An interesting hungarian author: Rejt� Jen�

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 D�rrenmatt, 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 appear to be concerned in the least about the fact that he owed his extraordinary popularity not to his quality as an author of parodies, not to his literary talent, but to his being an inventive, prolific manufacturer of amusing fiction. We must not look for any tragic conflict with himself, any mysterious ambivalence, behind this duality: there are some enduring values in his writings which we are left with when the trash has fallen through the sift; in these we should see the instinctive triumph of the talent and humaneness of the born story-teller rather than regard them as the product of some inner conflict.

As to the further course of his life and activity, we are left with suppositions. Like so many of his fellow-writers, Rejtő was brutally annihilated by the nazis. It is said that he walked quietly, with composure, into his death, like a man who owes no debt to anybody. Most people attributed his attitude to his modesty. Objective posterity may safely say that he has indeed left no debt behind. He has left to us a rich legacy. Is it possible that he guessed as much?

B�la Abody