Blood Sacrifice by Douglas Jackson review: 'a novel of rare intelligence and ambition'

Douglas Jackson | Ian Rutherford / The Scotsman

Blood Sacrifice is the second in a planned series of four crime novels set in Warsaw during the Second World War. The Polish experience from September 1939, when Nazi Germany attacked from the west and the Soviet Union, then allied to Germany, invaded from the east, was one of unrelieved criminality and horror. Poland's independence, recovered after the First World War, was snuffed out and its Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe, was all but exterminated. It is a bold novelist who addresses such a subject. Douglas Jackson, a Scot with Polish family on one side, is such a one.

His hero, Jan Kalisz, is a Polish detective policeman, a married man with a teenage son. Wounded in the few weeks of fighting which ended in Polish defeat, he was subsequently approached by a leader of the nascent Polish Resistance, who persuaded him that it was his duty to act as a collaborator: the Nazis needed a Polish police force to help maintain order. There were men like Jan in every occupied country. Jan was suited to the role because he was a fluent German speaker who, with a German grandmother, might even seem an almost-German. In the first book in this series, Blood Roses, he couldn't even tell his wife that he was still serving Poland.

Blood Sacrifice begins in January 1943. The Final Solution has been underway for a year. Deportation to the death camps has begun and all Warsaw's surviving Jews - almost half a million in 1939 - are now confined to the ghetto. The novel begins with the assassination of a prominent Nazi, thought first to be a suicide. Kalisz is assigned to the case along with a German colleague, a good one actually. Investigation shows it was murder, not suicide. The dead man has been engaged in robbing his own government, looting works of art and jewellery. He seems to have had three identities. The investigation requires Kalisz to enter the heavily policed ghetto. His position is interesting. On the one hand he is a diligent Police investigator; on the other a Polish patriot. In the ghetto he meets businessmen doing well out of the desperate Jews and seeks out an old acquaintance, Sol Goldberg, known before the war as the most ruthless gangster in Warsaw. Goldberg knows of Kalisz’s double role. He also knows the Jews are doomed, but is determined to go down fighting. Can Kalisz procure weapons for him?

It's a tricky and dangerous assignment, perhaps, impossible, but that's enough of the plot for a review - though one should add the presence in the ghetto of a mysterious and frightening figure known as "the Cannibal". The story is very detailed, not always easy to follow, though its outline is clear and it is always gripping. The publishers might have eased the reading by providing a list of the principle characters with a descriptive note, and also a couple of maps of Warsaw, especially one of the ghetto. If this sounds more what one might look for in a non-fiction account, one feels the lack of these aids to understanding all the more keenly because the novel is so convincing.

Jackson has set himself a challenge that would daunt most novelists. This is art which is true to life at its worst but also at its most heroic. Kalisz is no superman hero. He is a brave, intelligent and honest man doing what can be done in appalling circumstances.

One has the impression that all the novels Jackson has previously written, especially the nine that make up his Hero of Rome series, have prepared him for what he has set himself to do in this series. This is a story of shifting loyalties, of crime and detection, but also a study in historical tragedy. Jan Kalisz has to carry a lot of weight as the hero of such a story. So far, however, he is fully up to it and the promise of what is to come is compelling. Meanwhile, one can confidently say that these first two novels display an intelligence and ambition rare in Scottish fiction today.

Blood Sacrifice, by Douglas Jackson, Canelo, £16