JOSEF SKVORECKY'S DETECTIVE: LIEUTENANT BORUVKA

Josef Skvorecky, 1924-2012

Like a melancholic thought-bubble in both mind and appearance, senior Prague police homicide detective Lieutenant Josef Boruvka first delighted Czech readers in 1960 appearing in a series of short stories which were collected in 1966 as Smutek poručíka Borůvky (The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka [1973]). He is a modest criminologist who solves complex crime puzzles inside a drab society under Communist Party control. ‘Joe’ Boruvka, whose Czech surname means blueberry, is known as ‘Comrade Bubble’ by his police team for his portly appearance, balding round head (which signifies cerebral detachment), and an almost supernatural ability to solve crimes. His crack scientific and commonsense mind is often at odds with young Sergeant Pavel Malek, whose Slovak surname means small and is suggestive of his mental stature, if not the apparatchik mentality of Slovaks within a bicultural Czechoslovakia. Czech language readers familiar with the flamboyant 1920s European literary tradition of eccentric detectives would have readily identified Karel Capek’s folksy, unpretentious Dr. Mejzlik as Boruvka’s predecessor.

Boruvka, born just after the end of WWI, is an old-fashioned reactionary who finds himself trapped between an imposed communism and a nascent 1960s liberalism. He is very much a product of the classical catholic education he received at the Kostelac Gymnasia in eastern Bohemia, well before the Nazi occupation of 1938, when Czechoslovakia was a democratic republic. Caught in a loveless marriage to an Italian dressmaker, Josef has a romantic, guilt-ridden weakness for intelligent blonde women, including a junior sergeant who pleases him with her towering chignon when not irritating him with her leaps of logic. His male chauvinism extends to a futile concern for the moral education of his teenage daughter, Zuzana (‘Sue’), who is caught up in the anti-authoritarian identity crisis which would lead to the shortlived Prague Spring in 1968. Boruvka has a suppressed, anachronistic persona that allows him to function under communist scrutiny while remaining a member of the hapless Catholic People's Party, a protective outward mien acquired while serving in the Czech tank corps alongside the occupying Germans, when he excelled as a physical trainer and sax player in the Army band.

Boruvka abhors the loose ends typically found in Capek's stories, seeing them as arising from a non-materialistic philosophy tending towards mysticism, and given that both Capek and Skvorecky studied philosophy and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague, one can see why the lieutenant “liked mysteries, but only solved ones.” Boruvka, having lectured in criminology under Soviet rule, is theoretically an exponent of diamat or materialist investigation and brings mechanical, physical, biological, chemical and social skills to his work. His proceduralism is also a criticism of aesthetic detection. Thus Sins For Father Knox (1973 [1988]), wherein we find both Boruvka and his female alter ego, singer-sleuth Eve Adam, breaking the ten commandments of literary detection proclaimed by Ronald Knox in 1929. Boruvka's respect for logical method is eroded when he realizes he has had Eve wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a poisoning murder. He is so soft-hearted that at the precise moment he uncovers the actual murderer we find, as always, an “expression of inexpressible sadness on Lieutenant Boruvka's round face.”

In The End Of Lieutenant Boruvka (1975 [1990]) Skvorecky depicts Boruvka in a hardboiled series of retrospective cases set in a gritty landscape of Warsaw Pact social realism, of informants against alleged revisionists and Zionists, and individuals desperate to escape. Headstrong Zuzana is pregnant by an irresponsible psychiatrist but loved nevertheless by a flakey American, Mack, destined to be deported. Borukva is increasingly under pressure from Orwellian forces undermining just outcomes, ‘counter-espionage’ collaborators who regard murder as much less of a crime than an illegal exit to the West. The decadent Party elite are protected, like Major Kautsky who appropriates the investigation in “Miss Peskova Regrets” to whitewash the overdosing of a young dancer on LSD. Victims, like the two teenagers found shot in a field that both the Soviet and Czech armies patrol, receive no justice from Boruvka’s elegant, finite solution. At the end, in “Pirates” Boruvka faces characters for whom defection, people smuggling and escape to America offer the only existential hope. In an endgame act of defiance and empathy he betrays his fellow officers and helps a six-year old girl take flight to her parents in Pittsburg, knowing he faces an endless prison sentence.


A thinning Joe Boruvka reappears in the late 1970s as a parking lot attendant in Toronto and becomes a peripheral but defining advisor in the satirical novel The Return Of Lieutenant Boruvka (1991). Eve Adam has helped him escape prison in Prague and ended up inside herself. Zuzana has moved up from the U.S. to Toronto to take care of him, and taken a secretarial position with The Watchful Sisters, a one-woman detective agency. A female friend has been found shot dead and the list of suspects is a who’s who of the historical émigré factions from Czechoslovakia. Fraudulent Austrian royals, exiled anti-communists, Nazi sympathizers, former collaborators and Soviet spies offer a microcosm of European angst and vengeful grudges misunderstood by naïve and apathetic Canadians. Boruvka, an outsider in a novel narrated by Canadian Neil Donby, the victim's brother, provides the logical questions which solve the crime. In the epilogue Eve is reunited in marriage with Boruvka in Memphis, and Neil has caught Boruvka's “oppressive disease, the European virus. A melancholy that sometimes knocks me off my feet and eats away at the very substance of optimism.” Boruvka is thus the only literary detective at the geographic, political and ideological center of 20th Century European angst who bridges the Atlantic, carrying the burden and hope of displaced identity.

[Note: The piece above appears without the images in 100 Greatest Literary Detectives (ed. Eric Sandberg) Rowman & Littlefield, U.S.A. 2018.  Copyright is retained by its author, Chad A. Evans, who once studied detective fiction and film language under Josef Skvorecky at the University of Toronto.]

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442278226/100-Greatest-Literary-Detectives#