The Night Reporter

Introduction

Introduction

Yuri Vynnychuk’s novel The Night Reporter reminds us considerably of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930) as well as the world-famous 1941 John Ford movie. While the statuette of the Maltese falcon comprises the Hitchkockian McGuffin in the movie as well as in the novel, Vynnychuk’s McGuffin is a missing notebook that will unlock the secret to a series of apparent murders of members of a powerful business syndicate in Lviv, Ukraine in 1938. Like Hammett’s Sam Spade, Vynnychuk’s protagonist Marko Krylovych is a handsome man who has considerable success with the ladies. Commitment issues and his rough and tumble life keep him from settling down. He is an investigative reporter of the seedy, nighttime underworld of Lviv. The crooks, who use violent methods to acquire the notebook, visually are reminiscent of the fat man Syndney Greenstreet and his two oddball henchmen, particularly the one played by Peter Lorre, from the movie. Instead of a single femme fatale love interest as found in The Maltese Falcon, Vynnychuk’s protagonist has several possibilities, including the rich wife of the politically powerful murdered candidate for president of the city government Yan Tomashevych. The Night Reporter is unapologetically retro-masculininist (the way the world was in 1938 for better or for worse). It is a novel whose events happen over five days, so the action is compressed in a brief time period like that of the movie Three Days of the Condor, which like the movie adds to the dramatic tension of the novel. All the action occurs in September 1938 in the picturesque city of Lviv, which was then called Lvov and under Polish control. Vynnychuk artfully recreates the time and place of the tense atmosphere of Lviv of that era just a short time before the Nazi invasion.

While plot elements are significant in the novel, Vynnychuk’s prose is equally about texture, the subtlety of dialectal linguistic features and the nuances of his characters’ speech, who come from various socio-ethnic layers of society, including, among others, criminals, batyars, prostitutes, shopkeepers, waitresses, members of the police and secret services, and the rich and powerful. They each speak in their own distinctive way. While there is minimalist description in the novel, the plot presses forward mostly in dialogic fashion. It unravels like a slowly peeled onion or a nesting doll that reveals bits and pieces of the story from various perspectives until you arrive at the denouement and the final reveal. The narrative is told from the first-person perspective of the protagonist with more and more of what truly happened in what people tell him in conversations as well as in his various interactions with them. He above all else is a relentless seeker of the truth with a lofty sense of scruples (though with his flaws – smoking, drinking, fighting, and an excessive interest in the ladies).

The novel fuses two genres: the detective story and the spy novel. It follows the trail of the mystery of a string of murders related to a syndicate of individuals controlling the Association of Brewers, each of whom dies under questionable circumstances. The reporter plays the dual role of muckraking journalist and that of a detective, secretly deputized by the police commissioner to investigate the mystery. He meets several possible love interests over the course of his dangerous investigation. Will he get the girl? And if he does, which one does he get? Or is he incapable of being tied down by just one woman? You’ll have to read the novel to the very end to find that out.

Vynnychuk began writing the novel in 1979 when it was impossible to publish such a work under Soviet censorship and published it only recently in 2019. While he revised it some forty years later, it represents an important point in his early development as a storyteller. Vynnychuk became infamous for his lighthearted Maidens of the Night about a pimp and two Odesan prostitutes, which he began to write at virtually the same time as The Night Reporter. The former delves into the underbelly of underground Lviv in contemporary times. The latter does the same, but in the more distant prewar Galician past, the examination of which becomes an essential passion for Vynnychuk’s oeuvre. The Night Reporter is a compelling journey into the world of that fascinating multicultural past of Lviv.

Michael Naydan