I was very pleased to learn that my 2023 detective short story ‘Atelier Diocletian II (figures after Ivan Martinac)’ has been included in the official Ivan Martinac bibliography (‘Reviews of Martinac’s character and works published since his death’) on the website dedicated to the work of the late film director, whose work I encountered for the first time while I was writer in residence in Split in 2018 with Udruga KURS.
(Incidentally, the whole Martinac site is well worth a long browse around even for English-speakers, as while it is Croatian language throughout, it includes digitized versions of many of his short films, any of which I would highly recommend.)
Commissioned for Richard Skinner’s excellent book of film essays The Hinge of a Metaphor, ‘Atelier Diocletian II’ is a detective story that takes the form of a Coroner’s interim report into the unexplained death of a UK citizen in the city of Split, Croatia.
When it came out, the story made the papers in Croatia, since the work of Martinac is little known outside the city of Split and in certain underground film circles.
Indeed, the author and film critic Jurica Pavičić points out in his piece for Croatian daily Jutarnji List (£) that
Outside that circle, Martinac was almost unknown, so unknown that the day after his death the paper you are reading published the wrong photo.
A free PDF of Pavičić’s piece is included in the bibliography also, so I make it available here also:
Pavičić goes on:
And here comes the interesting part. Recounting a fictional investigation that combs through the Split art scene, White brings real people and places from the culture of the city into the story. They are mentioned as ‘witnesses’ in the story: Renato Baretić, Ivica Ivanišević, translator Dražen Čulić, and the director and president of Split Kino Club Sunčica Fradelić. Even the meeting place of local journalists and writers is mentioned, Konoba Hvaranin and its owner Vinko Radovani. As a literary character, your author too found himself in the story. The fictitious Jurica Pavičić explains to the Croatian-British investigation that he had conversations with the murdered man and realized that he was becoming increasingly obsessed with Martinac. The fictional me and the fictional Fradelić help the investigation to understand the intention of the quote deceased.
Pavičić concludes his article by hoping that my ‘moving homage’ might help Martinac’s classic films reach a wider audience outside of the city.
Hvala Jurica! I hope so too.
And I also hope it is not too long before I can visit Split again.
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Buy my latest novel The Fountain in the Forest (Faber, 2018)…
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