To Be Read...

Martin Beck in Skåne: Dalköpinge church

 

Martin Beck turned to look at an unusually pretty whitewashed church.  Allwright followed his gaze.

"Dalköpinge," he said. "If  you're interested in picturesque churches, I can supply at least thirty of them. In the whole district, of course."

(Cop Killer). 

 

August Heat... in Sweden

I am in Skåne, in Wallander country, and a few minutes away from where the policeman is shot in the Martin Beck novel, Copkiller, but I am sitting outside in the August Sun, reading my first Andrea Camilleri novel.

I have reached page 116: 

Then (Inspector Montalbano) sat outside until eleven o'clock, reading a good detective novel by two Swedish authors, husband and wife, in which there wasn't a page without a ferocious and justfied attack on social democracy and the government. In his mind Montalbano dedicated the book to all those who did not deign to read mystery novels because, in their opinion, they were only entertaining puzzles.

     

  

Stories of a Crime: An Audience with Maj Sjöwall

 More Pictures of Maj and Martin Beck locations

  
As part of the celebrations to mark the 40^thanniversary of the Martin Beck novel Polis, Polis, Potatis Mos (Murder at the Savoy) Maj Sjöwall was joined in conversation by fellow crime writer Jan Arnald (who writes as Arne Dahl)  and Per Engström, at Malmö City library.

What follows is my attempt at an account of what she said – apologies for the many inaccuracies, but here are some notes from a whispered translation (thank you, Sanna).

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As part of a late 60s art happening a young activist, Maj Sjöwall, placed a large poster alongside the motorway from Lund to Sweden’s third city. It read:  “Malmo Cultural disaster – turn around.”

Shortly afterwards, the police seized the banner, but Maj and her partner Per Wahlöö went on to make a significant contribution cultural life, and in particular the recent wave of Swedish crime fiction. The couple had moved to Malmö, in southern Sweden, in the winter of 1969, because they had little children and Per didn’t like Stockholm.

Together they created the ten Martin Beck novels, ground breaking police procedurals with an emphasis on teamwork and hard slog, shot through with deep political conviction and a warm humour.

 

Working

Although now overshadowed by the success of Martin Beck, Per Wahlöö had already written three big political novels, which Maj acclaims as great literature. She remembers the times together when she would sit knitting and he would make little model boats, then he would start writing and she would be envious that it came more easily to him whereas she struggled. Per would also giggle to himself when he wrote something good and it made her jealous that she could not write as easily.

Maj and Per shared strong left wing beliefs, and there is an uncompromising  political context to her conversation.  She laughs often, and her audience laughed with her, she seemed humble, but by no means softened by age.

In ten crime novels there has to be a fair spattering of violence, death,  suffering and tragedy but the Beck series is notable for many iconic comic scenes.

We realised that if we wrote police novels to would get our message out to more people. It is a coincidence that the ten years in which we wrote those novels were the ten years the Vietnam war was going on and things were very black and white. Young people were very much against the war and that made them focused on political matters.

They believed it was time to change the cime genre, to move away from Agatha Christie puzzle stories in which little old ladies cut their roses in the garden, where you add one piece to another and solve the mystery where the murder, the body in the library, was just an inconvenience. You solved the murder and you got back to normal again. She mentioned Swedish writers Maria Lang and Stieg Trenter in this context. Per and Maj saw Swedish crime fiction as posh, bourgeois and middle-class (Lang’s stories took place in the university environment of Uppsala). Per knew something about police that’s when we started writing. No-one had rally written about police work from the inside before.

The Martin Beck stories, collectively titled The Story of a Crime, were firmly rooted in a biting social critique. We used documentary style to place it in time but you have to be careful about it, we had to remember that what we did was meant to be entertainment.  We took the view that we wrote entertainment.

From the beginning they planned a series of ten novels .We decided would happen, four lines about each chapter. Each one of us took responsibility for each chapter. We sat opposite each other, writing by hand. We wrote in a style that we planned and developed together – I don’t write like we did for Martin Beck and nor did Per.

It was simple natural. It was fun to write together.  It wasn’t like we had a meeting at 2.30, we talked about Martin Beck all the time.

We would sit opposite each other at a desk and write by hand. Once we finished one book we started the next one. We knew straight away what it was going to be about.   We didn’t plan what book number eight was going to be about.

Although she enjoys Håkan Nesser, whose van Veeteren stories are set in a fictional country she refers to as “Nesserland”, Maj says that for her it was important that the setting  exists for real, that you don’t make it up. When you write you have a film in your head, you can see it.

We used the people who were around us and said “That’s how this or that character looks”. But they were characters who lived their own lives so you had to adapt characters so there would be a tension between them.  If you write a novel you get to know them, but you lose the element of surprise.

One notable character came about when Per and Maj  were sailing on ferry from Gothenberg to London -  they kept diaries, and a man who kept coming to their table was  immortalised as The Abominable Man  (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle).

I lived with those characters for years and I miss them at times.

Yes, we had lots of fun. We did it to amuse each other but also it is important to lighten up because they are about such terrible things. If you work with these terrible crimes,  you need a sense of humour and I think most police do have this dark sense of humour.

There is a challenge in crime stories because there has to be a murder ... Martin Beck can’t be happy because they have to deal with those things has a pain in his stomach. Martin Beck is not a fantastic police officer because he has too much empathy and he feels sorry for those people he prosecutes.

It is clear from her conversation that she has a particular affection for Gunvald Larsson, and Maj said her favourite Martin Beck story was Det slutna rummet (1972, The Locked Room), and in reply to  questioner who described the closing scene where Gunvald falls through a trapdoor as the funniest thing he had read, and Maj said the slapstick humour of the scene was one of her favourites from the Martin Beck stories.

Inevitably, Maj is regularly asked for her thoughts on the big names of the stars of Swdish crime fiction – Camilla Lackberg, Liza Marklund and most of all, Stieg Larsson;  unless I missed it, no-one mentioned Henning Mankell.

In France and Germany people say Swedish crime novels are so good, and ask her why? She said she did not have an answer to that question, not a clue.

 Per Engström suggested it may be because they are well-written, and Maj replied “Well, not always.”

I can’t see why people think Swedish crime novels are so much better than any others.  We don’t read that many European writers because they don’t get translated into Swedish . (Maj mentioned the French writer Fred Vargas as an example of a good writer).

When you go into a German bookshop it is all Stieg Larsson and Camilla Lackberg and Swedish flags and very book has little red cottage with white in the corner.

It is a picture of the Sweden of (assassinated Prime Minister) Olof Palme, which made people interested in Sweden, because they thought it would work.

The social democracy in Sweden has moved from left to right. There was a point where there was a balance but the rest of the world thinks there is something like the Swedish model which still works. The image of perfect Swedish model [laughs].

But she and Jan Arnald agreed that there were still things that worked in Sweden if you compared it to other countries

She sympathised with writers such as Arnald who have to engage with a world that no longer seems  so black and white:  "Yes, I don’t envy you that write today at all."

It is a lot more globalised and Sweden is still a small country. When we wrote everything was very national , it happened within Sweden.  Sympathises with challenge of writing about more complex global world, financial crisis...  But it is your job to explain these things to us!

The future

Asked if there will ever be an eleventh Martin Beck novel, Maj’s answer was emphatic. Absolutely not! When you do something and it is finished, it is finished. When you bake a cake you can’t just add a little muffin.  And Per died.  People say isn’t it sad? But I don’t think we would ever have written together again – he had other plans. Our lives would probably have continued, side by side, his writing, like when he was writing his books and I was working on the translations.

I don’t want to publish things that I write... and it takes a bloody long time to write a novel.

Writing a novel is isolating and I was spoiled by our collaboration. I don’t think I have anything important enough to say to go through the lonely experience of writing  a novel.

She is also wary of becoming a "celebrity writer":  “You have to travel to all those countries where Stieg Larsson is being published and tell them about Stieg Larsson or, rather, answer the question of why Stieg Larsson is so popular!”   

 

 

Cop Killer: Sjöwall and Wahlöö

os

Malmö is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Murder at the Savoy but that is not the only novel in which Martin Beck visits Skåne. Some of the key action in the penultimate book in the series, Polis Mördaren (Cop Killer, 1974), takes place just south of here, in Vellinge, at Anderslöv (Photos), and on the road to Skanör and Falsterbo, home of the hapless Kvant and Kristiansson.

The cover of Savoy as featured in the Polis, Polis, Potatismos exhibition is brilliant....

 
... but the 1982 edition of Polis Mördaren (Cop Killer) hasn't aged quite so well.

  

Meeting at the Savoy: Maj Sjöwall

Tonight, the great lady of Swedish crime fiction held court at the scene of the start one of the seminal Swedish crime novels.

It was 8.33pm. A shot rang out, a prominent industrialist slumped to the table, and the assassin fled the Savoy Hotel, through a window and disappeared into the streets of Malmo.

Well, it was rather more Swedish than that when Maj Sjöwall attended the opening of a week long celebration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the sixth Martin Beck novel, Polis, Polis, Potatismos, or Murder at the Savoy.

The hotel restaurant was packed, the Malmö literati listened as the significance of the occasion was explained by the curator, and a smart, sharp woman in a lime green cardigan said a few words.

Then she returned to her table and spoke to friends.

 
No tickets, no opportunities to buy Martin Beck novels, no queues for a signing. After a while a couple of people were rude enough to intrude upon Maj's privacy.

I was one of them.

She was warm, polite and interested. I asked her why Martin Beck was always referred to by his full name. Her eyes twinkled: "I like the sound of names that are musical. I like names that are two syllables and then one syllable, and that is why I always called him 'Martin Beck'."