After graduating in Germany in 1939, FH was sent as an archivist to Paris, where he documented ordinary life throughout the war. He vanished in Berlin in 1945 and this is the first publicati... read more
A wonderful evocation of Leningrad in the 1930s, in which a series of murders and thefts of paintings from the Hermitage embroil Inspector Vasily Zaitsev with the Soviet secret police.
Not all are hidden by luxuriant, pointy moustaches... The painter's only novel is a baroque and decadent tale set in the 1930s, first published in 1944.