BEN PASTOR ESSAY--what is a man like Martin Bora doing in the uniform he wears?
Detection, I am beginning to understand after seven novels and with number eight in progress, becomes for Martin Bora part of the business of living. Note: not of his military business (he is not a professional investigator, and often his inquiries are accidental), but of the very way he sets himself before reality. He is curious, attentive, notices the minutiae, the seemingly irrelevant detail; his senses are alert and his mind sensible and discriminating: his ideal brothers are in equal measure Natty in The Last of the Mohicans and the even-tempered Marlow in Heart of Darkness. The only literary investigator with whom he shares a recognizable trait - a tranquil melancholy veined with humor - is very different from him: Police Inspector Maigret.
