Murder with a Guarantee
September 1938. The clouds of war are gathering over Czechoslovakia, while a mysterious murder takes place in Braník, Prague. Hitler asks for the Sudetenland and in villa no. 383 Nad myslivnou Street, a couple is found shot dead. Major of the Czechoslovak Army Dušan Činovský and the daughter of the Ministerial Council Zuzana Bechyňová. The case for Dr. Peony from the Ostrozrak detective agency begins.
History repeats itself in many details. With Russia-invaded Ukraine awaiting the help of Western democracies in the late winter of 2022, the whodunit takes on a topical dimension with Putin's invasion. "Hitler will destroy us by air," prophesy the participants at the banquet in the Barrandov villa at the very beginning of Murder with a Guarantee. "I think Hitler is more strutting than he is really strong. Hitler's army is not sufficiently trained. It will be enough if England and France stand firmly behind us," other party guests countered.
The consideration of whether Czechoslovakia should have actively resisted the German invasion is, of course, overshadowed in the detective story by another question. Who is the killer of the Major and the dreamy beauty? And there's another big problem. Who wrote the book anyway? Or rather, the entire detective trilogy: Murder for Happiness (1962), Murder on Guarantee (1964) and Murder by Proxy (1967). Was it Josef Škvorecký, or rather Jan Zábrana? Or did they write the trilogy together, as the covers of the post-1989 editions of the mystery books state?
The writer Patrik Ouředník has attempted to answer with his own thoroughness in his book The Free Space of Language (Torst 2013). Until the Velvet Revolution, the detective story was attributed only to Zábran, but he died in 1984 and Škvorecký began to leak contradictory information about the writing of the trilogy after 1989. "Josef Škvorecký is an author with reservations," Ouředník suggests diplomatically.
Authorship is simply without guarantee. What is certain is that a humorous detective story on the verge of a silly parody was created.
In the fifties, the crime genre was on the index, but with the May group and everyday poetry, normal life was returning to literature. And they were allowed to reminisce again about the pre-war era, which Zábrana and Škvorecký (or only one of them) enjoyed. One of the first sentences that opens Murder with a Guarantee is: "It was seven in the evening when we arrived in my boss Tom Lomal's Rolls-Royce at the villa of the factory owner Ivo Zdeborský in Barrandov."
The author or authors set the detective story in the times around the Munich Agreement. It must be added, however, that the exaggeration disappears as soon as a communist enters the story, and then the whole plot becomes bogged down in platitudes. The obvious bow to the regime is rather amusing today, but it is also a testimony to how writers had to bend over backwards even in the early 1960s.
Jan Zábrana's parents were sent to prison by the regime in the 1950s, his mother was sentenced to eighteen years and his father to ten. Škvorecký did not have a similarly painful experience. The book's occasionally proclaimed positive attitude towards communism may suggest that Josef Škvorecký was the author of Murder with a Guarantee. It's a mere deduction, we don't know. But the author or authors will tell us the murderer with all certainty.
