By Vincent Czyz

Stasio is an exercise in noir fiction with the intellectual depth we expect from our best writers, compounded by the lyricism of Tamas Dobozy’s style, crisp dialogue, wit and humor, and well-drawn characters.

Stasio: A Novel in Three Parts by Tamas Dobozy. Anvil Press, 234 pages, $18.

Tamas Dobozy is the author of four short story collections, including Siege 13, which won the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — roughly the Canadian equivalent of our National Book Critics Circle Award. I read all four and reviewed two (here’s one: Arts Feature: Recommended Books, 2021 – The Arts Fuse). He also won an O. Henry Award as well as, among other honors, a National Magazine Awards Gold Medal for Fiction. His work, undergirded by a probing intelligence, is consistently off-beat, unsettling, and superbly written. It is often dark and just as often, hilariously funny.

Given Dobozy’s weakness for the short story, it’s not surprising that his debut novel, Stasio, is composed of three distinct sections, which, though touted as novellas, are closer to a long short story, a novelette, and a novella. While each is self-contained, the trio fit together in a seamless whole — a feat unto itself.

Stasio is detective fiction, or if you like, noir fiction. Some of the best literary authors — Faulkner, Hemingway, Borges — have been attracted to the genre, so Dobozy is in good company. He more or less honors the tropes but also presents us with a novel that is psychologically astute and often startling in its social insights.

The first section, “Steyr Mannlicher,” revolves around the execution-style slaying of a single mother and her children as well as the murder weapon itself, the eponymous Steyer Mannlicher, a hybrid shotgun and rifle of unusually intricate craftsmanship. Delving into the gun’s provenance, Stasio uncovers a history of violence, inexplicable incidents (suggesting the gun has a mind of its own), and a list of owners whose initials are all “TD.” Hints of the supernatural are balanced by a good dose of plausible deniability.

While there’s a murder mystery at the heart of the narrative, this section is a hard look at poverty. Therese Dallaire and her children live in a “shithole apartment” in a public housing project: “Drug dealers across the hall. At night the sounds of prostitutes trading sex for drugs, hollering through the wall, keeping her kids awake. The ex-husbands and boyfriends she’d escaped from, three of them violent, the fourth one a suicidal depressive who threatened to take all of them with him when he went.” Dallaire herself becomes a methamphetamine addict and despite the sores that cover her face, takes up the skin trade to support her habit. Her neglected children often go without meals.

Stasio muses that he’s safe from the curse of the perversely beautiful weapon, which is in his possession, because his initials are A.S., but they could as easily be T.D. since his nickname is “Tony” and the “de” that the other cops drop when they address him by his surname hasn’t gone anywhere. More to the point, there is a certain temptation: his wife is a nagging, endlessly needy invalid — wouldn’t it be a mercy to finish her off?

Like many a noir detective, Stasio is a loner who drinks too much coffee, gets too little sleep, and complements his caffeine intake with alcohol, but unlike them, he often finds himself in twilight realms of consciousness where the boundary between waking and dream is blurred beyond recognition.

This is especially true of “Photo Array,” the second section, a claustrophobic episode that takes place almost entirely in the basement of the police station to which Stasio has been exiled by department brass. He doesn’t even bother going home very often, ordering takeout and sleeping in a crawlspace above the drop ceiling. Assigned to scrutinize cold cases for new leads, he fixates on the suicide of Veronika Bokor, the daughter of Hungarian émigrés. This is familiar ground for Dobozy, who is himself of Hungarian descent and wrote extensively about Hungarians and Hungarian immigrants in Siege 13.

“Stasio sat with the photographs now. Only the photographs. […] The images were dimming, the faces faded, the backdrops almost translucent, as if his take on the case was a form of overexposure, each misapprehension, each faulty reading of evidence, each bad theory, was bleaching the true story from the page.”

Stasio uncovers a family tragedy that begins in Hungary and, facilitated by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, which pried open Hungary’s borders, climaxes in Canada. Once again, we encounter intimations of the supernatural. While we’re inclined to attribute his conversations with a ghost to hallucinations brought on by sleep deprivation and malnutrition (he often goes hungry), there is physical evidence that’s not so easily accounted for.

Canadian writer Tamas Dobozy. Photo: Henry Dobozy

A story of false identity, manufactured narratives, and betrayal, Stasio is also a prime example of how the past in Dobozy’s fictions is never dead, forgotten, or erased — only transformed. It may return as an abandoned house, an underworld disguised as a basement archive, a photo album, a network of scars turning a face into a wreck, or an AVO file that unexpectedly surfaces. It is a ghost, a psychological haunting that can’t be exorcised, a collective dread that never dissipates, inevitably compromising the present.

“The Unaffiliated,” the longest, most complex, and most original of the novel’s three parts, returns us to one of Dobozy’s thematic obsessions: utopia. It opens with the death of an activist tied to Neue Demokratie, a political movement that espouses peace and envisions a society based on cooperation rather than competition. An offshoot of Neue Demokratie, the Unaffiliated — with its compound built to sequester members, including children, and its charismatic leader, Lukas Fisch — bears a strong resemblance to the Branch Davidians and David Koresh, particularly in terms of Koresh’s sexual abuse of girls and young women.

The novella is a masterwork of noir fiction and political discourse. The aging Stasio is partnered with Gant, a new recruit, and Gant’s training, grounded in political correctness, often clashes with Stasio’s old-school style. Neue Demokratie’s pamphlets offer scathing critiques of Western democracies, as does Gant: “Before you know it, the system, the people involved, get some power, and the system starts making itself the priority over what you set it up to do in the first place. Which means somebody’s going to profit, and somebody is going to suffer or get sacrificed, collateral damage, whatever you want to call it.”

Dr. Mazel, a political scientist, takes up the problem of utopia, asking her students, “What if utopia wasn’t a place? What if it was a disposition, an attitude, a way of doing things? […] What if it was a joy in always being at work? What if utopia meant you never arrived at perfection but kept trying to achieve it …”

Unlike Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, Stasio is deeply (and believably) flawed, not just as a person but in his thinking and investigative methodology. As the janitor in “Photo Array” wryly observes, Stasio seems “like a guy who could stand to get reacquainted with the right way of doing things.” Perhaps his strangest gift (or curse) is an archaeological sense of crime. “The crime you start out looking at,” Gant accuses, “is never as important as the other crimes you find along the way” (such as Fisch’s sexual abuse). This, of course, is how the novel itself works, using a given homicide as a point of departure to explore political, social, or psychological issues.

The novel’s settings are bleak, gloomy; the weather, perpetually gray. Even the nighttime sky is devoid of beauty: “Outside, there were no stars, only an orange haze that crawled up either side of the sky, met in the middle, and radiated back at him like a heat lamp.” All in keeping, of course, with noir fiction’s grim image. Stasio, however, is much more than mere image. Distinguished by Dobozy’s lyricism, crisp dialogue, wit and humor, well-drawn characters, and the intellectual depth we expect from our best writers, it is a haunted narrative that, when the pitch is right, is also haunting. 

Vincent Czyz is the author of a collection of short fiction, which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Best in Small Press, two novels, a novella, and an essay collection. Czyz is the recipient of two fiction fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts, the W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction, and the Capote Fellowship at Rutgers University. He has placed stories in Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Southern Indiana Review, Tampa Review, Georgetown Review, Tin House, and Copper Nickel, among other publications.