The detective stories of the author Václav Erben dominated the Czech school of this genre for three decades. Its main character, Captain Michal Exner, won hundreds of thousands of readers mainly because of his difference from the contemporary archetype of a classic criminalist or investigator in the services of the SNB. A lover of women, good food and drink and selected ways returns to the Czech reader after many years in a book whose quality has not been diminished by time.