Adventure classics – Detectives too good for their own good

The Dogs of Riga

by Henning Mankell

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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 -- Wilkie Collins' gem of a whodunit

The Moonstone

by Wilkie Collins

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Hailed as the first of the classic detective novels, the serial publication in 1868 of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone drew such popular acclaim readers placed bets on the whereabouts of the signature yellow diamond at the heart of the story. Its intricate plot (whose elements have been cribbed countless times), sympathetic depictions of non-Western religion, and cast of Dickensian characters ensure its place on the greatest of all time novel lists and the continuing remakes.

And all this is despite Collins’ assertion that “I was not only pleased and astonished at the finale, but did not recognise it as my own.” No wonder. To cope with the physical pain of gout, the psychic pain of his beloved mother’s death, and the upheaval of two separate households, each with its own pseudo-wife, he was taking doses of the opiate laudanum huge enough to kill most people.

To a modern reader, a plot that makes not only one, but two important characters the victims of amnesia seems foul play. Even feckless aristocrat and prime suspect Franklin Blake doesn’t know whether or not he’s the thief. His memory is a perfect blank after ingesting a nineteenth century version of a roofie, whose effects Collins knew only too well.

It doesn’t help that the, again, not one but two women in love with Blake try to shield him. They only succeed in making things so murky even the great detective Sergeant Cuff, imported from London for the case, hares off on the wrong scent.

Perhaps it’s because Blake never regains trust in his own memory that the novel purports to be compiled from the recollections of multiple narrators.

The story opens with a prologue set in the real 1799 siege of Seringapatam (in what is now the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka). During the ensuing battle, John Hearncastle steals a fabled yellow diamond named the Moonstone from the fortress’s treasury, but not before one of the defenders vows, “The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!”

Dogged by the gem’s guardians who follow him from India, Hearncastle, the outcast of his family, maliciously wills the Moonstone to Rachel Verinder, daughter of his widowed estranged sister, Lady Verinder. The diamond is to be presented to Rachel on her eighteenth birthday. To celebrate the birthday, Lady Verinder gives a dinner party whose guests include two of her nephews, Franklin Blake and Godfrey Ablewhite, who are also rivals for Rachel’s love.

That night, Rachel insists on keeping the diamond in an unlocked cabinet in her own room. And in a house inhabited only by members of the family and their devoted servants, the diamond disappears. Did Rachel steal her own birthday present for some unfathomable reason? Or did Blake, as Rachel fears? Or Lady Verinder’s newest parlor maid, supposedly reformed thief Roseanna Spearman? Or even the three Indian jugglers who turn up unexpectedly to present entertainment at Rachel’s birthday celebration?

A year passes with no sign of the diamond, but not without signs that the fabulous gem is still exacting its vengeance. Can it be a coincidence that both Godfrey Ablewhite, pillar of charitable institutions, and shady pawnbroker Septimus Luker are attacked and searched by unknown assailants? Did Ablewhite and Luker meet through one of Ablewhite’s pet charities, the hilariously-named Mothers’-Small-Clothes-Conversion Society? (Its purpose: to redeem pawned trousers and retailor them into children’s clothes.) Or is there some deeper connection between the men, such as the mysterious valuable in the strongbox of Luker’s bankers, a valuable due to be redeemed a year after the theft?

The story is available in many versions, including a free ebook through Project Gutenberg,
www.gutenberg.org/. For more about the significance of the book, I liked www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/27/. For more about Collins’ life and work, I liked The King of Inventors, by Catherine Peters. The illustration for this post is from my library, from The Works of Wilkie Collins, published in 30 volumes by P.F. Collier & Son in 1900.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an April of mysteries by looking at Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, with commentary from Pierre Bayard’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.)