Sins for Father Knox (1973) by Josef Škvorecký
Good Reads meta-data is 272 pages rated 3.56 by 124 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Czech (via exile in Canada)
Verdict: A puzzler, indeed.
Tagline line: Who dunnit? How d’ya know?
Accomplished Czech crime writer Škvorecký offers ten short mystery stories after a foreword about Ronald Knox’s decalogue. In anticipation of this volume, there is an earlier post setting forth Knox’s ten commandments. That is the homework.
Each of these stories illustrates the contravention of one of these ten commandments. That is, each story shows the importance of each commandment by its absence, so that when it is violated the story is less than satisfactory.
About 80% through each story there is a pause to allow the reader to infer who did it and how and ponder on which commandment has been compromised.
The stories are amusing, though contrived for didactic purposes, and, sorry to say, they become repetitive because the recurrent character is described every time in some detail: her alluring scent, her plunging décolletage, her blonde hair, her hourglass figure, her shapely legs revealed by a maximum mini skirt, and so on, again and again. Likewise, her repeated and successful efforts at repelling boarders from the barflies that are drawn to her as per the previous description.
Some readers may be interested to know that one story offers a mathematical proof to identify the murderer. Sort of.
The sequence is not in numerical order of the decalogue, nor otherwise ordered by difficulty, or length. This reader discerned no order at all.
Only one of the stories is set in Czechoslovakia as it was then. Some are in Sweden and most in the USA as our heroine is a traveling artiste singing in nightclubs. Škvorecký’s Lieutenant Boruvka does make an appearance in the last story along with the songbird whose feminine attributes are once again detailed.