Translated from Czech by Rosemary Kavan, Kaca Polackova and George Theiner
Published by Faber & Faber / W. W. Norton & Company, 1973, 288 pages. Original version published in 1966.

Meet Lieutenant Boruvka of the Czechoslovak police: a rotund man with baby blue eyes, a tuft of hair on top of his head, and a mournful expression. Every crime he solves seems to make him even more depressed at the perfidy of human beings. He has acute powers of observation (except when clouded by the presence of his young colleague, she of the momentous chignon), and a strong sense of empathy. Lieutenant Boruvka is also the beleaguered father of a 17-year-old daughter, Zuzana, who is more interested in men than in her studies.

In these twelve stories, Lieutenant Boruvka solves baffling murders: the singer of a band is found dead in her locked hotel room; a model is killed during a fashion show; and then there is the mysterious death of an old cat.

The murders seem to follow him even when he is on holiday (as they tend to do with fictional detectives). To encourage Zuzana to study for her school exams, Lieutenant Boruvka commits himself to taking her on a holiday abroad if she does well. Except that he forgets to define what “doing well” means. When Zuzana gets through, though not with flying colours, he is obliged to fulfil his promise. Lieutenant Boruvka does not want to leave Prague and the comforts of his home, but a promise is a promise. So the two of them go off to Italy.

In the Dolomites, their car breaks down and as they walk to their hotel, they—naturally—find a dead body. In spite of the carabinieri finding Lieutenant Boruvka a little suspect, the Czech policeman gets involved in helping to solve the murder. He finds, to his surprise, that his daughter knows far more about his cases than he could have imagined—or approved of, given that she reads his case notes after he has gone to bed. But it pays off. Zuzana, instead of being a flighty teenager, turns out to be a clever and astute young woman and a big help to her father.

His deputy Malek is sometimes more enthusiastic than perceptive. In the first story, where they find an old woman hanging by the rafters, Malek has made several elaborate calculations to prove that her husband was the murderer. Lieutenant Boruvka patiently hears him out and solves the crime just by observing the room.

The last story goes back to Lieutenant Boruvka’s past, and how he met his wife. And you get a hint of why he always wears that mournful expression.

Although each story stands alone, the book as a whole works as one continuous narrative about Lieutenant Boruvka. You follow his life and also how Zuzana develops and grows up. It is a collection of short stories that works almost as a novel.

Josef Skvorecky is a well-known Czech writer, who fled Czechoslovakia after the invasion of his country following the Prague Spring of 1968. As far as I can tell, these are his only detective stories. They are slightly tongue-in-cheek, parodying the tropes of the genre (especially the locked room murder, of which there are several). The stories are enjoyable, often with complicated solutions. Lieutenant Boruvka is a wonderful creation—and a fictional detective to remember.