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 – A cold triple whammy of murder

The Dogs of Riga

by Henning Mankell

…

I think even American crime writer Elmore Leonard would have made an exception to his advice never to open a book with a description of weather in the case of Scandinavian crime fiction. There’s a certain rightness to a story about cold-blooded murder in a cold country (and in the near wake of the Cold War) opening, as Henning Mankell’s The Dogs of Riga does, with “It started snowing. . . ”

The natural world – its weather, its landscape, its oceans and their currents -- are especially important in this story about a most unnatural act of murder. But don’t expect nature to be kindly in Mankell’s 1992 story (first published in English in 2001). This is the second of his police procedurals featuring Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander (but oddly, the fourth to be translated into English).

Weather is only one more enemy for Wallander to contend with when his office in the coastal town of Ystad receives an anonymous tip that two dead men in a rubber life raft are drifting shoreward. He can only hope the call is a hoax as he goes off duty that evening, heading toward the gloomy home life de rigueur for protagonists of Nordic noir. Wallander’s consists of an estranged wife, an estranged adult daughter, and an estranged (naturally) elderly father who constantly berates him for becoming a police officer.

When he goes to bed, the thermometer reads -3 degrees Celsius. When he wakes the next morning, the life raft and its grim cargo have indeed washed ashore. The dead men are fairly young, well-dressed in foreign clothes. Each has been shot through the heart.

Their only possible identification: “Their dental work wasn’t done by Swedish dentists,” the police pathologist says. “Could have been by Russian ones, though. . . Or dentists from one of the Eastern bloc countries. They use quite different methods from us.”

And by the way, the men have also been tortured. And the raft they were on turns out to have been manufactured in Yugoslavia. Given all that, and that the currents of the Baltic Sea could have propelled a raft from any of several states of the former Soviet Union, Wallander is less surprised than annoyed when a Major Liepa from the police force in the Latvian capital of Riga pays a call.

(The illustration for this post, from a c. 1940 German atlas, indicates the proximity of the countries involved. The country labeled “Lettland” on the map is present-day Latvia.)

The men’s fingerprints, Liepa says, show them to be a pair already known to Latvian police as notorious criminals. The police in Sweden are only too happy to transfer jurisdiction of the case to him.

“(Liepa) was very short-sighted. His rimless spectacles seemed to be much too weak, and when he was reading he held documents only a couple of inches in front of his eyes. He seemed to sniff the paper, rather than scrutinizing it, and anyone watching found it hard not to laugh out loud.”

Despite his oddities, Wallander finds the “little hunch-backed Latvian major. . . an extremely shrewd and perceptive police officer.” He genuinely mourns when, after Liepa returns to his country, a telex arrives from the Riga police reporting that it is now Liepa who has been murdered the day after arriving home. Will the Swedish police be able to provide any assistance?

And Wallander’s real murder investigation begins.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes an April of mysterious adventures with Henning Mankell’s The Dogs of Riga.)