The 14-carat roadster

Jenő Rejtő 1905-1943 He was an 'irregular' writer. While he lived, and for many years after his death, it was even questioned that he was a writer at all. Appearances were against him. He poured forth a flow of adventure stories that were published in a kind of shilling-shocker series. Most of his readers were not aware that the man behind the attractive-sounding pseudonym P. Howard was Jenő Rejtő, journalist, author of cabaret skits, literary hack, a steadfast practitioner of all sorts of side-lines. And what if they had known? Nothing at all. After all, thrillers are pooh-poohed by educated people, and they are not supposed to read such things-except up to a certain age, or furtively. On the face of it, this story, too, is a thriller. It does not lack that important effective element - the accidental. Nor is it short of events, romantic twists and that essential ingredient - love. Rejtő knew the rules of the thriller well, and was shrewd enough to make the most of them. None but his closest friends and a few connoisseurs open-minded enough to look for the work behind the genre recognized the above-the-average talent in Rejtő. Literary talent has a peculiar nature: it is always tied to certain specific forms of communication, and suited for the treatment of only a certain number of tasks - sometimes only a single task. Uninhibitedly, Rejtő poured forth his books - labelled as literary trash - delightfully unworried by the nagging fears of literary accountability. He expressed his most important human message in these curiously grotesque adventure-stories. The author's way of looking at things and the methods he used in the caustic satires - were a safety valve for his communicative urge by which he let off the steam generated by the absurdities of the world around him. In these writings he felt at home, in a peculiar, irregular way, under irregular conditions at a time that was 'out of joint.' As a matter of fact, the stories Rejtő wrote are, whether he intended them as such or not, 'anti-thrillers', which he carried to the point of absurdity through the impeccably rigorous observation of the rules of the genre. It would be irreverent, in looking for 'fellow-iconoclasts', to cite the example of Dürrenmatt, who has written what is a requiem for the detective story or Cervantes, who borrowed the jacket of the picaresque novel. After all, Rejtő, evidently endowed with lesser talent than those two, definitely got a kick out of this kind of writing. Nor did he