be just 26 years, but in Croatia the period sees the collapse of one system, the emergence of another, the fall of Yugoslavia, the war in the 1990s, the real estate crisis in 2008, and then the tourist boom of last two decades with all of its controversies.
Who is Inspector Gorki Šain, what inspired this character and how have you developed him?
Gorki Šain is a policeman in the communist police force who investigates the disappearance of a local teenage girl in 1989, just weeks before the fall of Berlin Wall. He is the grandson of a famous war hero of Tito’s partisan resistance. His grandfather even gave him a name in honour of the communist writer Maxim Gorky. Šain is a good policeman, but everyone sees him as a product of nepotism, a silver-spoon-fed kid of the red elite. In 1990, the state and the system changes and his upbringing and his name irritates new bosses. When he fails to find the girl, they have a good excuse to get rid of him.
He leaves the police force and the job he loved so much, but still has a talent for investigation. So, he uses that talent in the service of young capitalism: he helps a real estate company in purchasing seaside estates by investigating which families might like to sell. Who has a gambling debt? Who has health problems? Who has children who would like to study abroad? Gorki is a former leftist who identifies himself as left-leaning but he has become a functional clog in a ruthless capitalist machine. In a way, it’s very typical post-communist trajectory. There were, and there still are, many Gorkis I know.
Who or what is he up against here?
To begin with he is looking for a missing girl, without any results. After this failure, he is sacked. So, the family – the mother, father and especially the twin brother – are left alone in their search for the girl which is agonisingly long. After many years, Šain comes back to their town, now as a real-estate buyer. Only after his return does he connect the dots and realise what really happened before. He does so with a little help from outside circumstances, including an earthquake.
Who are the other key characters we’ll meet as we read the novel?
The family of Silva Vela, the missing girl, including her mother, father and twin brother. There is also her then-boyfriend, the son of the local Albanian baker who spent the last night and becomes the main suspect. There are two important mothers in the novel. In Mediterranean noir, like in a Greek tragedy, you always need a mother.
Tell us a bit more about the setting and the role it plays in the story?
Split is the city where I was born, where I live, and hopefully where I’ll die. It’s the biggest city of the Mediterranean Croatian south, the Croatian equivalent of Marseille or Naples. Split is everywhere in my fiction, but not that much in Red Water. Here I needed a smaller Dalmatian town which should be easy to approach and to escape from – not an island. So, I invented the town of Misto. The word actually means ‘small town’ in the Dalmatian dialect and was used in the titles of two 70s TV shows over here. I reused it as a fictional toponym. People who read novel in translation sometimes complain that they can’t find Misto on Google Maps and this is why.
The murder takes place in 1989 before the breakup of Yugoslavia, but a lot of the solving takes place in 2017. How have you explored the past and your country’s experience through this crime story?
As I said, these 26 years have been a period of dramatic shifts for Croatia. The fall and breakup of Yugoslavia, a new independence, the war in the 90s, the early tourist boom, the real estate crisis in 2008, and the final triumph of a tourist monoculture. But I also wanted to have a clash between a grand collective story and an intimate family story. Silva’s family has a personal trauma which is so deep that public problems and dramas pale into insignificance. At the same time, Silva’s disappearance becomes peripheral to other problems because everyone is focused on the dramatic political and economic changes. That’s why the narrative takes place over such a long time span. One French critic wrote that the main character of Red Water is time. I totally agree.
What is the crime fiction scene like in Croatia?
Crime fiction emerged in Croatia during the later years of communism, in the late 70s and early 80s. At that time Yugoslavia was a strange hybrid society – communist regime that was well integrated with the West, with strong market and proto-capitalist forces in its cultural industries. In that period, two bestselling crime writers appeared on the scene – Pavao Pavličić and Goran Tribuson. They are both members of the national academy now, and in Croatia that means they are embraced by the conservative mainstream. From the 80s up until now there have been some crime novels, but not many authors have dedicated themselves totally to crime writing. There are couple of writers who write good books with some crime elements. One I like is Kristian Novak, who wrote two novels taking place in a northern border region, by the Hungarian border. In one of them, Gypsy, But the Fairest of them All, the crime is related to migrant smuggling gangs. It’s a great book.
Which other authors or books have inspired you, why, and what are you reading at the moment?
My personal canon is very British. Three corners of that canon are Graham Greene, John Le Carré and Ruth Rendell. The fourth and probably most important is Patricia Highsmith. She has been a strong influence, not that much in Red Water, but more in Woman From the Second Floor and Mater Dolorosa. I have also been influenced by the crime writers Leonardo Sciascia and Kerstin Ekman. The title Red Water is a dedication to the latter’s great novel Black Water.
When it comes to new authors, I like Gillian Flynn and Tara French. But there is also a man who influenced me a lot, who sits outside the field of the crime fiction. That’s Raymond Carver. My generation of writers in Croatia adored him. His simplicity and sobriety were like a cold shower which washed all the pretence of the postmodernist fiction away. I was influenced by his style: his sober, minimalistic writing and mundane, every-day characters who could be your neighbours.
Right now, I just finished reading Antonio Scurati’s early novel Best Years of Our Lives.
What’s next for Jurica Pavičic and Gorki Šain? Are there more mysteries on the way in English?
Unlike many crime writers, I don’t have a recurring main character. Gorki Šain is the only main character who has reappeared, in a novel called Son of Prometheus in 2020, but that isn’t a crime novel. Next year, Bitter Lemon Press will publish my novel Mater Dolorosa in the UK, which was released after Red Water and takes place entirely in Split. It’s a crime novel – the story of a sister who slowly realises that her brother is probably the perpetrator of a gruesome rape and murder that all the city is talking about. I follow three main characters: the sister, the mother and the policeman in charge of the investigation.
Grab a copy of Red Water using the buttons/links below. The book was translated by Matt Robinson.
