Joe Alex – kryminał inteligencki w PRL‑u
Joe Alex – highbrow crime fiction in the People’s Republic of Poland

Author(s): Rafał Szczerbakiewicz
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: Maciej Słomczyński; Joe Alex; highbrow crime fiction; the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL)
Summary/Abstract: The literary projects of Maciej Słomczyński – a renowned translator of the classical canon of the so‑called serious literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Carroll, Faulkner etc.) – which cover popular genres, are an integral part of his multi‑faceted artistic output. He was inter alia the author of milicja novels (published under the pen name of Kazimierz Kwaśniewski) and the author of novels which constitute a peculiar continuation of the Anglophone crime fiction represented by the tradition of Agatha Christie (published under the pen name of Joe Alex). These works indicate that in Poland the metatextual crime fiction of the theoreticians of literature (e.g. Marek Krajewski, Mariusz Czubaj, Krzysztof Zajas) represents a more durable tradition that we think. In the present article I focus on the figure of Joe Alex as the desired alter ego of Słomczyński himself. On the one hand, the erudition of the distinguished translator to a great extent make these novels intertextual novels, which imitate his favourite Shakespearean “theatre within a theatre”, but which also engage a peculiar game with the fluid boundaries of modernist literature and – in a broader fashion – of culture. On the other hand, they are underappreciated, very early (in the Polish circumstances) and right away ironically refined literary games which undermine the binding discourses and regimes of the so‑called high culture.

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