After Hungarian writer Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize in 2002, his political enemies called the award “conscience money” — as if given to Mr. Kertész because of his sufferings in the Holocaust, rather than for his writing. Very few critics have agreed, but until now, English readers have been able to find little in Mr. Kertész’s work that is not based on his experiences during World War II.

If Auschwitz is the “zero point,” as Mr. Kertész has called it, around which the human condition turns, then the material of “Detective Story” (Knopf, 212 pages, $21) functions as a satellite — distant, but still revolving around the facts of authoritarian inhumanity. The new novel is his first translated into English that is not at least loosely based on his own life.

Mr. Kertész published his first book, “Fatelessness,” an autobiographical novel about his boyhood internment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, in 1975. But he did not win much international fame until the book was retranslated into German in 1996; it was this second German translation that led to the Nobel Prize. But Mr. Kertész had already written two follow-up books — “Fiasco,” not yet translated into English, and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child” (1990). The first tells the story of an author who has published his Holocaust novel, to a resounding silence, and the second describes a couple’s decision, due to memories of the Holocaust, not to have a child. “Liquidation,” published after Mr. Kertész was awarded the prize, in 2003, tells the haunting story of the same author’s suicide, and of the demise of his publisher’s business. It borrows several key scenes from the earlier books, obsessively revisiting key turning points in a life spent interpreting the Holocaust.

“Detective Story” (1977) is another sort of tale altogether — except that, then again, it isn’t. Set in an unnamed Latin American country, the new novel, which was Mr. Kertész’s third in Hungarian, spins a deeply self-conscious web of psychological drama that should be familiar to any of Mr. Kertész’s readers. Like them, it is a very brief book, one that you could breeze through, if you wanted, without noticing its delicacy. As we learn from the opening chapter, “Detective Story” presents the testimony of a low-level intelligence agent, brought to justice now that the dictator he served has fallen. Antonio Martens presumably faces death for crimes against humanity, and most specifically for the deaths of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, father and son, two famous industrialists executed, without evidence, by Martens and his colleagues.

By telling his tale through the mouth of a political prisoner, a man who might feel simple remorse or who might be teeming with convoluted rationales, Mr. Kertész has the opportunity to defy expectations. Himself a victim of totalitarianism, he might have created the portrait of a monster. But authors naturally like to humanize their characters.

Martens is no exception. He is portrayed as a sensitive misfit while his former boss, Diaz, plays the mastermind, and his one-time colleague Rodriguez plays the simple, sadistic creep. Martens suffers from periodic headaches, which he barely explains, but which seem connected to moral misgivings. We learn that he did not expect to become an agent; he was trained as a “flatfoot,” a mere policeman, and his coarse language often betrays a bewildered ego, trying to puff itself up in accordance with circumstance. “All the newspapers have printed enough bullshit about this sort of thing nowadays,” he says, preemptively, before explaining his interrogation techniques. Sometimes he has to fall back on the clichés of pulp fiction, to understand events. Of his boss Diaz’s manner during a particularly intense interrogation, he writes: “Diaz’s voice by now was unpleasant, distinctly unpleasant.”

These banal turns of phrase are painful to read, and remind us of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, which held that the great crimes of history are committed not just by sublime monsters but also by ordinary people who get caught up in the machinery of out-of-control politics. Martens refers again and again to “the logic” of events, which he believes constitutes a kind of destiny — he has an uneducated reverence for abstractions. But still, he doesn’t grasp how pathetic destiny’s servants — his superiors — can be.

Mr. Kertész lets us read between the lines of Martens’s story. The dictator himself, “the Colonel,” appears to be a totally fungible Latin American warlord. Diaz, the mastermind of intelligence, only seems masterful if you mistake his dumbfoundedness for silent cunning, as Martens does.

Indeed, if read carefully, “Detective Story” becomes just that — a generic attempt at a detective story, worked up by a disappointed pawn of state who must sense, deep down, how paltry his historical role has been.

Martens becomes fascinated by the Salinases. Though they disappoint him as suspects, they obviously represent a fullness of life Martens can only imagine. Imprisoned himself, he now tries to re-create Federigo Salinas’s prison rhapsodies about life on the outside: “A simple everyday evening . . . when the city lights come on . . . Simple, familiar lights that offer aperitifs, refreshments, trendy and durable goods.” These are sensations, we presume, that Martens has never personally had. Mr. Kertész himself perhaps knows Salinas’s sense of life as well as Martens’s deprivation, and in this most fictional work brings both fully into play.

blytal@nysun.com