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.