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Nations are stereotyped as easily as anything else, and in the 1960s and 70s most of us thought of Sweden as a paradise, where social democracy worked, where the welfare state was successful, where the girls were blonde and beautiful, where the scenery was lovely and the buildings half-timbered, and where sexuality was frank and innocent. Even its legendary suicide rate could be seen in a positive light, as being the result of the admirable willingness of Sweden’s coroners to be open and honest instead of hushing things up because of outdated taboos.
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo lived there, and knew different.
They’re usually described as a wife-and-husband team, but they weren’t married. They’re usually described as Marxists,but they were, more accurately, modern European socialists, intensely sceptical of capitalist excess. What is agreed upon – and what we readers should be grateful for – is that instead of writing agitprop in obscure journals, they aired their views in a series of ten crime novels, of which this title was the seventh. Originally the series had a single subtitle – what we might now call a strapline – which was ‘The Story of a Crime’, and which, it became clear, had a dual meaning. The books were crime stories, obviously, but the series as a whole was the authors’ indictment of the way power treats the powerless.
All very worthy, all very noble and interesting, and like most things worthy and noble and interesting probably destined for the footnotes of history – except that along the way Sjowall and Wahloo also invented a brand-new type of police procedural that changed the genre for ever and still resonates to this day.
Their criticism of government was unrestrained: ‘The centre of Stockholm had been subjected to sweeping and violent changes in the course of the last ten years. Entire districts had been levelled and new ones constructed … What was behind all this activity was hardly an ambition to create a humane social environment but rather a desire to achieve the fullest possible exploitation of valuable land.’ With predictable results: ‘This is an insane city in a country that’s mentally deranged.’
The police force was both their narrative vehicle and their political focus. Again stereotypically, because Sweden had been neutral during World War Two, and because the girls were blonde and beautiful, we thought of Sweden as an essentially pacifist country, but Sjowall and Wahloo were at pains to point out its central militaristic culture, and the way in which the police recruited from the military ranks. They saw the nationalisation of Sweden’s regional police forces in the mid-1960s as a final nail in the coffin, as a transition to a paramilitary force answerable to, and interested in, no one but itself: ‘If you really want to be sure of getting caught, the thing to do is kill a policeman … There are plenty of unsolved murders in Swedish criminal history, but not one of them involves the murder of a policeman.’ And: ‘… everyone knows it’s pointless to report a policeman. The general public has no legal rights vis-à-vis the police.’
Interesting, eye-opening and worthy, but forgettable, regrettably, except that their narrative vehicle was so perversely compelling. Cop stories until then had tended to be exaggerated and glamorous, but Sjowall and Wahloo went the other way. Their manifesto is recapitulated in this book as succinctly as anywhere: ‘Police work is built on realism, routine, stubbornness and system.’
And in the middle of it was Martin Beck.
By this seventh title Beck was fully mature and fully realized as a character. Dour, determined, dissatisfied, dogged, even a little depressed, he was revolutionary at the time, and lives on as the grandfather of practically all current Scandinavian detectives, as well as foreigners as far-flung as Ian Rankin’s John Rebus and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko. He is a marvellous invention, well served by a supporting cast of colleagues as superbly drawn as, say, Ed McBain’s ‘87th Precinct’ repertory. (And very well served, here and elsewhere, it must be said, by Thomas Teal’s English translation, which captures Beck’s weary, sardonic tone to perfection.) Even minor passing characters are delightfully written: in this text, one Captain Hult is found wearing his uniform on his day off. ‘I wear my uniform most of the time,’ he says. ‘I prefer it.’ Thus Sjowall and Wahloo create an impression in eleven words, where some writers would use eleven paragraphs.
And surprisingly, given the rubric of routine, the plotting is equally able. Subtle reversals come thick and fast. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say this book opens with the gruesome murder of a senior policeman. But ‘The Abominable Man’ is not the perpetrator – it’s the victim. The moral ground shifts under our feet just as new clues alter the direction of the investigation. These books work superbly well as thrillers – no question about that – but they’re remembered for making the crime novel socially realistic. Or is it the other way around?
Lee Child
New York, 2011
Just after midnight he stopped thinking.
He'd been writing something earlier, but now the blue ballpoint pen lay in front of him on the newspaper, exactly in the right-hand column of the crossword puzzle. He was sitting erect and utterly motionless on a worn wooden chair in front of a low table in the cramped little attic room. A round yellowish lampshade with a long fringe hung above his head. The fabric was pale with age, and the light from the feeble bulb was hazy and uncertain.
It was quiet in the house. But the quiet was relative – inside there were three people breathing, and from outside came an indistinct, pulsating, barely discernible murmur. As if from traffic on far-off roads, or from a distant boiling sea. The sound of a million human beings. Of a large city in its anxious sleep.
The man in the attic room was dressed in a beige lumber jacket, grey ski pants, a machine-knit black turtleneck jumper and brown ski boots. He had a large but well-tended moustache, just a shade lighter than the hair combed smoothly back at an angle across his head. His face was narrow, with a clean profile and finely chiselled features, and behind the rigid mask of resentful accusation and obstinate purpose there was an almost childlike expression, weak and perplexed and appealing, and nevertheless a little bit calculating.
His clear blue eyes were steady but vacant.
He looked like a little boy grown suddenly very old.
The man sat stock still for almost an hour, the palms of his hands resting on his thighs, his eyes staring blankly at the same spot on the faded flowered wallpaper.
Then he stood up, walked across the room, opened a closet door, reached up with his left hand and took something from the shelf. A long thin object wrapped in a white kitchen towel with a red border.
The object was a carbine bayonet.
He drew it and very carefully wiped off the yellow gun grease before sliding it into its steel-blue scabbard.
In spite of the fact that he was tall and rather heavy, his movements were quick and lithe and economical, and his hands were as steady as his gaze.
He unbuckled his belt and slid it through the leather loop on the sheath. Then he zipped up his jacket, put on a pair of gloves and a chequered tweed cap and left the house.
The wooden stairs creaked beneath his weight, but his footsteps themselves were inaudible.
The house was small and old and stood on the top of a little hill above the main road. It was a chilly, starlit night.
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