Magdalena Talik: The plot of your last crime story, "Zbyt krótkie szczęście" ("Happiness Too Short") takes place in Wrocław. For some authors place is very important - Ystad gained hundreds of tourists because of detective Wallander from Henning Mankell's stories, and Wrocław is visited by fans of Marek Krajewski. Was there any particular reason for you to choose Wrocław?
Paweł Pollak: I chose Wrocław only because I live here. In Biskupin actually, where the murder of the teenage couple takes place. Such setting of the crime scene is to be blamed solely on my laziness. I didn't feel like going to the remote part of the city to check details necessary for the book. Anyway, I don't drive much since Google Street View. Take ul. Spółdzielcza for example; it is one tram stop away from my home, and I saw it on my computer because I didn't feel like going there. However, it turned out that trees were covering the buildings, so I had to take a walk there anyway. In short: author's exceptional laziness.
And as a translator from Swedish, weren't you tempted to move the plot to the other side of the Baltic?
Paweł Pollak: Not really. It would be attaching myself to popular Swedish crime stories, and I prefer my own ways. Now they're trying to persuade me to set a book to a smaller town, like Strzelin.
By this you mean that the mayor of this anonymous town wants to get product placement at the same time?
Paweł Pollak: Almost something of that sort. But since I'm not much for an investigation in the provinces, my main character, superintendent Marek Przygodny will continue to operate in Wrocław.
Many years ago, American crime story writer, Sue Grafton planned a cycle of books, with each part starting with a successive letter of the alphabet. She is now writing "Z is for Zero". Do you already know how many books about the Wrocław superintendent will there be?
Paweł Pollak: When I was writing the first part of the series about Przygodny, "Gdzie mól i rdza" ("Where Moth and Rust") , I intended writing successive ones. And how many exactly? I'm not aiming for a specific target number. I would like to write five volumes, but it is to be seen whether it can be done. I've already started the third part, but I haven't been working on it too intensively, it's just one of my unfinished projects.
The series and Zbyt krótkie szczęście"("Happiness Too Short") story's main character is superintendent Marek Przygodny. Privately divorced, with remorse, at work he is brilliant, tough and unconventional, because he reads, and it is classics such as Lem.
Paweł Pollak: I know people whose occupations are not at all associated with reading, and yet they reach for books. Why then a superintendent could not be a reader? In fact, many of my characters read, for me it is an opportunity to recommend some worthwhile titles. I'm annoyed by the fact that so many film characters don't read, that there are no people interested in books in politics. As if some were ashamed to appear with them in hands.
Fortunately, the superintendent has no such problem. In the story, Przygodny is befriended with a cynical journalist, Jurek Kuriata. You've worked in media in the past. Isn't this character a revenge, a satire?
Paweł Pollak: It is criticism levelled at cheap sensation-targeted journalism. He is a flamboyant personality, and was intended so. Kuriata was to be a counterbalance for placid Przygodny, because such a positive character as the superintendent would surely bore the reader, sooner or later. One may wonder whether it is credible for two people of such opposite characters to be friends, but I think it is. Especially that they are connected by their work.
Also interesting are the secondary characters - officers Wójcik and Wojtkiewicz. Their discussions whether a car can drive without gasoline (and they claim it decidedly can) are really funny. Will they be coming back?
Paweł Pollak: Those two not too sharpest tools in the box will keep appearing. With Wojtkiewicz's ever-present "exactly", with which he comments his colleague's comments, and his conspiracy theories. From the first volume, "Where Moth and Rust", we learned about the policy of coffee producers, and in the second one "Happiness Too Short", about the policy of fuel producers. And Wójcik, together with Wojtkiewicz will continue to get on Przygodny's nerves, and more. In fact, in the current volume their behaviour contributed to the superintendent's life being in danger.
The plot in Zbyt krótkie szczęście"("Happiness Too Short") is well thought. How do you construct it while writing? Do you start from the end, write down the clues?
Paweł Pollak: The plot needs to be constructed as a chess task. Everything has to be logical from the very beginning to end, to harmonise and result from one another. It is hard to come up with an out-of-the-box alibi, if it is the plot's key element, like in "Columbo" series with Peter Falk. One of these unfinished projects I mentioned is a short story (or a short novel, we'll see how things work out), based on the scheme of the series, where the killer is known from the very beginning, and the plot's axis is a psychological duel between the detective and the killer. And I have spent a long while indeed working on the criminal's impeccable alibi for the detective to challenge.
As a crime story writer, do you read a lot of such stories?
Paweł Pollak: Not so many right now, but I used to, indeed. But not for instruction, just for pleasure.
And what is a pleasurable for a professional like yourself?
Paweł Pollak: A good, well-constructed mystery. Crime stories with "just" a mystery are a bit obsolete nowadays, and the social background needs to be a bit more robust nowadays, but I'd grab Agatha Christie at any time.
