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    Two Murders in My Double Life: A Novel
    Two Murders in My Double Life: A Novel
    Two Murders in My Double Life: A Novel
    Ebook185 pages2 hours

    Two Murders in My Double Life: A Novel

    By Josef Skvorecky

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A brilliantly stylish tour de force in which the bright, sarcastic comedy of one tale sharply contrasts with the dark, elegiac bitterness of the other, Two Murders in My Double Life confirms Josef Skvorecký's reputation as one of our most versatile, engaging, and compassionate writers.

    In Skvorecký's first novel written in English, the narrator lives in two worlds: the exile world of post-Communist Czechoslovakia, where old feuds, treacherous betrayals, and friendships that have lasted through wars, occupations, and revolutions survive; and the fatuously self-congratulatory comfortable world of a Canadian university, in which grave attention is given to matters such as whether a certain male professor has left his office door open wide enough while interviewing a female student.

    Murder suddenly intrudes upon both of these worlds. One features a young female sleuth, a college beauty queen, professional jealousies, and a neat conclusion. The other is a tragedy caused by evil social forces, in which a web of lies works insidiously to entangle Sidonia, who is a publisher of suppressed books, and the narrator's wife.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 2, 2015
    ISBN9781466893986
    Two Murders in My Double Life: A Novel
    Author

    Josef Skvorecky

    Josef Skvorecky is the author of The Bass Saxophone and The Engineer of Human Souls, among other works. He is the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and Canada’s Governor General’s Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario, and Venice, Florida.

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    Reviews for Two Murders in My Double Life

    3.5/5

    15 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Imagine Agatha Christie inviting Vaclav Havel over for tea. Picture the two of them, the dame of mysteries and the Czech president, sitting down to a nice steaming mug of Earl Grey and discussing murder and politics. Think of the wild swings the conversation would take. That’s the kind of literary trampoline you’ll be bouncing on when you read Two Murders in My Double Life, by Josef Skvorecky (who, incidentally, dedicates his novel to Havel). As the title implies, there are two murders in this bipolar, bicontinental novel. There’s the killing in the tradition of Christie, P.D. James and Ellery Queen: a professor at quaint little Edenvale College in Toronto has been strangled in a traditional Locked Room Mystery (the biggest piece of evidence is a piece of chipped-off nail polish found in a file folder); the other murder is a larger, more intangible crime involving a McCarthy-like witchhunt in Prague—it is “a total crime,â€? as Skvorecky puts it in a brief introduction: North America leads, by a wide margin, in the worldwide statistics of murder, but North Americans have never experienced total crime. In Europe and Asia, millions of people fell victim to it, many millions in large countries, but it is not only the body that is murdered by this mega-assassin, it is the soul: the character of the community called a nation. However, one can hardly write a murder mystery about the assassination of souls. These are big issues he’s wrestling with and, to be brutally honest, he doesn’t always pin his narrative to the mat. The story is sharply divided between a traditional murder mystery and a political saga (the likes of which you might find if you tuned into National Public Radio on any given afternoon). Two Murders in My Double Life is not for everybody; but for those it is for, they’ll probably be captivated by what’s inside. The writing is authentic enough to make you wonder how much of this is autobiographical. I had never heard of Skvorecky before I picked up the novel, but his approach feels awfully close to the bone. And, in fact, the photograph on the dustjacket is an old photo of the author and his wife: he’s seated on a rock on a hillside, she stands next to him, and both of them have their backs turned to the camera as they look out over the countryside below. Curious and intriguing. At the center of Two Murders in My Double Life is the Skvorecky figure, an unnamed professor at Edenvale whose colleague is strangled with a piece of string one night and whose wife is under investigation for a past Czech “crime.â€? The novel flips back and forth between the two halves as the professor flashes back to how his wife was blacklisted for stray remarks she made about a friend of hers who was once involved with a Communist. For those unfamiliar with European politics of the Cold War, the Czech portions can get a bit murky and difficult to follow, but Skvorecky has a tart, bracing style that keeps you reading all the way through. The Toronto scenes, however, are a pure delight to read as the author has a great deal of fun at the expense of university politics and mystery writers. At times, reading like a Lite Version of Kundera, Kafka or Camus, Two Murders in My Double Life spreads a veneer of wicked satire over every page—especially those set in North American academia. This is a world where long debates rage over whether or not an instructor should leave his door open when a female student shows up for office hours or—more precisely—who is the faculty’s biggest and best adulterer. There are no lack of catty cocktail parties in these pages. There’s also no lack of sly humor, which mystery fans should quickly catch. One character, a police detective, is named Dorothy Sayers; another is Raymond Hammett; and so on. Skvorecky had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek while composing this, his first novel written in English. His other works include The Cowards, The Engineer of Human Souls and Dvorak in Love. No two ways about it, Skvorecky has a good grasp of our language—in these pages, it is alternately a light brush of the fingers and a hard slap across the face.
    • 4/5
      This book, Skvorecky’s first in English, is a fast enough read and half of the story was fairly compelling. The other half, the campus murder mystery, felt a bit distant and unreal. There were also some quirks that I didn’t feel worked and some language usage that bothered me. The narrator – maybe an alternate-Danny Smiricky – is a Czech ex-pat who teaches at Edenvale College in Toronto and is married to Sidonia, a former singer who publishes banned Czech works. He is also a mystery writer and teaches a class on that subject. When the husband of an Edenvale professor is murdered, the narrator ponders whodunit with his student, a police sergeant investigating the case. At the same time, Sidonia is listed as a StB collaborator (Czech secret police) and tries to clear her name. The Sidonia storyline was much more interesting than the murder investigation. How she came to be listed – and the narrator’s involvement – is just one example of the accommodation and uncertainty under the Czech Communist regime. The narrator also relates other stories of ordinary people forced to collaborate and how little the actual collaboration could be. The murky ambiguity of those days is contrasted to the fiery rhetoric surrounding the list and the multiple hypocrisies on display. Sidonia initiates a lawsuit but it becomes clear that she might never be able to prove her innocence when the accusation is a moving target. One of the slightly annoying quirks in this half is the appearance of unnamed characters obviously based on real people – the Czech “playwright president” and the female writer from the GDR revealed to be a Stasi collaborator. Also weird is the absence of diacritics and some Anglicization (?) of names – the Vltava is called the Moldau.The murder mystery has name weirdness also – a lot of the characters have literary names – the murder victims is Raymond Hammett, the sergeant is Dorothy Sayers, a professor is named James F. Cooper and so on. Sayers and the narrator treat the murder almost as a thought exercise and the college atmosphere didn’t really seem to reflect that a murder had taken place. The narrator’s casual sexism was also rather irritating. It was interesting enough to read and the exploration of post-Communist guilt and innocence felt realistic and sadly muddled but overall didn’t compare to the glorious grab-bag The Engineer of Human Souls.

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    Two Murders in My Double Life - Josef Skvorecky

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