[Marxism] Radical Swedish detective novels

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/22/death-in-sweden/
Death in Sweden
Posted by Chris Bertram

Just before Christmas, I picked up a copy of 
Roseanna, the first volume of Maj Sjowall and Per 
Wahloo?s Martin Beck series. I?ve just finished 
the final volume The Terrorists. Having read the 
first, I had to read them all. Since the reprint 
schedule wasn?t going to get me them all quickly 
enough, I scoured Hay-on-Wye for volumes and then 
the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s Sjowall and 
Wahloo, husband and wife, collaborated on the 
sequence of ten detective stories set (mainly) in 
Sweden. Though we at CT sometimes Scandinavia as 
some kind of benign alternative to North American 
capitalism, the far-leftish Sjowall and Wahloo 
had a much more negative take. The Swedish 
welfare state that appears in the novels is a 
grotesque fraud perpetrated on the working class 
and they use the device of detective fiction to 
show a reality of desperation, poverty, 
isolation, alienation, exploitation, and 
criminality. But the novels are hardly excercises 
in agitprop . I they were, they?d be a pretty 
poor read. Instead, their brutally cynical vision 
of Swedish society simply tinges the whole and 
emerges through the facts and the occasional acid comment.

At the centre is Beck. He is dour, he is 
miserable, he is middle aged, and often seems to 
have a cold. For most of the sequence he is 
trapped in an increasingly loveless marriage and 
we follow him as he migrates from the bed, to the 
sofa and, finally, out the door. Beck does what 
he does without much drama, methodically and 
quietly, despite the incompetence and politicking 
of the police hierarchy. To assist him he has 
Lennart Kollberg, an ex-para who refuses to carry 
a gun, who eventually quits the force in disgust, 
and Gunnvald Larsson, a brusque dandy and former 
seaman (whom Kollberg hates for much of the 
series). And there are a string of other minor characters, of course.

Any sequence of ten novels is bound to be a 
little bit uneven. There is something great about 
Roseanna (else I wouldn?t have continued), but it 
lacks the colour of the later novels, and number 
2 ( The Man Who Went Up in Smoke ) was a bit of a 
chore. But the series really gets going with The 
Man on the Balcony and, especially with The 
Laughing Policeman (later a film with Walter 
Matthau, relocated to San Francisco ? I haven?t 
seen it) which I read in almost a single sitting. 
It was probably my favourite, but the 
antepenultimate story, The Locked Room, may run it close.

There are weaknesses in the novels. Chief among 
these is the way that cases get solved through 
happy coincidences. The police are working away, 
sifting records and knocking on doors and then 
someone (perhaps an incompetent patrolman in an 
outlying district) stumbles on something that 
isn?t quite right and ? hey presto ? the case is 
solved! But the depth of characterization and the 
portrait of a society that is all buffed and 
shiny on the outside but full of worms and maggots inside makes up for this.

(I wrote this post a couple of weeks back. Having 
finished the series, and feeling bereft without a 
Swedish detective to read about, I started on the 
first of Henning Mankell?s Wallander series, 
Faceless Killers. It is kind of fun, but, so far, 
not nearly as good. Beck is, in a some way, 
everyman. He may be morose, but he is easy to 
identify with (at least for me). And he is 
surrounded by other people who have a reality and 
a depth similar to his own. Wallander seems much 
more an assembly-job than an organic literary 
creation to me. When Wallander is listening to 
opera I have the sense that Mankell decided to 
give him a hobby as a way of individuating the 
character. Beck, by contrast, sits alone and 
builds model ships. It just seems like the kind 
of thing he might do and not at all like something the authors bolted on.)


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