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This scarce book used to belong to a library but survived surprisingly well - Wrapper not price-clipped showing £12.99 net on foldover - Published by Faber & Faber- 173 pg. >>> The Return of Lieutenant Boruvka is the last book in this 'marvellous sequence of detective novels' (The Times) in which Josef Skvorecky offers us not only a sly and devious murder mystery but also a comic confrontation of the Old World and the New that pokes fun at both sides of the cultural divide.'The Czech answer to Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown.' Observer >>> Josef Skvorecky was born in Nachod, Czechoslovakia on September 27, 1924. Under Nazi occupation, he was forced to work in an aircraft factory. He later read Philosophy at Charles University in Prague. He worked for the state publishing house, helping to translate books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler. He began to write detective stories featuring Lieutenant Boruvka, which became popular with Czech readers. In 1958, his novel The Cowards was published and then banned on the grounds that it was "Titoist and Zionist." He and his wife moved to Canada after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the liberal reforms known as the Prague Spring. They founded 68 Publishers in 1971, which released more than 200 books by exiled Czech authors and those banned by the communists. Skvorecky's other written works include Miss Silver's Past, The Engineer of Human Souls, and The Miracle Game. In 1980, he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He taught at the University of Toronto. He died on January 3, 2012 at the age of 87. >>> Boruvka is working as a parking-lot attendant in downtown Toronto, after a spectacular escape from a Czech prison which provoked an international scandal, when a young woman is murdered, perhaps in a spy coverup. Boruvka lends his years of experience and hard-won pessimism to the neophyte Canadians on the case (including his daughter, who works for a feminist detective agency). - By having this story--his most riveting and funniest yet--narrated by the murdered woman's brother, an amiable WASP, Josef Skvorecky sets the Old World against the New, and pokes fun at the absurdities on both sides of our cultural divide. In the end, as an old war crime is avenged, the narrator discovers the source of Lieutenant Boruvka's mournful demeanor.
