Socialist Detective Fiction: The Development of Attempts to Bring Detective Fiction into the Ideological Service of the Czechoslovak Regime in the 1950s–60s

This historically oriented study explores the transformation of detective fiction in Czechoslovakia from the 1950s to the 1960s, illustrating how detective fiction was adapted to serve the ideological goals of the communist regime. Following the postwar communist takeover, crime fiction was initially rejected as a decadent bourgeois form. However, between 1958 and 1962, critics and literary publicists began formulating a concept of ‘socialist detective fiction’ that aligned with the principles of socialist realism. Paradoxically, while this theoretical framework emerged in official discourse, many contemporary writers resisted it – producing works characterised by humour, irony, and playful subversion of the idealised image of state security forces. This study examines the contemporary 1960s Czechoslovak debate on detective fiction, attempts to define socialist detective fiction, and, using the example of Josef Škvorecký, explores the strategies by which authors resisted the subordination of detective fiction to state ideology.