Review: Thoughts of a Crime Fiction Reader (1966) short film

Original title: Nápady čtenáře detektivek Director: Václav Táborský Rating: 7/10 IMDB

“Could it be a suicide?”

During his long career, Czech writer Josef Škvorecký tried various genres from poetry to memoir literature. But what he was most famous for among his readers, was a long line of affectionate parodies, pastiches, tributes to and deconstructions of a crime fiction genre. As rumor has it, his life-long admiration of this sort of literature started during four months in 1962, when he was hospitalized with an infectious jaundice. To kill the time of forced inaction, he reportedly managed to read about 150 crime fiction paperbacks. As he recalled it later, “All those murders helped me to survive.”