Two Murders in My Double Life

Albert Stray is manager of the Port Credit Public Library.

Josef Skvorecky’s latest work, his first English-language novel,
weaves together two separate tales, one set in his native
Czechoslovakia, the other in Mississauga. One of the two murders cited
in the title is that of a womanizing professor at Erindale College; the
other is the murder, in Prague, of the reputation of the narrator’s
wife. The author has fun peopling his novel with names drawn from
mystery fiction. There’s a policewoman named Dorothy Sayers and a
professor named Marjorie Allingham, and the book abounds with references
to the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Hercule Poirot, Humphrey Bogart, and
Edgar Allan Poe.

Two Murders is in part a political tract against the former Communist
government in Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, the Czech part of the story
merely distracts readers from the more interesting tale of campus
intrigue.