The well-known South Bohemian writer Ladislav Beran (born in 1945 in Písek) has been following this Aristotelian precept in his work all his life and has been performing a long and admirable literary feat. He has seventy books to his credit. He entered literature with his first book Auction in 1987. His seventieth publication is currently on the shelves of bookstores. And three more of Beran's volumes are due to see the light of day next year! Ladislav Beran's work is based mainly on his long experience as a commissioner of the criminal service, but from time to time he also writes a novel dealing with interpersonal relationships, such as the reader-successful book The Foals Are Little Horses.¨

Crime in Eden

The title introduced by these lines was published a short time ago in the edition Original Czech Detective Fiction by the popular Brno publishing house MOBA, so the book still smells of printer's black. It is decorated with an imaginative cover by Ivan Vaszila and the content consists of two dozen thrilling crime stories set in the 1930s in Písek in the area of the local gendarmerie search station. The titles of the cases speak for themselves, such as The Leaky Memory, The Sold Bride, The Techtle Mechtle of the Procurator Arnost Fanfula or The Christmas Hauptref, or last but not least The Robbed Amant and the Unclean Washerwoman from Vodnany.
Each of the stories bears the hallmarks of Beran's work - a sense of suspense, plot, thrilling gradation and punchline. Readers certainly cannot complain about the lack of humour.

When writing Crime in Eden, Beran, as always, went into the archives and contemporary materials to present his readers with the most interesting cases that the then Sandy Investigation Station solved. As the annotation on the back cover of the recommended publication says, readers will once again meet not only Staff Captain Votruba, but also other members of the gendarmerie search party. Murder with a Fountain Pen, Criminal Tango or In flagranti - this is just a small selection of well-written stories that take us back to the time when professional honour and the desire for justice were the alpha and omega of all investigators...

Please meet

Ladislav Beran was born 11.12. 1945 in Písek. From 1978 he worked at the Písek Criminal Police, where he was in charge of property crime and from 1990 he was in charge of the protection of cultural heritage, including art and antiques. In 2005, he was retired as Commissioner of the Criminal Service. He began publishing his first short stories, first in magazines, then in books from 1985. His authorial output is admirable. He is the author of dozens of books, mostly with criminal themes, and in the last decade he has continued the legendary series of Sinful People by Jiří Marko, and he has mapped the work of the gendarmerie in Písek in the 1930s. A number of his works have been dramatised for radio and published in the German and Austrian press. Ladislav Beran is ready for a television or film adaptation of his work.

He has been awarded several literary prizes for his work, such as the Zeyer's Mug twice, the Jiří Marek Award (also twice), and the South Bohemian literary prize Číše Petr Vok for lifetime achievement, which he received in 2014.
How Ladislav Beran felt and what this award meant to him will be the subject of an interview with this successful and popular writer, which we will be preparing shortly. In this brief introduction, it remains to add that Beran is a member of the Writers' Association in Prague, the Writers' Association in České Budějovice and also a member of the Czech section of the International Organization of Adventure and Detective Literature - AIEP. zde. Currently Ladislav Beran is writing the second part of the novel Hříbata jsou malí koně, which was published by the publishing house Hříbata. The sequel to the previous volume will be called Mine for Happiness.

Ivan Černý/gnews.cz

Ladislav Beran receiving the Petr Vok Literary Award in 2014