Series C-L: 2 CDs

The plot in the style of the so-called. The locked-room mystery has appeared in countless variations in the history of detective fiction from its beginnings to the present day - not coincidentally, it was recently used by Stieg Larsson in Millennium. It is always a problem of a bounded space (room, home, of the car, island), where the crime took place, although the door is locked from the inside, stone walls, ditches and other impassable obstacles simply could not happen.

It seems as if the mystery of the locked room, seemingly precluding any logical solution, contains the quintessence of what makes a detective story a detective story: That is why, as Josef Škvorecký says, all the Great Detectives have been "grinding their teeth" on this "nut" since Poe's Murders in Morning Street. Among them are Captain Kalash and his sidekick Karlicek in Eduard Fiker's novel Series C-L, representing the qualitative peak of the final phase of the author's work and of the three-part detective series with the characters of an officer from the State Security Headquarters and his talkative, imaginative and tireless crime fiction. Remarkably, it was only after twenty or twenty-five years of intensive work on the bloody fox of crime reading that Eduard Fiker wrote his first locked-room mystery par excellence. The traditional plot scheme is refreshed in Fiker's novel (certainly not for the first time in the history of the genre) by "moving" the crime scene.

The mystery of the locked room is modified here into the mystery of the barred mail car of the express train 2316, guarded from inside and outside, travelling at a constant speed of 70 km/h, which was blown to pieces by the explosion of the infernal machine on 27 June 1951 after half past three on kilometre 297.3 of the railway line Prague - Bratislava.