BEING A READER

After reading seven Swedish crime novels in a couple of weeks, I’m even beginning to think of street names as Thisgatan and Thatgatan. But even more curious is the fact that Swedish crime books have become so popular in the English-speaking world.

Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson may have become popular on their own merits anyway, but perhaps neither of them would even have written crime stories if it hadn’t been for the police procedurals their compatriots Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö wrote in the 1960s and 70s. They are the people who laid the foundation for the success of Swedish crime stories in the wider world.

Had Sjöwall and Wahlöö been Norwegian or Latvian, perhaps we would have had a spate of popular crime books from those countries today.

I have now in short succession read a book by Mankell, Larsson’s three and three by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. While reading Larsson was a first, I had read the other authors before. Mankell I liked from the start, but think now that I had underestimated Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s achievement at first.

Their books are dry, police procedurals written like police reports. On this day, this happened. Then nothing happened for a couple of days and then a lot happened on the Tuesday. The weather was like this. At 11.47, a man walked into a hotel lobby. He had a large nose and close-set blue eyes…That sort of thing.

Though I was a crime reporter for a brief period in my twenties, I cannot claim to know much about how the police really operate. However, I can well imagine that Sjöwall and Wahlöö get closer to the truth than most crime writers. They seem to enjoy describing the drudgery of an investigation in detail, all the dead ends and the interminable waiting.

If you want to skim from major event to major event, you miss the essence of this series.

A common denominator of the books I’ve read is the long time that passes between the crime and its being solved – it could be many months. Another is that the crimes are often solved by a lucky break away from the main investigative team, a local cop on the beat who spots something useful, rather than by the strict application of logic, carefully compiled evidence or psychological insight that usually feature in fictional crime busting.

Basically, Martin Beck and his team of detectives stick doggedly to their task until that break comes, so it’s not sheer luck. Their chief virtues are thoroughness and persistence.

The characters are also very unromanticised. Martin Beck is not only a very ordinary man with an ordinary home life, but his crime solving ability does not seem to be exceptional or beyond the realm of probability. This is most unusual for a fictional detective. As indicated above, he doesn’t get sudden insights that solve the crimes. The only gifted character is his colleague Melander, who has a phenomenal memory, one that puts the detectives on the wrong track about as often as it helps.

The only element where these books stretch the reader’s credibility even slightly is the portrayal of the two klutzes Kvant and Kristiansson – blonde, handsome patrolmen who appear in some of the books and are virtually guaranteed to get things wrong.

Much has been made of the authors’ Marxist leanings and the social commentary in the series. As can be expected, the rich murder victim in Murder at the Savoy is portrayed as hateful – an arms smuggler who trod on the lives of little people. There are many comments on the decline of sexual morals and growing drug abuse, though much of the described behaviour seems rather pale compared to the world described in more recent crime novels.

Rather than social commentary, what gives Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books their power is their verisimilitude. We recognise their truth, which makes the relatively unsensational crimes in these books more shocking than the outrages in the books of Mankell and Larsson.

It was a few years after everyone else had read the Millennium trilogy and halfway through the second book that I realised author Stieg Larsson was having us on. The books about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist are elaborate jokes.

If Wikipedia can be believed, Stieg Larsson had only considered publishing these manuscripts shortly before his death, when he was already deep into the fourth book of what is now, weirdly, marketed as a “trilogy”. The author’s otherwise puzzling hesitance to publish makes sense if yourecognise the books as parodies, a bit of fun the author was having, perhaps primarily for his own amusement.

They are compelling reading, make no mistake – page-turners, even if there are too many pages in some parts. I lined up the second book even before I had finished the first. And I’ll read the third as soon as I can get hold of it. The books are written in an unobtrusive journalistic style, each book has enough plot for five and Lisbeth Salander is a great fictional character.

At least, she is in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

In the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson stretches his reader’s suspension of disbelief too far. Here Lisbeth Salander is presented as nothing short of a superhero. She’s the size of a pixie, but beats up two Hell’s Angels types and goes a few rounds with the book’s other de facto superhero, the fantastically strong “blonde giant” who is impervious to pain and is untroubled in a fight with a champion boxer.

Not only this, but near the book’s climax, Salander solves Fermat’s Theorem in her head while stalking her prey! This is a problem that has had the world’s top mathematicians baffled for centuries. Don’t tell me Larsson wrote this with a straight face.

The reviewer who compared his work with that of Ingmar Bergman got it very wrong. Bergman is also Swedish, and that’s about it. The filmmaker was self-consciously serious. Larsson is self-consciously funny. He is to Bergman as Chaplin is to Nijinsky; his genius is of a different sort.

But back to the plot aspect, which makes it even more clear that Larsson was having fun with these books. His approach to plot reminds me of that unforgettable scene in My Cousin Vinny where Vinny (Joe Pesci) stamps his foot and says: “Is there any more shit we can pile on to the top of the outcome of this case?

Let’s look at some of the plot elements of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

• • Framing an innocent in a court case (Blomkvist)
  • Financial fraud on international scale (Wennerström)
  • Financial fraud on individual scale (Salander)
  • Whodunit – a murder committed by one of a closed group of people
  • Computer hacking (Salander)
  • Institutional injustice
  • Vigilante revenge
  • Family intrigue that would put Falcon Crest to shame (the Vangers)
  • Nazis (various)
  • A sadistic rapist (Bjurman)
  • Two serial killers!

The second book adds a biker gang, international sex trafficking, Cold War espionage, domestic violence and a chainsaw massacre to some of the elements of the first. The body count would not be out of place in a Schwarzenegger movie.

Most thriller writers would be happy to spin a yarn featuring one or two of these plot lines. Not Larsson. I can imagine him sitting in front of his Powerbook. Let’s see… What other form of villainy is there? Add it in!

Rumour has it that the German one-hit wonders Trio wrote their immortal song “Da Da Da I Don’t Love You You Don’t Love Me Aha Aha Aha” in response to a rival band’s music that they considered boring and monotonous. So they wrote the worst song they could and, lo and behold, they had a massive hit!

Whether the story is true, I don’t know. But I can imagine Stieg Larsson being similarly motivated. He tried to write books that took the thriller genre to ridiculous extremes.

And, like Trio, he’s had amazing success. He deserves it too. The so-called Millennium trilogy speaks of genius. But it’s the genius of a fun fair attraction – most enjoyable, in the way of a roller-coaster ride or a house of horrors.

If the author had lived to see the incredible success of his work and the seriousness of some of the praise, my guess is he would’ve had a good laugh. Not for the first time.

In the last two weeks, I revisited two of my favourite crime writers and learned a thing or two – not all of it positive.

Both of these authors have long reached the stage where their names dwarf the actual book titles on the covers. This, more than any printed claim, is the sure sign that an author is successful. So, kids, dreaming of publishing a book isn’t the ticket any more – you have to dream of publishing a book where your name is bigger than the title. To achieve success, the author has to become a brand.

But what happens to authors once they’ve become a brand? Suddenly there’s an expectation that they’ll write more books of the same type and quality, and do so with great regularity.

For Mankell, especially, this is a great challenge, as he’s known primarily for a series of books featuring one character, the detective Kurt Wallander. Being a cop, Wallander can be involved in a new crime as many times as is needed, so the plot permutations are virtually unlimited. The problem is the character itself. How many twists and turns can one man’s private life take before it becomes totally ridiculous?

Mankell has seemingly found a way out of that conundrum by shifting his focus to Kurt’s daughter, Linda Wallander. In Before the Frost, she takes over as the lead character.

The plot of this book feels unusually contrived. It’s not so much that it’s any less believable than the norm for books of this type, but that the plot comes across as a lifeless joining of dots, lacking the inspiration or gusto of earlier Wallander books. This is, however, offset to some extent by the clever game the author plays with dates, giving his fictional tale a deftly handled resonance in the real world of his readers.

Mankell has, of course, also written books that have nothing to do with Wallander. Based on the one I have read (Depths), these books should be well worth seeking out.

Without the expectation to stick to one character, coming up with a new book every year or so should be easier for Elmore Leonard than for Wallander. All his readers expect is that trademark stripped-down style and smart characters who are a law unto themselves. Leonard has done essentially the same thing in his early Westerns, the modern crime stories he’s most famous for and occasionally in novels with a historic bent. What he does is undoubtedly great, and in the pantheon of crime writers Elmore Leonard ranks with the handful of giants of the genre up in the Chandlersphere.

The problem is that he’s been at it an inordinately long time, and seems to be struggling a bit, if Up in Honey’s Room (2007) is anything to go by. The book seems to consist of highlights from previous books retold and bits of somewhat jarring research, joined together in a not altogether involving plot. And alarm bells always start to ring for me if an author has his characters telling jokes.

Leonard dusts of Carl Webster of The Hot Kid (himself the son of Virgil Webster of Cuba Libre), which is fine. What’s more worrying is that so many of the other characters become indistinguishable from Elmore Leonard characters in other books and even from other characters in this particular book.

Roger Ebert made the point about modern American movies that the characters in most movies are unbelievably dumb. In this book, the problem is the opposite – everyone is unbelievably clever.

The typical Elmore Leonard hero is smarter than the people around him, always first to catch on to what’s happening. In this book, Carl, Honey, the cop Kevin, German POW Jurgen and spy Vera are all exceedingly quick on the uptake. They catch on to things about each other and events so quickly that you wonder if they’re not all reading each other’s minds.

There’s just too much cleverness and this causes confusion rather than tension – something that’s not helped by the fact that the book doesn’t have a clear main character, nobody we really want to root for. Even the two villains (one charmingly evil, one a dull fool) are not hateful.

The lesson from all this, I guess, is that it’s unrealistic of readers and publishers to expect these marquee authors to keep churning out equivalents of their best books time and again. Perhaps becoming one of those writers isn’t the best thing in the world after all.