Review: What evil lurks in Sweden’s bucolic countryside?

Review of: The Inspector and Silence

Author: Håkan Nesser (English translation by Laurie Thompson)

Publisher: Pantheon Books

Source: Library

Grade: C

All Chief Inspector Van Veeteren wants at the beginning of Håkan Nesser’s 1997 The Inspector and Silence is a quiet vacation with a chance to chat up an interesting woman, who he met, not coincidentally, during his investigation of her husband’s murder. Followed, perhaps, by an even quieter retirement as the owner of a local second-hand bookshop. He definitely doesn’t want the complication of a new criminal investigation. But when a police chief in a summer resort town calls in a favor a few days before Van Veeteren is due to leave for sunny Mediterranean isles, he feels compelled to respond. After all, the man is the protégé of a fellow officer who once saved Van Veeteren’s life.

And the case, although especially distasteful – the beating, rape and murder of a young girl -- should be easily closed before his plane leaves. The girl was attending a religious camp in the area. With few neighbors in the rural area, the obvious suspect in the attack is the camp’s charismatic preacher, who requires his nubile charges to swim nude in the nearby lake. The man already has a criminal record for assault on another young follower. But when police arrive at the camp to investigate, the preacher has disappeared. And the camp’s chaperones insist that all their charges are accounted for, a story backed up by the other campers.

But if no one is missing, who is the girl? Who assaulted and killed her? And why did the charismatic preacher choose such a suspicious time to disappear?

Further complications ensue. The girl’s murder, reported by anonymous caller, was actually the second anonymous tip about campers at the religious retreat. When local police received the earlier tip, the acting chief visited the camp, was told then that all the campers were accounted for, and dismissed the call as a prank.

It takes a second call, in which the tipster gives detailed directions to the location of the corpse, before a search is made. And before the acting police chief admits he’s in over his head and calls for outside help.

The body of the first murdered girl (if there was a first girl) is yet to be found. No one at the camp is able (or willing) to throw any light on the crimes, or on the whereabouts of the absconded preacher, and the trail is growing cold. Will Van Veeteren be able to solve the case before he leaves for vacation? Will he be able to solve it at all?

Van Veeteren is divorced, grumpy, and definitely past his prime as a police investigator. And although the acting police chief he arrives to help also calls in reinforcements from neighboring districts, the body of the first murdered girl isn’t located until a dogwalker stumbles across it. Not until a week after the bodies start piling up do the police even think about searching for the missing preacher.

The degree of incompetence would lead a U.S. reader of mysteries to suspect veniality on the part of the police. But in Nesserland this appears to be business as usual. (I write Nesserland instead of Sweden because Nesser’s names for his fictional places and people are amalgams from a number of Northern European countries.)

I have to admit, I don’t get it. I picked The Inspector and Silence (in the 2011 translation by Laurie Thompson) off a shelf of my local branch library because of the current The Girl with the (whatever)-generated fascination with Nordic noir fiction, and because of Nesser’s reputation as one of the best of recent Swedish crime writers. It left me feeling more annoyed than thrilled.

Perhaps I’ll give Nesser another try, maybe his award-winning Mind’s Eye (1993), or 1996’s Woman with Birthmark, or 1999’s Carambole, all now available in English translation. But for your first foray into Nesser’s work, leave The Inspector to a well-deserved silence.

Adventure classics – Detectives too good for their own good

The Dogs of Riga

by Henning Mankell

***

The only thing that could make the police force in the small Swedish town of Ystad happier than solving a politically-awkward double murder is getting the case transferred out of its jurisdiction. In the case of Henning Mankell’s 1992 mystery classic, The Dogs of Riga, that jurisdiction is across the Baltic Sea in the capital city of Latvia, a country newly emerged from the ruins of the fallen Soviet Union. Somewhat to the surprise of Ystad police inspector Kurt Wallander, during the investigation he’s taken a liking to short, nearsighted Major Liepa, the Latvian counterpart who has solved part of the mystery – the identity of the two dead men who washed up on Ystad’s coastline on a rubber life raft.

On Friday, Wallander sees Liepa off on his flight back to Riga with a farewell gift of an illustrated book on Ystad’s county. Not much, but the best he can think of. “I’d like to hear how things turn out,” he tells the major.

Back in his office Monday morning, his chief advises him Ystad has received a telex from the Riga police. Wow, he knew Liepa was a good detective, but news already? “What’s he got to say?” Wallander asks. The answer: “I’m afraid Major Liepa is not able to write anything at all. . . He has been murdered.”

Wallander can hardly refuse to fly to Latvia in response to the Riga police department’s request for help, but once there, he notices two things very surprising to him: how extremely cold it is in Riga, and how lovely Baiba Liepa, the dead Major Liepa’s widow, is.  Oh, and a third thing: how much the influence of decades as a Soviet vassal state still lingers in Latvia.

What he learns from the local police is that after Liepa finished his official report late on the day of his arrival in Riga, he went home. Late that night, he received a phone call and left the house, telling his wife only that he had to go straight to police headquarters. The next morning, dock workers found his body, the skull smashed in.

“It’s very rare for a police officer to be killed in this country,” police tell Wallander. “Least of all one of Major Liepa’s rank. Naturally, we’re very keen for the murderer to be found as soon as possible.”

Wallander, however, soon has reason to believe the official version of Liepa’s death is less than completely ingenuous, and to suspect that Liepa’s own detective skills had led him too close to a deadly secret. Soon both Wallander and the major’s widow are involved in a deadly cat and mouse game between drug smugglers such as the now-identified dead men on the raft, who take advantage of the region’s post-Cold War turmoil and a band of would-be political reformers. And the death toll mounts.

Will Wallander be able to follow the clues to the evil at the heart of the labyrinthine police headquarters? Will the perpetually love-lorn Wallander and Baiba Liepa be able to find solace for their losses? Most important, will either of them make it out alive? Fortunately, The Dogs of Riga is readily available in a number of languages to provide the answers.

Can’t get enough Scandinavian crime fiction? For more reading suggestions, see “A Cold Night’s Death: The Allure of Scandinavian Crime Fiction”, which includes a pronouncing the names of those notable authors.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics stays firmly planted in Scandinavia as it begins a May of historical fiction with Björn Kurtén’s Dance of the Tiger.)

Adventure classics – As American as Anita Ekberg?

The Laughing Policeman

by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

…

When eight people are found dead on a bus one rainy Swedish November night in 1968’s The Laughing Policeman by husband and wife writing team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Stockholm police are left with only two substantial clues to the assailant’s identity: the shell casings of the weapon used, and the statement of the massacre’s sole survivor. What more could police ask for? A investigation will reveal the type of weapon used. An eyewitness can identify, or at least describe, the shooter. After that, finding the killer should be easy, shouldn’t it? Or maybe not.

The weapon turns out to be a 1940's era submachine gun, one of thousands stolen from military depots, or even purloined by former servicemen. And the eyewitness only emerges from a coma seconds before dying, leaving behind a few baffling words. Baffling, that is, until the police can decipher the speaker’s accent.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö wrote alternating chapters of their series of mysteries featuring Stockholm detective Martin Beck and his co-workers. I like to think that Sjöwall, herself a translator, might have been responsible for the chapters dealing with the numerous regional and international accents described in the book. One detective is described as having such a broad provincial accent that a Middle Eastern immigrant he interviews doesn’t believe he’s actually Swedish. Others also are identifiable by their regional accents, which unfortunately disappear in translation.

Or perhaps, as British author/translator David Bellos discusses in Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, his book about the perils of translation, accents disappear because translators fear that use of nonstandard language will perceived as evidence of ignorance.

At any rate, the (briefly) surviving eyewitness’s statement remains incomprehensible, the more so because he is an American immigrant, a native English speaker with, yes, a formidable accent.

A tape of the all too brief interview reads:

Who did the shooting?

Dnrk.

What did he look like?

Koleson.

If any non-Swedish speakers intend to write a Swedish mystery with a character named “Koleson,” stop now. According to Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s detectives, there’s no such name. And what, in any language, does dnrk mean?

Not until the survivor’s fellow employees are questioned does the answer emerge.

“…he was born in America,” (the detective says). “Was it noticeable when he talked?”

“Was it! He had an accent just like Anita Ekberg’s. And when he was drunk he spoke English.”

“When he was drunk?”

“Yes. And when he lost his temper. Or forgot himself.”

Or, the detective realizes, when he was dying, piecing together the survivor’s first answer as the English words, “didn’t recognize him.” And the second as an attempt to describe the assailant as “like Olsson,” the survivor’s work supervisor. (Author and translator at this point helpfully distinguish between the Swedish pronunciation and the survivor’s Americanized “Oleson.”) When the supervisor is found to bear a striking resemblance to a suspect in an old and cold murder case, Beck and company are nearing the end of their trail.

All of which leaves me to wonder, after the crime is solved, how Anita Ekberg, mid-twentieth century Swedish blonde bombshell and starlet of a string of American and Italian movies, managed to acquire an American accent in Swedish.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an April of mysterious adventures with another masterpiece of Scandinavian crime fiction, Henning Mankell’s The Dogs of Riga.)

Adventure classics – Was mass murder a US import?

The Laughing Policeman

by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

…

When eight people are found shot to death on a bus in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s 1968 The Laughing Policeman, the public is incredulous. “This is the first time a real mass murder has occurred in Sweden,” a reporter insists to luckless Stockholm policeman Gunvald Larsson as he conducts a press conference. “Do you think this maniacal act was inspired by what has happened in America, for instance?”

The maniacal act in America the reporter mentions most likely was, as Texans know only too well, the 1966 shooting spree from the University of Texas clock tower by Charles Whitman. Whitman – and Texas – gained international notoriety when the 25-year-old ex-Marine climbed to the top of the UT tower just before noon on August 1, 1966, and spent the next hour and half on a shooting spree before being killed by a local police officer.

Of course, Sjöwall and Wahlöö may also have had in mind the murder of nine Chicago nurses by Richard Speck earlier that same summer of 1966. Or the 1959 murder of four members of the Clutter family in 1959 (chronicled by Truman Capote’s 1966 publication of In Cold Blood). Maybe they even thought of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. So many infamous murders, so many choices.

Judging from the current popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction, readers from other parts of the world may wonder if the Nordic lands have become a hotbed of murder. In fact, violent crime, especially mass murders such as the 2011 killing of 77 people in Norway are incredibly rare. Prior to the 1968 publication of The Laughing Policeman, the only report I found of a mass murder in Sweden was in 1900, a crime spree so distant in time it may have been overlooked by the fictional reporter at Larsson’s press conference.

Or perhaps the ferry boat rampage with knife and revolver by John Filip Nordlund that killed five hardly seemed like a “real” mass murder. (Nordlund also earned a place in criminal history as the last person in Sweden executed by manual beheading.)

After all, Nordlund’s killings didn’t wipe out so many people in such a short time. Surely, the press reasons, there must have been more than one murderer involved to have gunned down everyone riding on that ill-fated bus in Stockholm before any of the passengers could react.

Even more troubling is the presence among the victims of an off-duty police officer who, contrary to practice at the time, was carrying his own weapon which had not even been drawn. His girlfriend insists he was working on a case, but there’s nothing in police records to indicate the nature of his search. And a search of his apartment turns up a wealth of information about sexual deviance that shakes investigators. Has one of their own crossed a line?

The Sjöwall-Wahlöö team became famous as much for their exploration of social ills in the outwardly idyllic Swedish welfare state as for their intricate plots, and before Stockholm detectives Martin Beck and his fellow police officers can solve the crime, they will lead readers through an exploration of Swedish society, drug dealing, mental health and immigration that still seems prescient.

Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes its examination of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman with a final American angle: the mysterious phrase uttered by the US immigrant who is the sole survivor of the shooting spree.

In the meantime, English-speaking readers face another dilemma: how to ask for the books of their favorite Scandinavian crime writers whose names abound in diacritical marks? Fortunately, a link at the New York Public Library site includes a guide not only to the most famous authors, but also to pronunciation.  Skål!

Adventure classics – A long cold season of murder

The Laughing Policeman

by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

How can we account for how hot Scandinavian mysteries are today? Long before Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo took the international mystery world by storm, the writing duo of Maj Sjöwall  and Per Wahlöö were ushering in a golden age of Nordic noir. The first of their series of police procedurals featuring Stockholm police detective Martin Beck debuted in 1965, but it was not until the fourth book in the series, The Laughing Policeman, was translated into English in 1971 that the rest of the world fell in love with mayhem with a far northern accent.

Beck, however, seems the character least likely to laugh. The joke, if a joke is intended (and nothing these writers did seems unintended) is that depressive, dyspeptic Beck laughs only once.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö (whose photo illustrates this post) were exploiting a landscape and culture ripe for the exploration of crime. Of course there’s the climate, with its months of cold, damp and darkness that mirror the darkness in the souls of the genre’s characters. (Not surprisingly, The Laughing Policeman’s opening sentence (in the English translation of Alan Blair that I follow) is “On the evening of the thirteenth of November it was pouring in Stockholm. . . the weather was abominable.”

And beyond landscape is culture. Or do landscape and culture mirror each other?

“You can find extensive reading and writing of crime fiction only in very old and stable democracies,” Swedish crime author Liza Marklund writes in John Connolly and Declan Burke’s anthology of mystery novels, Books to Die For. “I spend quite a lot of time in Africa, and when I tell my friends in Kenya that I write fictional books about crimes being committed, they look at me strangely and ask: ‘Why?’ You need freedom of speech, law and order, hope, and prosperity to be able to enjoy fictitious crimes and violence.”

Maybe the audience for crime fiction is bolstered too by a relatively large population of (possibly) overeducated Caucasians. Or am I reading too much into Marklund’s additional statement, that “The whiter and brighter the society, the darker and blacker the crime appears: the drama is all in the contrast.”

At that cold and rainy opening of The Laughing Policeman, Swedish society hardly looks bright. Martin Beck accepts the invitation of his friend and fellow policeman Lennart Kollberg to a late night chess game. Beck is a notoriously bad chess player, but the game still beats returning home in the rain to his uncongenial wife.

And even though most of Stockholm’s police force is gathered outside the American embassy, battling demonstrators protesting the Vietnam war, there’s little reason to believe either Beck or Kollberg will be needed at work. Why would anyone who isn’t forced into the cold rain by pay or principle would choose to go out?

Little do Beck or his friend know that as the anti-war demonstration is breaking up, a mass murder is being committed, a murder that will rock a city unused to such horrors to its core. Neither do they know that one of the murder victims is a young fellow police officer working on his own time to solve a sexually-oriented murder that has puzzled Beck for years.

Is there a connection between the murders and the political demonstration? Is the young police officer the target of the mass murderer or only collateral damage? And what is the meaning of the statement the sole survivor makes immediately before dying?

Next Friday, Adventure classics digs deeper into the case of The Laughing Policeman – and of the roots of Scandinavian crime fiction as fashioned by the team of Sjöwall and Wahlöö.