Maryla Szymiczkowa Books in Order

Maryla Szymiczkowa is the shared pen name of Polish writers Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński. Together, they write historical mysteries that pair a sharp crime plot with the social rules, gossip, and daily frustrations of late 19th-century Cracow.

Dehnel was born in Gdańsk in 1980. Before the two began writing mysteries together, he had built a wide-ranging career as a novelist, poet, translator, and painter. Tarczyński, born in 1983, works as a historian, translator, and specialist in American studies. Their different backgrounds give the partnership a useful balance: one brings a novelist's feel for character and language, while the other brings a historian's eye for period detail and context.

Dehnel's earlier work includes Lala, a family story built around a grandmother's memories, and Saturn, a novel centered on the painter Francisco Goya and his son. Readers who come to those books often find a strong interest in family stories, art, the past, and the strange ways private lives intersect with public history. His poetry and translation work sit alongside that fiction rather than apart from it.

Then came a bored professor's wife with a talent for detection.

Tarczyński first imagined Zofia Szczupaczyńska, known in English as Zofia Turbotyńska, as a middle-aged, socially ambitious woman who becomes an unlikely amateur sleuth. The character began as an idea for someone else to write. An editor suggested that Dehnel and Tarczyński take it on themselves, and the pair turned the pitch into their first joint project.

They chose a woman's pseudonym on purpose. It gave them room to try a lighter, genre-driven kind of fiction without presenting it as simply another Jacek Dehnel novel. It also made the collaboration feel properly shared. The name itself has family roots, drawing on relatives connected to Cracow and Lviv.

The pseudonym became the whole point of the game.

Under the name Maryla Szymiczkowa, the pair place Zofia in 1890s Cracow, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She is a professor's wife who knows the rules of respectable society and enjoys enforcing them, until murder and disappearance give her something more interesting to do. Her investigations take her from well-kept homes and charitable committees to institutions, back streets, and people polite society would rather not notice.

The books have room for comedy, but they don't treat the period as a costume party. Class divisions, women's limited choices, prejudice, and political pressures all shape what Zofia can see and what others try to hide. English-language readers have encountered the series through Antonia Lloyd-Jones's translations, beginning with Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing and continuing with Karolina and the Torn Curtain.

Dehnel and Tarczyński are partners in life as well as writing, and married in London in 2018. Their work as Maryla Szymiczkowa is a good entry point for readers who like a clever historical mystery, an imperfect detective, and a city rendered with both affection and a raised eyebrow.