Josef Škvorecky's Sins for Father Knox

     "...the blonde turned to the detective. 'It's clear now, isn't it?'

     'What is?'

     'Everything. Don't you see?'

     Neils C. Kölln didn't see, but rather than making him humble, this annoyed him.

     'No,' he snapped. 'I'm not clairvoyant!'

     'Neither am I," said the blonde modestly. 'But when I'm bored, I read mysteries.'"

The 'blonde' is Eve Adam, a Czech lounge singer on a world-wide tour for Pragokonzert, who has to fight off (at least some of the time; at other times she doesn't fight) various men's groping hands. And all the while she's solving mysteries.

But not before she gets out of jail in Prague. Where she herself had been convicted for murder. Lieutenant Boruvka, the Czechoslovakian detective who was the protagonist of the first book in this series by Škvorecky, was responsible assembling the evidence and arresting Eve Adam, but in the first case in this book, he begins to have doubts, and with Eve's help, gets her cleared from that murder charge. Still Eve decides it's best to leave the country for a while and takes an offer of a tour to get out of Czechoslovakia.

There are ten stories in the book, and as the title might suggest, they follow a conceit: Fr. Ronald Knox, first Anglican, then Catholic priest, uncle to Penelope Fitzgerald, writer of mysteries, member in good standing of the Detection Club, composed in 1928 a list of ten commandments for the writing of Golden Age, fair-play mysteries. Each of the stories in Škvorecky's book violates one of Fr. Knox's rules. Those rules (fairly tongue-in-cheek) include things like, no more than one secret passage in a house or no previously unknown twin can suddenly show up.

At one point each story presents a challenge to the reader, like an old Ellery Queen mystery:

It's a pretty amusing collection of stories. 

But I will say I didn't think it as good as that first collection of mystery stories by Škvorecky. Mostly that's because there wasn't enough Lt. Boruvka. Now probably it's to Škvorecky's credit that he writes less well about a loose-living lounge singer than he does about a mournful but happily married man who still looks at girls but then doesn't act on those longing looks. Lt. Boruvka is just both more amusing and more convincing than Eve Adam, and I wanted more of the Lieutenant in this book. Still this was fun.

Škvorecky is an interesting figure in his own right. Born in 1924 in Czechoslovakia, he was a jazz musician as a young man, and wrote several novels in the Communist years, either unpublished or squelched after publication. He was a supporter of the liberalization in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and after the country was invaded by the Russians, he and his wife got out, to Canada, where he established a press, 68 Publishers, in Toronto, that specialized in banned Czech and Slovak literature--the press brings out the first Czech language edition of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He died in 2012.

This book comes out in 1973, when Škvorecky is in Canada, and the stories are set in a variety of places--New York, Stockholm, Paris--where Eve Adam tours, but the stories set in Prague are still clearly a communist Czechoslovakia. The book was translated into English by Kaca Polackova Henley.

And though the stories are set in several locations, it will be my visit to the Czech Republc for this year's European Reading Challenge.

And while that's the shadowiest of shadowy figures on the cover of that book, I've already used an Eric Ambler novel for the Shadowy Figure category in this year's Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt...

...so we'll have to go with the hat.

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Hat: the fifth story is 'Why So Many Shamuses?' and that guy with the hat on the cover looks pretty shamus-like to me...