The Fissure, which blends humor, thriller suspense, and political satire of a police regime, is the story of a man's day who is arrested for an unknown reason and taken by two agents of the Special Services to the capital for interrogation and, no doubt, elimination. This novel confronts the humanity of feelings with the inhumane and relentless logic of a repressive system, and has been translated into around thirty languages, achieving international success.

Published in 1965, it foreshadowed the military dictatorship that would descend upon Greece two years later. It was translated and published in France for the first time in 1970, where it won that year's Grand Prize for Detective Fiction.