Tales from Two Pockets by Karel
Capek
Short And Sweet, With Surpising Nuances
Karel Capek (1890-1938), one of the greatest Czechoslovakian authors of
the century, and who mastered numerous forms of writing, was
particularly inventive with the genre of mystery, detective, and crime
fiction. In Tales from Two Pockets, however, Capek took the crime story
and related forms of the genre to new levels, weaving strange, short, and
powerful psychological studies of ordinary human beings caught in
extraordinary and improbable circumstances. Through these intense but
always fun stories, Capek moves brilliantly but lightly in the philosophical
realms of human existence, exploring the nature of crime and justice,
even the very concept of truth.
Personal Review: Tales from Two Pockets by Karel Capek
"Tales from Two Pockets" should have a special place in the minds of its
readers. That's the place reserved for works which are entertaining
without being trivial, consistently amusing and delightful upon re-reading,

and which appear to have been written effortlessly and on the spur of the
moment (this latter characterization is probably an illusion, since even a
rapidly written piece by the right writer incorporates a lifetime of
craftsmanship and professional skill). The stories in this collection, which
combines two different but related sets of stories ("from one pocket, then
the other"), were written for Capek's newspaper columns during
1928-1929. Czech readers responded enthusiastically to these stories,
which started out clearly enough as detective or crime stories but soon
overflowed the boundaries of that category to become something very
different: reflections on the human mind and character under duress and
meditations on the nature of crime, punishment, and, most especially,
justice. The difficulty of judgment which is fair to both the victim and the
perpetrator is a theme returned to several times, leaving the question an
open one, even in the most gruesome cases, e.g., "The Ballad of Jura
Cup", in which the motive is highly personal and bizarre, or "An Ordinary
Murder" in which the motive is routine but the results are unsettling. Also
related to this idea is the story (from the first set of 24) entitled "The last
Judgment", which seems to be the prototype of the stories in a completely
different collection,"Apocryphal Tales", stories that veer off in the direction
of "alternate reality" parables (this may be the story which Capek himself
thought of as "the turning point" within the whole collection of 48 stories).
The second set of 24 stories is a continuous round-table conversation,
organized along the lines of the Decameron. One story ends, and a
thematically-related one begins (or a story is based on a stray remark or
characterization in the immediately preceding story), something like a
baton that is passed from one relay racer to the next. Often there is a
smaller story within the larger one, recruiting another member at the table
as a second narrator. From the formal point of view the most interesting of
these is "The Confession", in which a priest, a lawyer, and a doctor are all
told the same story by the same man over several decades - he has done
something terrible (his deed is never specified) and must talk about it or
implode, though he feels neither contrition nor guilt nor remorse, while he
has a specific desire to avoid retribution (which is why he picks men
professionally and ethically bound to keep his confession a secret). It's a
large and eclectic collection of narrators that Capek creates - including
policemen, businessmen of various stripes, a doctor, a priest, a "jailbird", a
journalist, civil servants, and men of unidentified callings. Based on their
names and their vocations they are meant to be a representative sample of
inter-war Czechoslovakia's polyglot mixture of ethnicities, nationalities,
religions, and social strata. This is the "social undercurrent" of these
stories, an idealized picture of a hybrid, pluralistic society created by an
admirer and strong advocate of T. G. Masaryk and the political system of
the First Republic.
The translation by Norma Comrada is excellent, colloquial and fluent.
As is her Introduction, which gives the background of the stories' creation
and of Capek's familiarity with the detective-story genre in the literatures of
France, England and America. On a light note, the musings of the lifelong

bachelor, Police Captain Bartosek, on a kidnapped child (which I think of
as "Bartosek on Babies") should be required reading for new mothers and
new policemen as well. And it is in his portrayal of policemen that we see
the breach that separates Capek's time and place from the grimmer post-
World-War-II world of Czechoslovakia. We meet Captain Havalka who
sympathizes with the inner turmoil of Jura Cup, and, more than once, we
see at work the squirrel-toothed Inspector Pistora, whose unprepossessing
exterior houses a first-class deductive brain that rivals that of Sherlock
Holmes. Then there is Detective Holub, who, when recovering the funds
that the confidence-man Plichta has defrauded from widows and lonely
women, allows Plichta to deduct his "operational expenses" from the
restitution he makes and admires his strict system of accounting (it is
Holub who says,"We like ordinary criminals, not mysteries"). You can't
imagine such empathetic portraits of policemen after 1945, though P.
Kohout has tried his best to endow even State-Security policemen with
admirable streaks in their characters.
The stories were written during the "calm years" of the First Republic,
after the difficulties of setting up a new state had been dealt with, and
before the Depression and the encroaching threats of international power-
politics had arrived. This allowed Capek a respite to write as he pleased
without an eye looking over his own shoulder at the political excitements of
the years before and the years to follow. As Comrada points out, it would
be incorrect to call these works "detective stories" or even "crime stories"
(in many of them there are neither crimes nor solutions). However the
reader characterizes them, it should be obvious that Capek displayed a
relaxed freedom of spirit as he wrote them and took a great deal of
pleasure in doing so, both of which are strongly communicated to the
reader.
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