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The big advantage of Café Lukacs is its fascinating atmosphere, embracing from the very first pages every movement of the characters. With gray, sad socialist Budapest as a backdrop, Kalfopulos uses all known techniques, typical for adventure novels, in order to make us feel familiar in an unknown environment, in which the pieces of a dark and vague puzzle must be put together. The pace of the novel unfolds without digression or deliberate sensationalism, but rather with allusions to police stories, catching the reader by the throat with their nostalgia and sometimes romance. The final passage of the novel sheds light on the thought of the author and answers why things remain in the twilight even at the end of the story: "Well, life is such that in the meantime something always happens. As long as you are lucky enough to catch up with the right moment and to experience it, then you will be extremely lucky if you remember it years afterwards.” Thus, years later the case will emerge again at the forefront of his mind when everything will already be a distant memory: "Un souvenir, c 'est l' image d 'un rêve...". 

The constant recourse to intertextuality, as literary and cinematic text, builds a plot, in which raw constructive materials are the borrowings. Meeting with a passenger on the train with a bowler hat, raincoat, hands of a pianist and face of a "janitor"; in the underworld slang and in pulp language means implementation of "wet contracts” (remember the psychotic images of Victor the Cleaner, recreated by Jean Reno in Luc Besson’s Nikita (1990), and the imperturbable assassin Léon in Besson’s eponymous 1994 follow-up. The movie-buff reader will recognize a reference to Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977), the loose screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley’s Game and others. The hero also discovers neighboring Austria, the venue of Kalfoloupos’ previous book - The Third Man - and goes to the legendary cinema Bellaria, where films of the interwar period are screened. The author's intent suggests also time-travel, as the recent past is marked by the choice of events at the Austro-Hungarian border in August 1989, which had set in motion the collapse of the socialist bloc and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The tape goes back also to the distant guilty past in search of war criminals on the site of the martyrdom of their victims.  When events are taken from the pages of history in such way, they become associated with the life of the victim and we are on track to understand the reasons for the crime, which finally remains undisclosed.
  
Café Lukacs is a policier or a detective story, inspired and well-written, which originally combines pages from other books, historic episodes, film footage and a character whose experiences resemble liminal conditions between dreams and reality. A critical review of the novel likens its protagonist as an "extra in a film, about the plot of which he knows almost nothing." The moral dilemmas of the hero are confronted with his instinct for self-preservation. The series of crimes will reveal a painful past, with roots lying in the years of the Holocaust in Hungary. The dark "forest of the city" will first reveal the marvelous, and then the sinister dimension of the city. 

In his preface to the novel, the famous Greek writer Vassilis Vassilikos writes: "The book is read in less than an hour or as long as a flight from Athens to Thessaloniki (with the well-known delay) lasts or in the Eurostar train crossing the English Channel. But mostly, on one’s way to Budapest.” In his review in Ta Nea, mentioned in the interview with Kalfopoulos, D. Kourtovik devotes much space to "clarifying" the meaning of the the word "noir" in the sense of criminal novel. Incidentally, he writes: "According to the prevailing understanding, the term "noir" refers to police novels, in which the full uncertainty of darkness comes from everywhere, both literally – through the scenes, deployable, mainly among urban night landscape and gloomy interiors – and figuratively, by moral ambiguity penetrating the stories. Suppressive uncertainty extends to the very protagonist, who is not a typical detective, as his image alternates, or rather his roles merge: investigator and investigated, someone both innocent and guilty.” 

Even the hero himself may be seen as a victim of the old lady, seduced by her aristocratic charm. Her murder evokes Nazi phantoms, which still haunt some European cities. Hints of cinema and literature, alternating bright and dark frames, voluptuous echoes, cosmopolitan images, hidden mystery and plenty of roaming “with a cause”, memoirs, and searches and ending at dusk, Kalfopoulos’ intriguing novel is a fair example of "voluminous" not always being necessary for good quality literature. 

I take a look on the Net for some reader opinions, and once again the blogger with the pen-name Patriarch Photios surprises me with his critical acumen: "Lazy read that will appeal to those who love old French movies, in which the atmosphere of old sepia-colored photos or black-and-white footage are of greater importance rather than the actual plot of the story.” 

* Former Austrian doctor, known as Doctor Death, because of his "medical" experiments as an SS officer at Mauthausen concentration camp, accused of murdering and torturing inmates by methods such as direct injection of toxic substances in the heart muscle.