To Be Read...

Sweden's Top 100 Crime Novels

Our morning paper, Sydsvenskan, has published its list of the top 100 Swedish crime novels, as voted for by a panel of journalists, critics and bloggers.

Top of the the list is Blackwater, by Kerstin Ekman, first published in 1993, and highly recommended. 

The next three all come from Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, with The Laughing Policeman (Den skrattande polisen) at Number Two, Roseanna at Three, and The Abominable Man (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle) at Four. In all, eight of the ten Martin Beck novel series make the top 100 - only CopKiller and The man Who Went Up in Smoke miss out.

Overall, Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, secured twice as many votes as the next most highly rated writer, Ekman, and three times those going to third placed Leif GW Persson. GW's most acclaimed novel is Den döende detektiven, which is yet to be translated into English. Between Summer's Longing and Winter's Cold, (Mellan sommarens längtan och vinterns köld) ranks 13.

Stieg Larsson's Girl trilogy all make the top 20, but some of the more familiar names make little impression. Åsa Larsson is at 14 with The Savage Altar (Solstorm), but only two Henning Mankell novels make the list Faceless Killers (Mördare utan ansikte, 9) and Sidetracked (Villospår, 22).

A support feature, Prestige eller penger (Prestige or Money) why the commercial queens of Scandi crime, Camilla Läckberg (pictured), Mari Jungstedt and Liza Marklund, top the supermarket best seller lists but don't merit a mention in the critic's Top 100. 

 

Anger Mode, by Stefan Tegenfalk

“My apologies for being five minutes late,” Walter reiterated. “There was wind resistance on the way here.”

Grumpy, unpredictable detective Walter Gröhn is one of Anger Mode's many strengths, as is Stefan Tegenfalk's humour.

Gröhn is very much from the outsider mould of police investigator, whose genius for results is tightly knotted to outlandish and sometimes unethical techniques. 

Walter’s lack of social skills did not, however, prevent him from having the highest total of solved murders in his thirty-five-year-long career. With the aid of long experience and an unorthodox mindset that often set aside legal conventions, he was able to sustain a high percentage rate of closed cases. This was unfortunately at a cost to his own career, which had stalled at the rank of detective inspector. He was not considered to be “potty trained” and sufficiently diplomatic for the position of chief inspector.

Not surprisingly Walter, gains a reputation for being brilliant yet impossible to work with. Here, the rough edges are polished or sharpened by a (reluctant , of course) partnership with heiress, Jonna de Brugge, who shuns family richs for an elite investigation squad.   

We are told:

One of (Gröhn's) most well-known cases involved the murder of the Hungarian twins, which, after a long and prolonged investigation, proved to be the work of a third, and completely unknown, triplet brother.

I rather like this, in that is sounds like a plot for a book that I would hate to read. As a plot device, twins are bad enough, but when number three comes from nowhere it is has 'two-stars at best and try someone else' writ large.

Tegenfalk is a knowing author, who is happy to reference other crime novels.

Even so, Tor was on his guard when he bent over him to see how hard he had taken the blow. He had read the Lisbeth Salander novels and knew not to judge a book by its cover. If a thin anorexic could floor a blond giant, then this little fatso could take Tor

Or,

Jonna felt her pulse quicken as things started to fall into place. This was better than the ending of a John le Carré novel.

 Le Carre himself might have devised a cunning device by which despicble journalist, Jörgen Blad, from the newspaper, Kvällspressen, communicates with a man he is successfully blackmailing. 

Jörgen had therefore started a public website, which he named “StockholmInsight”, under an assumed name. He hoped it was totally meaningless and uninteresting for anybody who accidentally surfed to the page. The site comprised a few photographs of Stockholm and a description of a few points of interest. In one corner of the page, there was a header that read, “Café of the week”. Under it, Jörgen posted the name of the café where the meeting with his informant would take place. The time and date were posted on the left-hand side of the page, in the form of fabricated events that were supposedly happening during the week.

Much of Anger Mode takes place around Stockholm, but there is mention of Skåne (but not of Ystad's favourite detective). As in the Martin Beck series, for a police officer to be sent to the Deep South is a cruel fate indeed.  

“It’s a terrible mess down there in Landskrona. Many believe that it’s becoming a lawless region."

“You could never have made me go down to that Skåne dung heap. Not even if you asked me nicely.”

I am helping to organise a conference in Landskrona in October...

• Anger Mode is expertly reviewed by Maxine Clarke at Amazon.

The Dogs of Riga: Weakest Wallander?

For Kurt Wallander's second appearance Henning Mankell shifted much of the action away from Sweden, to newly-post Soviet Latvia.

It is February 12, 1991.

Two smugglers chance upon two dead men, wearing suits, in a liferaft adrift on the Baltic. Conscientiously, they start to tow it to port, but fearing awkward questions, cut the line, and it comes ashore at Mossby Strand, near Ystad. The ensuing investigation feels like an inconvenience to the hard-pressed police officers - do they really need to spend so much time discovering the fate of  two unknown foreigners (probably Russian or Eastern European, from their non-Swedish dental work)?

A Latvian connection emerges and Wallander travels to Riga, first to tie up some loose ends, then on a clandestine, unsanctioned solo mission that will uncover some of unpleasant corruption that still permeates life in a country in the time of great transition.

In plot terms, this isn't particularly compelling. Wallander is taken away from the team dynmaics that had begun to emerge in his debut appearance, Faceless Killers, and he is as much sucked along by events as propelled by his skills of detection.

Rereading Dogs of Riga is fascinating in that it sketches in much of the background that will underpin the the rest fo the series. You can almost see Henning Mankell drawing his charcaters, locating the Wallander he will somehow eventually come to almost dislike (The Troubled Man).

Importantly, the Latvian connection allows Mankell to muse, somewhat heavy handedly in places, on  his disillusionment with Sweden.  

Early on, we learn that one of the murderers from Faceless Killers has escaped from jail. Tricked by a woman carrying forged documents, prison officers  allow him out to a funeral; they overpower the accompnaying guard, and drive to Kastrup airport in the prison commissioner's car.

"Like the adverts say, Sweden is fantastic," Bjork said. "It makes me sick."

Wallander is even more distressed than his boss. "What's the point? Why do we bust ourselves to catch criminals if all the prison service does is let them go again?"

The shadow of Wallander's dead mentor, Rydberg hangs (too?) heavily over his thinking.

He and Rydberg had often discussed how Sweden, a country that was changing rapidly, becoming unfamiliar and uncertain, needed a new kind of police officer.

...

They were living at a time characterised by a sort of criminality that nobody had experienced before.

This bleak analysis, sufficiently powerful to push Wallander towads posting his application to beome a security guard for Trelleborg Rubber Company, is explored more deeply when, in Riga, he meets Major Karlis Liepa.

The thoughtful Liepa talks of links between the KGB and criminals: "The shadow of Stalin has always hovered over the heads of people like them."

The same was true of Sweden, was Wallander's immediate reaction. We might not be able to refer to such a monster in our recent history, but a complicated network of interdependent individuals is not the exclusive preserve of a totalitarian state.

For an English reader, this ability to equate liberal Sweden with the sins of Stalin seems almost self-indulgent, but reflects a real discomfort around the the true nature of Swedish post-War neutrality, that appears in so many novels (Leif GW Persson's Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End and Mankell's own Troubled Man among them).

Even Wallander thinks Liepa takes it too far when he observes:

"In your country I see an abundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. But there is a similarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has different faces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we  don't have the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not have to fight for your survival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension and I wouldn't want to exchange that for your abundance."

In a reply that sets the tinme for the rest of the Wallander series, he counters:

"You're wrong. There's a struggle going on in this country, too. A lot of people here are excluded - was that the right word? - from the abundance you describe. Nobody starves to death, it is true, but you are wrong if you think we don't have to fight." 

•  The Dogs of Riga is translated by Laurie Thompson

 

The Steel Spring, by Per Wahlöö

Per Wahlöö's Murder on the Thirty-First Floor was one of my five-star reads of 2011 but The Steel Spring is not so impressive.

In Thirty-First Floor, Wahlöö imagines a society shaped by The Accord, where people are healthy and content, but have been dehumansied by 'progress'. They turn to alcohol, and the police spend most of their time arresting and incarcerating drunks, many of whom end up in vast intoxification units, many of whom commit suicide

We rejoin Inspector Jensen -  'a man of normal build and ordinary appearance with short grey hair and an impassive expression' - as he about to return to this unnamed homeland after travelling abroad for a liver transplant. During his confinement, something terrible has happened to the country and it is somehow cut off from the rest of the world.

On the instruction of an exiled Minister, Jensen crosses the border and tries to piece together what has happened. People are dying from a mysterious epidemic, and the institutions of state seem to have been taken over by paramilitary medics. 

The landscape is familiar, the country vaguely Scandinavian, or Baltic. The political edge is sharp, exposing a consensual dictatorship that allows Wahlöö, a Marxist and a Swede, to stretch the weaknesses of social democracy to breaking point.

In recent years the city had turned increasingly into one huge traffic flow system, an apparent jumble of flyovers and criss-crossing motorways. Virtually all the older buildings had been pulled down to make more living space for automobiles, a planning solution that has resulted in a city centre apparently consisting of glass, steel and concrete.....

Many years earlier, when this city plan was being implemented critical voices had been raised to say that the system would make the city inhuman and uninhabitable. The experts had brushed off the criticism. They argued that a modern city should be built not for pedestrians and horse drawn carriages but for cars. As on so many other issues, both had subsequently been proved right. This was entirely in the spirit of the Accord.

The style, as translated by Sarah Death, remains crisp and direct. 

"Let's just stick to facts," Jensen said, amiably. "Plain and simple facts." 

"Facts. There are no plain and simple facts."

"What your job is, for instance?"

"I am a sociologist. Used to work at the alcohol research unit."

It is a tough interrogation as the crippled and pain-wracked man keeps needing sedatives that knock him out for an hour at a time

"We collated figures that came in from the alcohol retailers, the police and the detox clinics. Our statistical tables were sent on to higher authorities, where they were worked over. That's to say they were put through the mill, over and over again, and sent from one authority to another. When they finally got to whoever they were meant for, they were distorted beyond all recognition. Improved, if you like." 

Part of the challenge with Steel Spring is that there is not much detection involved, rather the narrative comes in longish expositions, arising from often chance encounters. It was published four years after Thirty First Floor, by which time after Wahlöö and partner Maj Sjöwall had delivered three exceptional Martin Beck novels, and his dystopian vision had become much darker, still less credible, and it has to be said, rather less satisfying. 

The Angelic Camilla Läckberg

Cycling Theorin's Öland

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For more photos of Öland, visit my OneStepBehind collection

The island of Öland is at the very heart of Johan Theorin's novels. Its geography, its history, its culture and mythology are woven into the narrative on many levels, not least through the character of the wise and humane Gerlof.

Much is made of the storms, the mist and fogs, and relentless winds that show Öland's bleak face, but it is also a beautiful summer island and an absolute delight for a cyclist. We stayed in Borgholm, the only big town on Öland, and by the end of August it already had the feeling of autumn: few visitors, quiet streets (but a huge number of crows blackening the sky as the sun went down).

First stop had to be Djupvik. Theorin's website tells us:

Stenvik is a made up village on the North-West coast of Öland and in real life it's very similar to Djupvik, which is located 20 kilometres north of Borgholm. Both Djupvik and Stenvik have a small shop, campsite, a long stone beach with a jetty and lots of boat houses. North of both Djupvik and Stenvik, there's an old quarry where one of the murders in Echoes from the Dead takes place.

We then visited Marnäs.

In my books, Marnäs, is the central place on north Öland and is located about 10 kilometres northeast of Stenvik on the east coast. In real life, the central place is called Löttorp and it's located much further north. Marnäs church (where Nils Kant is buried in Echoes from the Dead) has a real equivalent, it's called Föra church and it's located about 25 kilometres north of Borgholm. Here, my ölandish ancestor Gerlof Persson is buried - it's from him the family name of Gerlofsson comes and the fictional character Gerlof Davidsson.

Actually, Löttorp is one those pleasant but dull Swedish towns that scarcely make an impression on the visitor. It is not hard to see why Gerlof is desperate to leave his old people's home.

For the record, we cycled 95 miles, saw a snake, hundreds and hundreds of dragonflies, many buzzards, several deer ... and a herd(?) of camels!

Johan Theorin's Öland

Borgholm

Swedish stereotypes

Yesterday, our weekly shop from the ICA supermarket included  a jar of Abba Löksill herring and some Polar flatbreads from a stand graced by this stuffed reindeer. As you will gather from the shopper wearing an anorak, the weather was "changeable"...

Today, there is a hardly a cloud over balmy Malmö, and I am eating that herring, gazing out over the Öresund, which is many shades of silver and blue, towards Copenhagen, which looks nothing at all like the gloomy and threatening city of The Killing.

I am about to go cycling through Kurt Wallander's Skåne. If the sun keeps shining - likely but not certain! - the rolling landscape and huge blue sky will look nothing like the icy wasteland favoured for Scandi-crime fiction book covers...

 

The Dead of Summer, by Mari Jungstedt

Construction form boss Peter Bovide is holidaying with his family on the Swedish island of Fårö. As always he goes for an early morning run. Hours later his body is found Sudersand beach, shot once in the head, then many more times in the stomach.

It soon becomes clear that Bovide's firm employs illegal workers, there a financial worries and late payments, and the gun is Russian...

The Dead of Summer is the fifth of Mari Jungstedt's crime novels set in Gotland; if you have read the earlier ones you will know what to expect, if you haven't it is probably not the best starting point!

Jungstedt has created an engaging (if undemanding), cast of characters, and paints a picture of Gotland that makes you want to visit, explore... and meet friends (video). She is a journalist, and probably tells a lets a little too much of her professional experience seep into her portayal of reporter Johan Berg.

And she writes like a journalist, good for readability, but light on literary insight.

Here, police chief Anders Knutas has cut short his holiday to interfere with his deputy Karin Jacobssen's investigation.

Karin got up and went to stand at the window. He looked out at the idyllic summer scene, or at least as much of it as was visible on either side of the big customer car park at Östercentrum outside the Co-op forum.

Later a few pages later, Kihlgård comes over to talk to Knutas.

"What on earth is going on? This so-called summer paradise is turning out to be another Sicily."

Jungstedt is good at rooting her narrative in the ordinary - anyone who has visited Sweden knows the Co-op scene - but does anyone really speak like Kihlgård does here?

As before, The Dead of Summer ends with a question that ensures I will be reading the sixth instalment Den mörka ängeln (The Dark Angel?) as soon as it is translated into English (hopefully by Tiina Nunnally who does a typically good job here).

 

VIDEO: Amberville, by Tim Davys