Josef Maršík is a railway attendant, he has a wife and children ‒ and above all a rude father-in-law who is mainly looking for money, so he would like to get rid of his daughter's family so that he can rent their apartment better and more expensively. But in order for Maršík to provide for his family, to build his dream house with a terrace and a balcony, he needs much more money! That's when he makes his first bad decision: he submits a dating ad. After all, there is money among unmarried women...

An aging unmarried Alžběta Válová, a maid who was bequeathed ‒ imagine ‒ seventeen thousand by her ex-mistress, answers his ad! Maršík cannot resist this, so step by step he approaches the inevitable tragedy.

It is said that this was indeed the case, at least according to an advertising leaflet from 1932: Karel Čapek, Poláček's colleague from the editorial office of Lidové noviny, had previously advised the author of many court stories and humorous novels to transform his knowledge of the court reporter into a more serious and extensive form. This is how Karel Poláček's first serious novel ‒ Hlavní prělíčení.

He found inspiration in a two-part short story that was published in Český slov in 1928 under the title Román službenné. Poláček developed a sad, but almost trivial case of fraud and malicious murder of an innocent maid into a reportage novel study, which, despite its seriousness and tragedy, does not lack elements of irony, wit and genre detail that are so characteristic of Poláček.

Poláček's main adaptation was revised in 1984 for the Czechoslovak Radio by Stanislav Neubert and staged by director Jan Lorman. František Husák gave an excellent performance in the role of Josef Maršík, while Iva Janžurová played the role of the sensitive, naive and dowdy maid Válova.