The Hungarian capital spent most of the twentieth century on a political rollercoaster ride. The declaration of independence after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 following defeat in World War One was followed by Nazi occupation in World War Two, bombing by the Allies in 1944; the post-war Soviet military occupation; then the long dark years of communism from 1949 to the fall of the Iron Curtain. And now? Budapest is a city of two major stories—one that tells of the city as one of Europe’s most beautiful, a tourism magnet; charming cobbled streets of quaint cafés and fairy-tale gothic architecture, “Europe’s 7th most idyllic place to live,” according to Forbes. The other story, of contemporary Budapest, is of being in the eye of the European refugee storm; distressing scenes of so many refugees pouring through the city; the hard-man right wing politics of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and the toxic culture he has created against immigrants in what is, after all, the capital city of a European Union nation.
Adam Lebor covered the fall of communism in Eastern Europe for various British newspapers and splits his time between Budapest and London. Now he has started a series of novels set in Budapest and featuring Balthazar Kovacs, a Gypsy detective in the city’s police murder squad. District VIII and Kossuth Square have both been bestsellers and combine solid detective stories with ‘ripped from headlines’ issues. District VIII (2017) starts with the killing of a Syrian refugee who was camping out at Budapest’s Keleti station, but then his body disappears. Kovacs is warned off the case by a former police colleague now working for the Gendarmerie, a new paramilitary police force in the hard-line world of refugee-paranoid Hungary. It doesn’t help that Kovacs’s brother is one of Budapest’s top gangsters. In Kossuth Square (2019) Kovacs is called out at dawn to his brother Gaspar’s brothel and a dead body; an investigation that means dealing with his family, people-trafficking in Budapest and tensions in the Gypsy community. A third Kovacs novel, Margaret Bridge, is in the works, and apparently a TV show, too.
To see the modern history of Budapest through the eyes of a Hungarian crime writer you should read Vilmos Kondor. His five novel Budapest Noir series remain very popular in Hungary, and, while not all of them have been translated into English yet, we can access enough to get a serious taste for Kondor’s Budapest hardboiled style. Kondor cites Dashiell Hammett as a major influence. The entire series covers the 1930s to the 1950s through the investigations of local crime reporter, Zsigmond Gordon. In the first book, and one that has been translated into English, Budapest Noir (2012) a Jewish girl is found dead in Budapest in 1936 and Gordon sets out to solve a murder that everyone else in his soon-to-be Fascist country prefers to leave buried. The novel moves from the wealthy residential neighborhoods of Buda to the notorious slums of Pest. A couple of years ago Budapest film director Éva Gárdos filmed the novel in a high noir style on the cobbled streets of the old city—the critics saw it as ‘Chinatown comes to Budapest’. Perhaps some success for the movie will encourage English language publishers to pick up the rights to the rest of Kondor’s Budapest Noir series—they’ve already sold in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy.
One Budapest book well worth a mention is the fantastically titled Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts (2004) by Julian Rubinstein. Here’s the story: Attila Ambrus is the legendary outlaw of Budapest. He’s a failed professional ice hockey goalkeeper, ladies man and (after the hockey didn’t work out) the Eastern Bloc’s most prolific bank robber. The detective sent to catch him learnt his skills watching bootleg dubbed Columbo episodes while the CSI officer would turn up at crime scenes in top hat and tails. Too fantastic? Yes, but also all true. Ballad of the Whiskey Robber is a book with plenty of Budapest, but it’s also perhaps the most entertaining true crime book ever written with a cast of characters that, were this fiction, would you have you eyeball rolling and throwing the book away in exasperation at the ludicrousness of these people!
Some more Budapest set crime writing….
- Gaby Koppel’s Reparation (2019) is set in 1997 with a claim by Hungarian refugees in America against the old Budapest government; a child abduction in the city’s Hassidic community, and then an arrest in Budapest that ignites an investigation into the county’s past.
- Lisa Lieberman’s Burning Cold (2017) is set in a 1956 Budapest where American Cara Walden finds herself involved in the intrigues of dissidents and Soviet agents all hunting for her brother. By turns a mystery and a spy novel set in the middle of the Hungarian Revolution.
- Jessica Keener’s Strangers in Budapest (2017) follows Boston couple Anne and Will as they relocate to Hungary shortly after the fall of the communist government. But Hungary’s older and darker past of the Nazi murder of so many Hungarian Jews in World War Two drags the couple into a vendetta not of their making.
- J.F. Penn writes the ARKANE series of thrillers about a fictional (at least I hope it’s fictional!) British government agency specializing in paranormal and religious experience. The books roam around—Cairo, Jerusalem, the Scottish island of Orkney, Barcelona, New York, India, New Orleans, and, in book four of the ten book series, Budapest. One Day in Budapest (2018) has a priest murdered at the Basilica of St Stephen and a holy relic stolen. An ultra-nationalist political party calls for retribution and anti-Semitic violence erupts in the city. Dr Morgan Sierra, psychologist and ARKANE agent, arrives to sort everything out.
- Death in Budapest (2012) by James L. Ross mixes spying with crime (NB: Budapest is obviously a popular location with espionage writers, but I’ve mostly stuck with the more traditional crime novels here). Patrick McCarry, a down-on-his-luck Wall Street banker ends up in Budapest and tempted by the idea of running guns into the Balkans, an idea that, of course, will not end well.
And finally, Péter Lengyel’s 1988 Cobblestone. Lengyel is a Hungarian writer whose career spanned the communist era. He was a translator, a playwright and went to Havana for a while as a university lecturer. He became best known in Hungary in the late 1960s and 1970s as a science fiction writer (as many writers in dictatorships know, when it’s problematic to write about the world you live in simply get into a spaceship and set your novels in galaxies far, far away). In 1988 he took a break from sci-fi to write a crime novel. Cobblestone may start with a jewel heist in 1896 Budapest but it roams far and wide through the city’s history—collapsing empires and monarchies, different regimes, religious tensions, and up to the disappearing shop-fronts and street names under communism as much of old Budapest was threatened with destruction. Cobblestone is the entire history of twentieth century Budapest in one gloriously sprawling, crime novel.
