ESCAPISM AND REALISM
- or WHO IS EVA ADAMOVA?
This speech was held at the Literární Akademie's conference Labyrinth Of
Women In Literature, in Prague, Czech Republic, February 15-16, 2007.
”In Swedish you can do anything... Especially talk stupid.” – Sins for Father Knox
Male crime writers with female detectives may not be very common, but they certainly exist. In 1973, Josef Skvorecky published a collection of short stories, Sins For Father Knox, in which a nightclub singer called Eva Adamova solves murder mysteries in classical whodunit style. Who is she then, this musical amateur sleuth, which position does she hold in crime fiction and in Skvorecky’s writings?
Women authors have for a long time dominated crime fiction, and many of the foremost mystery writers are women. It’s not easy to explain the female dominance in this field, but the fact remains that Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Patricia Highsmith and others, are not only the most widely read authors, but they have also created works to which every mystery writer to be has to relate in some way.
However, the female dominance among crime writers doesn’t seem to have had any significant effect on the choice of principal characters. Just like their male colleagues, women authors tend to use male detectives: Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy Sayer’s case, Ngaio Marsh has got Sir Roderick Alleyn, and Ruth Rendell solves her murders with the help of Inspector Wexford.
When Colleen A Barnett compiled her Mystery Women: An Encyclopedia Of Leading Women Characters In Mystery Fiction, she found almost 400 stories featuring detective heroines between the years 1860-1979, but only 11 were written before 1900. The first female detective in history, “Mrs G”, first appeared in Andrew Forrester Jr’s novel The Female Detective from 1864. Forrester doesn’t tell us much about her background or motives, and she remains a rather anonymous figure.
Along with the Women’s Liberation movement, the number of female detectives increased. A quick run-through of Barnett’s encyclopaedia shows that the female “blood hounds” often had working-experiences from various professions, nursing, secretarial work, and teaching. Some were archaeologists or journalists. The most well-known character however, is the financially independent woman who tracks the killer down while knitting or baking sponge cakes. The spinster detective has become a literary convention, and the most famous of them all is of course Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.
During The Jazz Age, a new generation of women detectives with more verve and spirit made their way into criminal fiction, often together with spouses and boyfriends. Very popular were Dashiell Hammett’s glamorous detective couple Nick and Nora Charles, affectionately bantering and mixing their Manhattans in foxtrot time. Even Agatha Christie used a married couple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, whose adventures often turned into mild parodies of the genre.
Women detectives have become more frequent during the last decades; they are more equal, sexier, tougher, and better educated. Skvorecky’s female detective Eva Adamova is one of the precursors of these modern heroines.
Josef Skvorecky has said in an interview that he discovered detective stories rather late in life. It was during a stay in hospital, he was so ill that he almost died, and he found comfort and joy in the ingeniously designed murder mysteries.
Skvorecky has returned to crime fiction many times. In 1965, he published a series of essays on detective stories, and you can also find elements of a detective story in novels that are not really crime fiction, for instance Miss Silver’s Past from 1969 and The Miracle Game from 1972. Even Skvorecky’s novel Two Murders In My Double Life from 2001 about the aftermath of the Velvet Revolution is centred around a murder mystery. In recent years, Skvorecky has published several crime novels together with Zdena Salivarova.
In view of the great interest Skvorecky has for crime fiction, it is remarkable how little attention his actual detective stories have received by literary scholars. In Sam Solecki’s broad study Prague Blues, they are only mentioned in passing, and none of the contributors to the anthology The Achievement Of Josef Skvorecky has chosen to discuss his Boruvka stories, nor did the special Skvorecky issue published by Literature Today in 1980.
There is one female detective missing in the Bartlett encyclopaedia: Eva Adamova. The reason may be that she appears in a series of detective stories in which the main character is a man, lieutenant Josef Boruvka. The Boruvka series begins with a collection of short stories, The Mournful Demeanour Of Lieutenant Boruvka, but in the second part, Sins For Father Knox, Adamova is the principal character.
Who then, is this Eva Adamova?
One thing you can say with certainty. She doesn’t have a lot in common with Miss Marple. They are both amateur detectives who more or less stumble into new murder cases in classic detective story fashion, but this is where the similarities end. Miss Marple is a quiet spinster detective who prefers to blend into the background to be able to observe. Eva Adamova is a young nightclub singer who has great difficulties in fending off unwanted suitors, has got a foul mouth and isn’t unused to alcohol. However, they differ the most in their working methods. Miss Marple works associatively, using her village parallels to get to the murderer, while Eva Adamova, following in the foot steps of C Auguste Dupin, solves the cases by deduction.
Eva Adamova is a “slender young woman, blonde, with grey, widely spaced eyes”, beautiful and dynamic, quick and intelligent, and always two steps ahead of the police. Despite all this excellence, she is troubled by everyday problems, especially her love life, partly because she tends to act rashly and unreflectingly. She has got what is required from a Sherlock Holmes, but is human enough for the reader to relate to.
Eva Adamova was rather alone as a crime fighting nightclub singer, at least in the seventies when the books were published, but there are a few predecessors. An unusual example is the burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee, who wrote a mystery novel called The G-String Murders in 1941. It’s about how Lee herself solves the mystery with the stripper who was strangled with her own G string. Lee and Adamova are both in a line of work that has a bad reputation, and they are surrounded by men who constantly try to get them into bed. A forever blushing and stuttering policeman in Lee’s novel bears a strong resemblance to Skvorecky’s many shy and timid constables. The G-String Murders and Sins For Father Knox belong to the same literary tradition; they are both written tongue-in-cheek and have a slightly ironic attitude. In Lee’s novel for example, the victim is found during a solemn grand opening of a public convenience.
The parallel between Adamova and other female detectives, whether they are dancers or old spinsters, should not be drawn too far. Skvorecky is in all probability not inspired by Agatha Christie or Gypsy Rose Lee. In the preface to Sins For Father Knox, he writes: “I took some clay of subconscious origin and created an ideal woman (ideal in a platonic sense, that is – not in the sense that certain people refer to as moral) and made her commit a variety of sins.”
Adamova may have few counterparts in crime fiction, but she has several sisters in Skvorecky’s works. In 1968, Skvorecky co-wrote the script to Jiri Menzel’s satiric musical Crime In A Night Club, in which one of the main characters is Clara Regina, a blond nightclub singer with a complicated love life and a symbolic name, just like Eva Adamova. A blond singer also appears in The Miracle Game, here named Suzi Kajetanova, friend of Danny Smiricky, who gets into trouble with the political police after 1968. I wouldn’t be too bold in guessing that all these characters have the same real life model: Czech jazz singer Eva Pilarova, Skvorecky’s long time friend. If you have followed Skvorecky’s writing through the years, you know that Eva Pilarova pops up in his stories from time to time under different names. The heroine of Crime In A Night Club was also played by Pilarova, and Skvorecky wrote the part directly for her.
Adamova, Regina and Kajetanova all have one thing in common. They are not political, but they have too much integrity to avoid political persecution. In almost identical wording, Skvorecky has a couple of times summarized why the blonde singers were so threatening to the power structure in Czechoslovakia. Kajetanova “indulges in something that is human and indulged in by everyone else”, and Adamova “does what is human, and what everyone does.” This non-ideologic attitude must with necessity clash with authorities who look upon creativity and spontaneity as enemies of society.
The concept of sin is present through all the books. Boruvka and Adamova both have a Catholic background, and their lifestyles would be perceived as sinful by many of their fellow believers.
In his essay on crime fiction, Czech writer Karel Capek makes a distinction between sin and crime:
A sin is a certain bad state of the soul, whereas a crime is a certain bad course of things. There are deadly sins which are not deadly crimes, and vice versa.
Capek maintains that authors of detective-stories don’t concern themselves with sin, only with crime. That is, according to him, the difference between Dostoyevsky and Arthur Conan Doyle. The Boruvka series contradicts this statement. The stories about Boruvka and Adamova bring up moral issues in relation to justice and ethics, crime and sin, Commandment and Law. The short story An Atlantic Romance discusses the right to take your own revenge outside the law, the same theme as in the novel Miss Silver’s Past.
A recurring theme in the short stories is the discrepancy between the things we say and the things we do, the reality behind the grand ideals. “The more devout you are, the more you enjoy sinning”, Eva says, and adds self-critically: “Which I can confirm from my own experience, God forgive me.”
Skvorecky has said that he sees at least two important functions of the crime novel. First of all, it works well as an intellectually stimulating escape from reality when times are hard. Secondly, it gives the author a possibility to write about the darker side of things and still be entertaining. These two functions exist simultaneously and in full harmony in the Boruvka books. If the books are both realistic and escapistic, you might say that the author uses Boruvka for writing the former and Adamova for the latter.
Boruvka and Adamova live in the same world, but represent different realities. This becomes apparent if you compare the narrative in Sins For Father Knox and the following book, The End Of Lieutenant Boruvka. Skvorecky turns the two stories inside out, much like a negative to a photography. In Sins For Father Knox, Boruvka appears in the first and last chapters, and in the chapters between the field is left to Eva. In the case of The End Of Lieutenant Boruvka, it’s the other way around; Eva only appears as a minor character in the beginning and at the end of the book.
Boruvka’s experiences in life have been much darker than Adamova’s. He is a policeman working within a system that is in itself criminal. In the first book from 1966, written during a period when Skvorecky still had to consider the censorship, his stories are principally “whodunits”, but when Boruvka returns in the third book, it’s in a realistic narrative of Czechoslovakia of the time. Boruvka is growing frustrated over not being able to perform his duties, not being able to catch a killer because the killer is protected by his party loyalty. In case after case, he has to stand aside and watch the real criminals escape.
In 1975, Skvorecky was in exile and did no longer have to care about his censors. To let Boruvka work like a detached “whodunit detective” in a country governed by criminals suddenly appeared as irresponsible; ignoring politics would be a distortion of reality.
Still, there is always room for fantasies and dreams. Skvorecky has never questioned the value of crime fiction as light reading, and this is where Eva Adamova, his “ideal woman”, comes into the picture. When Skvorecky feels like playing, Boruvka steps down, or withdraws temporarily, and he lets Eva take over.
There are a certain kind of politically committed critics who condemn escapistic literature, but there is nothing wrong with wanting to get away from reality for a while. It’s only when escapism has disguised itself as realism, as is the case with socialistic realism, that it becomes a problem. There is a big difference between perfectly legitimate, even necessary, daydreams, and deliberate lies.
The escapistic function of Sins For Father Knox is probably the reason Eva Adamova has to go out on a worldwide tour. In the book, she visits France, Italy, Sweden and the US, which contributes to the light atmosphere of the book. In this way, Skvorecky doesn’t have to confront Eva with The Big Crime in her home country. The author visited the same places before 1968, and in an interview, he described how he felt about Communist Czechoslovakia compared to the free world: “I had come from a world that was drab to one that was colourful.”
The good-humoured stories about Eva Adamova are fantasies, a moments rest from the harsh reality that Boruvka has to face in his profession. Adamova’s stories are not realistic police stories. They are more like Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, intellectual games, riddles to be cracked in front of the open fire. Eva Adamova’s literary figure represents improvisation, play and joy, all that was banned in the home country at that time. When Sins For Father Knox was adapted for Czech television in 1992, the episodes were broadcasted live, and the feeling of game and improvisation from the book was kept by regularly letting the camera explore the area behind the scenes. They also added a guessing game to the programme. A person from the audience was given a walk-on part, and it was the object of the audience to pick him or her out.
It’s remarkable how elegantly Skvorecky has succeeded in putting together two so seemingly incompatible styles as escapism and realism. It’s true that Dashiell Hammett wrote both about a glamorous couple like Nick and Nora Charles, and a shabby private eye like Sam Spade, but they never appeared in the same books. In the Boruvka series, the author moves easily from The Closed Room to political murder.
The character of Eva Adamova never appears in the last novel, but the readers are told that she was imprisoned in Prague for her association with Boruvka, but escaped and finally ended up in Toronto where she married her melancholy lieutenant. In the country they left, there was no place for an honest policeman or a free-spirited woman.
By Martin Kristenson.
Translated from Swedish by Agneta Kristenson.
