TOP MARX

As you may be aware, I started reading Scandinavian thrillers a few years ago.  I haven't read them all yet.  But I have just finished reading the Martin Beck series by Sjowall and Wahloo.

The first point about the 10 Martin Beck books is that they were written between 1965 and 1975. They are not period pieces though.  They were written as a contemporary commentary on life and attitudes in Sweden.  As such, they do not constantly draw in references to remind you of the time, as a later novel might.  You might find some views archaic, and you might for example find it odd that the police can't pick up their mobile telephones to call each other or search out details from the computerised crime datebase, but personally I soon forgot these quirks (perhaps it's a sign of my age) and they didn't detract in any way from my enjoyment of the stories

The second point is that Sjowall and Wahloo had decided to write a scathing critique of contemporary Sweden through the artifice of a series of crime novels and to put all the opinions of the way Swedish society was going into the mouths of the novels' characters.  If you remember (or maybe it's still true), Sweden had an image in the 60s of a modern, clean lifestyle with smörgåsbord, minimalist designer furniture and a population full of blonde, sexy girls (or boys maybe).  You might therefore be disappointed to read of stinking, litter-strewn canals and young people living on the streets, taking drugs and falling under the welfare radar, and maybe some readers were disappointed at the time, especially as the first novels were published at the time of the Summer of Love and Flower Power (although of course Punk was looming . . .).  But one has to assume that this was the Sweden behind the PR and travel posters.  And it didn't sound any worse than any other country to me.  But it did provide a more realistic setting in which the various crimes take place!

There has been much written about the Marxist leanings of the authors. But one should also accept that, until this time, no one had produced quite such an exposé of real life in this model country. Scandinavian novels since have introduced characters who live in the world of luxury and privilege and who show themselves to be immune to and ignorant of the exigencies faced by Sjowall and Wahloo's characters.  There is something of that here too and an incomprehension even among the police at how society is developing.  Maybe it took a Marxist to see what was happening.  But I didn't read these books as a political tract, though it is true that you can detect a certain jaundiced view of society and often a strong sympathy with the criminals, themselves victims of the system.  They were just great detective novels.  They were much more enjoyable to read than anything I’ve read by Marx anyway!

It is true too that little touches of humour sparkle in the midst of the grim, dark Nordic life we are now familiar with from other authors.  I found myself frequently smiling or snorting with amusement, as I imagined these policemen going about their understaffed, underpaid, overworked business, sometimes more Police Squad than Crime Squad.

These are not long books; it was unusual then to write novels of the modern length, but they are   complex and full of detail, as well as sparingly written.   We really get to know all the characters – those that are diligent, those that aren't, those that have foibles or character flaws, those that have happy home lives that compete with the awful scenes policemen have to endure, the one with the with red noses or the large stomach.  And the books are of course a series, during which each one of the main characters develops and progresses.  You are as keen to know for example whether one policeman decides to leave the force in the end as you are to know whether he solves the current crime.  And the stories themselves are realistic - they don't rely on superhuman detective skills, or on some chance mistake by the criminal.  In fact the investigations often come to a dead end with no lines of inquiry left to pursue, before laborious reviews throw up new lines of inquiry.

And the third point, which is important to remember and which was what interested me, is that this series was the first entirely police procedural novel in the world.  Here is what has become the archetypical police detective – assiduous, dedicated, unremitting and conscientious in his pursuit of justice; honest within a corrupt system; problems in his private life, but with fascinating hobbies and personal interests; melancholy and at times irascible, but much loved and respected by his team colleagues.  But he is also one who is as much an active part of that team of colleagues as he is its leader.  And he solves his crimes by sheer hard work and persistent deskwork and legwork.

So these are the novels which inspired Nesbo, Larsson and Mankell (literally), but also Ed McBain,  Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and many other police and detective crime novelists.  Each of the ten books (under the most recent reprinting) indeed contains a forward by one of the famous crime writers of today, explaining Martin Beck's place in the genre.  Thanks to these later writers, you might find something rather familiar about life amongst this group of policemen and detectives.  But again I remind you when these were written.

There were police novels before this and there were detective/crime novels long before.  But I think that the first of this series was the first book to focus on the characters, their interaction, their daily lives and the detail of the search for the culprits, rather than just the crime and the solution.  And, unlike so many novels today, the reader doesn't have inside knowledge.  I am sometimes annoyed to read a chapter here and there from the point of view of the criminal, or detailing some of the criminal’s background as an explanation of his/her motives.  Why don't the police do this or ask that, I always think, because we've already been told who dunnit.  I liked the way the culprit was eventually found here though, through committed police work, and I feel the excitement and disappointments of the chase and then the odd anticlimax at the end as the book just ends.  You come to realise that the lives and tasks of Martin Beck and his friends and colleagues are the story.  The plot is well-conceived and sufficiently puzzling to hold your attention, but, as with many thrillers now, it is not the be all and end all of the books.   

Crime novels before this were just so different.  There is no Poirot here, or Sherlock Holmes or Columbo.  There is no central figure to marvel at and admire.  Martin Beck himself hardly appears in one book and the team is usually very much the key to the solution.  And nor is there a half-witted foil to the brilliant detective; Beck often praises his colleagues as having special skills that he lacks in certain areas.  And nor is there a dramatic explanation of the clever deductions by which the crime is solved in an explosive, impressive climax.  The team members often state themselves to be completely baffled by what's going on, but procedures are followed and in due course the police wind everything up.  You end up desperate to know what they do next.

I was so pleased that my local library had just bought this set.  I was therefore able to read them in order, which was definitely the way to do it.  But, now I am left with a strong sense of loss.  Why did they only write 10 in the series?  I so want to know what became of these very real characters.  I miss them all.

I'm not going to spoil the fun by saying too much about the plots.  But let me just say that they are both fairly 'normal' and topical.  There is none of the incomprehensible horror of the Wallander crimes.  There are crooked business dealings, child killings, police deaths, terrorist incidents, and the murder of a President – all reminiscent of some of the major crimes of the time.  This was the period of Woodstock, LSD, the moon landings and the election of Indira Ghandi and Golda Meir; but it was also after all the time of Cathy Come Home, the rise of heroine, rife police corruption, the Moors murders, the activities of the Baader-Mainhof group and the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.  All this fits with the stories of Martin Beck and colours the atmosphere within which the crimes take place and where the police grapple with their investigations.

I loved them.  I think you will too.

ALNWICKDOTES

One of the places I wanted to see, while visiting Northumberland, was Barter Books in Alnwick.  Alnwick, incidentally, for the benefit of foreigners, is pronounced ‘Annick’.  Barter Books calls itself ‘one of’ the largest second-hand bookshops in Europe.  But I suspect that is just to cover itself from claims from the Guinness Book of Records.  It is huge.  It turned out that our guest house was next door, so it became an easy place to walk to.  If it looks like a railway station, that’s because it is.  Or, strictly, was.

  

The station was built far too large for the local population, but, as was often the case in the North, they wished it to be a grand entrance for visitors (particularly Royal) to the town and Alnwick Castle.  It is now a superb venue for a bookshop.  Here is the entrance hall with the model railway steaming over head.

 

This is a close-up of the mural.

 

And this is one of the reading rooms.

 

On the wall, you can see the war time posters.  The owner discovered an original 'Keep Calm' one in a pile of old books he bought at auction.  He decided to make copies of it for resale.  And the rest is history; I imagine everyone in the world now has one, or a derivative, in their homes. This is the buffet.

 

And these are a couple of the buffet/reading rooms.

 

The walls, incidentally, are covered in the original hand-made glazed tiles.  Interestingly, there was a note on the wall apologising that the shop’s artworks are currently on loan to the Louvre.  Here are another couple of views of the shelves.

 

It doesn’t matter whether you want a complete set of Dr Who, or of Lynda LaPlante, or of Leni Riefenstahl’s Sudanese tribe books, or even an original copy of Metamorphosis et Historia Naturalis Insectorium (£399), you’ll find it here.  They also have some nice vinyl records too.  But the unique feature of the shop, as it’s name suggests, is that you can ‘sell’ your second-hand books here for credits with which you can then buy other books in return.  They also have quite a good index system (except for modern popular paperbacks which are just shelved in alphabetical order) through which I was able to find a book I wanted (at a good charity shop price).

MORE SCANDEWEGIAN NOVELS

Nowhere to post reviews.  So here they are.

I wasn’t impressed by Liza Marklund’s Prime Time, featuring young journalist, Annika Bengtzon.  I thought the characters were a bit thin and the plot a bit Agatha Christie.  Maybe Marklund’s publisher had wanted another novel quickly at the time?  Anyway, I persisted and read 2 more murder thrillers featuring the same media characters.

Exposed by Liza Marklund 

This has the trainee journalist, Annika Bengtzon, manning the tip-off phoneline on a work placement at Stockholm's biggest tabloid newspaper.  Of course she receives a call informing her that the body of a young woman has been found and she investigates. The blurb says, ‘There is suddenly far more at stake here than Annika's career, and the more questions she asks, the more she leaves herself dangerously exposed.’  This sensational build-up seems a bit misplaced (or maybe it’s from another novel).  Anyway, I quite enjoyed this rather more solid tale and Bengtzon came across as more three-dimensional.  Without spoiling the story too much, I can say that Bengtzon stumbles across video footage that places the main suspect hundreds of miles from the crime scene, right at the time of the murder.  'That night he did something so controversial that he'd rather be suspected of murder than tell anyone what he was really doing. What could possibly be worse than that?'  A nice premise and a sign that she is after all an instinctive investigative journalist.  And I am still fascinated at the way information is so readily available in Sweden.

Red Wolf by Liza Marklund

This one has Annika Bengtzon, now a crime reporter, investigating a death against the explicit orders of her boss, which seems to lead to a series of deaths, including that of a journalist investigating the same incident.  I am not reading these books in the order they were written, so there were references here to previous episodes that I didn’t understand, but, again, it was a good story that I enjoyed.  There was still though the unnecessary sensationalism (‘Caught in a frenzied spiral of secrets and violence, Annika finds herself and her marriage at breaking point. Will her refusal to stop pursuing the truth eventually destroy her?’)  It was an interesting read, but the ‘frenzied spiral’ and acts which might ‘eventually destroy her’ were tricky to find.  It was set in the north of Sweden, in the middle of a particularly freezing winter, which added that air of gloom and foreboding and devastation that makes Nordic thrillers the genre that they are.  My only real complaint is the attempt here to turn Bengtzon into a human being with personal problems and baggage.  This genre is usually good at doing this, but somehow the little girl who constantly breaks down into tears when her boss is cross with her, doesn’t square with the constant references to her as ‘top crime reporter’ and ‘dogged investigator’.  But there, she’s a woman, written about by another woman; what do I know?  The incidents investigated, by the way, are all based on real life events, which makes them credible I suppose, but also an uncomplicated, easy-read series.

The Inspector and Silence by Hakan Nesser.   

Another case for Swedish Chief Inspector Van Veeteren.  I still don’t know quite what to make of these novels.  The story was interesting enough - a girl went missing from the summer camp of a mysterious religious sect and a young girl's body is subsequently discovered in the woods nearby, raped and strangled.  This time, the story is set in the soporific heart of a summer heat-wave, which provides an interesting counter-point to the usual ice and snow and Nordic gloom.  I like the way the investigation unwinds in these thrillers, usually coming to a dead end when there are no more clues to pursue and leading to painstaking, laborious re-examinations.  I’m sure most police investigations are like this.  Here, the sect refuses to cooperate and all lines of enquiry run into the scorching sand around the forested lake.  Van Veeteren is approaching retirement and is in holiday mood, but is asked to apply his usual intuition when the police have more or less given up making progress and there is another murder.  So far, so good.  What I’m not sure about though is that, as in previous Van Veeteren stories, we are never given an insight into this famous intuition.  The detective goes off, apparently enjoying the glorious weather, boating on the lake and sitting in pub gardens, yet somehow makes progress where the combined might of the police force has failed.  And I’m not quite sure I really like Van Veeteren either.  Anyway, a good atmospheric piece and a credible crime tale in the usual readable style (by Mankell’s translator).

Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

This is the first book in the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s - the novels that set the tone and the standard of Scandinavian crime writing to come, if not crime writing in general.  I was very please to get hold of it at last.  It was reading this book, as a young man, that enthralled Henning Mankell and inspired him to start writing and to invent Wallender.  The enigmatic, taciturn, overworked, job-obsessed Martin Beck indeed is the model for many detectives since, such as Rebus and Scudder.  Despite a few references to outdated views of the time, it stands up well today.  The authors intended their stories to be firmly socialist in nature and critical, if not of society, of the government of the time.  This is a theme Mankell took up with gusto, as his Wallander looks on in mystification at the way Swedish society has developed.  That commentary, the unglamorous detective, and the slow build-up of the suspense in Roseanna, must have been stunning at the time.  Even now, it is still a good read.  The naked body of a young woman is dredged up from a Swedish canal. She has been sexually assaulted and strangled.  But no one has reported her missing and Martin Beck can find no clue to her identity.  Three months later, all that Police Inspector Martin Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and that she could have been strangled by any one of eighty-five people.  As the investigation struggles on, it is of course the detective and his preoccupations on which we focus.  Great stuff.  Must now to try to find some more in the series.

Missing by Karin Alvtegen. 

Another new author – no doubt now appearing on library shelves because of the continuing popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction.  In The Grand Hotel, a homeless woman charms a businessman into paying for dinner and a room. When his dead body is discovered the following morning she becomes the prime suspect. When a second person is killed in similar circumstances, Sybilla, having left her comfortable middle-class upbringing for the anonymity of the streets, becomes the most wanted person in Sweden . . .  I have now read several novels involving homeless persons on the streets of Sweden; they can’t all be total fiction.  Perhaps all these novels coninue to shine a light on the disjointed, unequal nature of society in Sweden.  I found that aspect of the story fascinating.  I also quite like the plot line – one which has been much done before (Frantic, The Fugitive, North by North-West, and other Hitchcock films).  But this is not so much a murder thriller as a journey by our heroine to find her way in life.  Those she meets on her way provide keys to her eventual existence.  But we do want to know who dunnit too.  Not a detective thriller as such, but an interesting book.  On the strength of the blurb on the back of this book, I borrowed it and another by Alvtegen, without checking the blurb on the second book.  That turned out not to be a thriller at all.

Sacrifice by Karin Alvtegen.

Monika is driven to succeed as a doctor - but cannot allow herself any personal happiness. Maj-Britt is desperate to be left alone.  A tragic accident brings these two strangers together.  The blurb then says, ‘forcing them to confront their darkest fears’; I must have missed that bit.  The blurb also asks, ‘why does she shun society?’  I still don’t know.  Again, I found that reading a tale of characters in another land, their lifestyles and their decisions interesting in itself.  But, despite the surprise ending, not really my glass of aquavit at all.

Midwinter Sacrifice by Mons Kallentoft.

Yet another Swedish crime thriller to appear on the crest of the wave of Scandi-fever.  This novel introduces a female hero for a change, Malin Fors, a detective with the usual kinds of messy personal baggage (a thirty-one-year-old single mother), but possessing special investigative skills.  She is first on the scene, when a naked man is found hung from a tree on a frozen plain in the middle of nowhere.  For a while, no one knows the identity of the dead man, but it seems that maybe no one cares. A tale of small town society trying to keep its secrets hidden.  This was in the end a run of the mill thriller, with a plot that I quite enjoyed.  Malin is a good characterisation and her instincts are what makes her a good detective and keeps things moving along.  And of course the cold and snow make it what it is.  What I hated though were the ‘voices’ that linked each chapter.  It’s fine, and a normal plotting conceit, to have persons in the background voicing their thoughts to help the reader understand motives and actions.  But having the dead man speaking to Malin was a bit weird and I found it an unnecessary distraction.  I read another review which said that the voices were what Malin could ‘hear’ and what drove her instincts.  Sorry, I didn’t understand that at the time.  Maybe, now you know, it won’t disturb you quite as much as it did me.

The Day is Dark by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

Another, the fourth, Thóra Gudmundsdóttir story.  Thora is an Icelandic solicitor, who investigates primarily for insurance claims, but who ends up resembling a Scandinavian detective.  She has a few problems at home and personal frictions, but these serve only to make her more human and do not overshadow the story, as they often can.  In this investigation, contact has been lost with two Icelanders working in a harsh and sparsely-populated area of Greenland.  Thóra is hired to investigate.  In everyone’s mind too is the fact that a woman had vanished from the site some months earlier.  The almost sunless days of the Greenland winter provide a nice brooding backdrop to the novel and the tensions that arise between the members of the team in this lonely, unforgiving, place are entirely credible.  The inexplicable hostility of the locals adds to the unsettling atmosphere.  And I was rudely reminded that Scandinavian countries are not all one, as the Icelanders grapple with Danish and English to make themselves understood to the Greenlanders.  A chilling tale in more senses than one and with nicely created shocks at the end of almost each chapter.  The most gripping to date of the Thora novels.  Sigurdardottir has now acquired the ‘Iceland’s Larsson’ or ‘if you liked Nesbo’ tag, which is helpful only to those selling the book, in other words not helpful at all.  Would make a good film I reckon, with scary music and inexplicable things happening all the time.  A great read this one.

The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler

And yet another new author, in fact another husband and wife writing team, and the book has apparently sold millions all around the world.  I can only guess that that is because, like so many these days, it says on the cover, ‘if you liked Stieg Larsson and are missing The Killing buy this'.  In fact it’s nothing like either.  It’s a good story – quite fast-moving, exciting, complex, mystifying, etc – all that a crime thriller needs to be.  A gruesome triple murder attracts the interest of Detective Inspector Joona Linna, who demands to investigate. There is only one witness - the boy whose family was killed before his eyes.  But he is deeply wounded and is comatose with shock.  Linna engages Dr. Erik Bark to hypnotise the boy, hoping to discover the killer through his eyes.  But Bark has sworn never again to practise hypnotism on traumatised patients.  And so the story unfolds and leads where no one expected.  So far so good, as a premise.  But it has received quite a lot of poor criticism (which makes the claim of it being an international sensation a bit odd).  Firstly, there are too many main characters.  Is the hypnotist the hero?  We follow all his problems, his cases, his personal life, his involvement with this case.  Or is Linna the hero?  He is after all the detective trying to unravel the mystery.  But we don’t learn too much about him.  Why is he the top detective, etc?  Does he solve this case or does someone else in fact?  Then there is a sub-plot with some other characters; I wasn’t quite sure who they were.  Why was that there?  Maybe that is one of the problems of a husband/wife writing team?  Anyway, sort all that out, or ignore it completely, and you’re left with a gripping tale that is well worth the read.   Oh, and why is hypnotism the only solution at the start?  And why does he have to use a discredited hypnotist who has sworn never to work again?  Oh, never mind; it’s a thriller, it has crimes and a detective, and it’s Swedish.

Disgrace by Jussi Adler-Olsen

You may remember that I quite enjoyed Mercy (The Keeper of Lost Causes in the US), this author’s first book, when the unsolved crime department was set up.  Well, here’s his second book.  After the ‘success’ of the first case, Carl Mørck now has a second assistant and things are going better than he expected.  But he decides to take on a case where the killer confessed and is just completing his long prison sentence.  Why?  Who knows?  He’s an instinctive detective after all!  The case concerns the murder of a brother and sister twenty years earlier.  A group of boarding school students were the suspects at the time, until one of them confessed.  If this is another book that offers a commentary on present day society (this time Danish), it’s pretty damning.  Again we follow closely a girl who lives on the streets.  She has learnt to be invisible and elude the police and the rest of her boarding school friends who want to find her.  She steals and beats up people who tangle with her.  But she has lots of money and is not entirely sane.  All this seems to be because of her treatment by her friends and her parents.  We are never told why they treated her this way.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter; the case is after all about the friends.  These are now very wealthy prominent citizens, who have achieved their success through ruthlessness, cruelty and a bit of illegality.  How they now live their lives and amuse themselves is somewhat incredible, even to a common pauper like me.  But there we are – this is the upper echelon of Danish society.  Perhaps the girl on the streets is the indictment of these excesses?  Anyway, the police characters are filling out nicely and this book has a new translator which makes the language rather easier to accept than Mercy.  The story runs along nicely and is exciting enough to keep interest until the end.  Although did the detective actually solve the crime?  There is still much that isn’t explained here, but maybe, with the exciting ending particularly, we can wait until the next novel.  I enjoyed it anyway.  I wouldn’t want to meet any of these upper class Danish types though.  Hopefully the next book will continue to develop the characters and will have an investigation on the same, more routine lines.  Hopefully too one that is actually unsolved, since he seems to have hundreds of such cases on his desk.