
Way back in the late 1960’s-early 1970’s, I was an ardent fan of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and their ten Martin Beck mysteries – the first Scandinavian mystery authors to be popular in the United States. Their book The Laughing Policeman (1970), set in Stockholm, was made into an American film by the same name (1973), but moved to San Francisco. In it, Walter Matthau nicely captured both the dourness and the humor of Beck, though he was renamed ‘Jake Martin.’ Sadly, having just completed the tenth mystery – and it was always planned to be only ten – Per Wahloo died in 1975, though Maj Sjowall still works as a writer and translator. There is an excellent article about them, written in 2009, here.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow, set in Copenhagen and Greenland, by Danish author Peter Hoeg was widely acclaimed in 1992, and filmed with an international cast in 1997. About the same time, Henning Mankell’s books about Swedish detective Kurt Wallander made their first appearance in English translation. The TV series, Wallander, both the Swedish version and the British version with Kenneth Branaugh, were quite popular on American TV. I read a few of the books and watched both series for a while, but I found the relentless gloom too dispiriting to continue.
It was the amazing success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008) that led to the great demand for Scandinavian mysteries in English translation. I read the first book in that series and saw both the Swedish and American film versions, but I wasn’t as enamored of the Larsson books as many people were. And since then, I’ve avoided Scandinavian mysteries, despite a delightful trip to Copenhagen and Stockholm in 2015.
So it was with some trepidation that I scheduled a series of book groups entitled “Crime Beneath the Midnight Sun” at one of my local libraries this fall. I was sure that by late fall, we would all be hopelessly depressed.
We began with Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked (1999), winner of the 2001 Gold Dagger Award – and indeed it was gloomy. But it was also a well-plotted police procedural about a serial killer who is an axe murderer. The reader knows more about the identity of the killer than the police do for much of the novel; the connection between the victims, however, is not readily apparent, so it becomes more a whydunit than a whodunit. Wallander seems to spend a lot of time trying to remember things that are just out of his memory’s reach, a rather tedious way of providing clues, and at times the detailed description is a bit too much. In the end, some of Wallander’s messy personal life takes a turn for the better though. Nonetheless, I didn’t feel much like reading any more of Mankell’s books.
So it was with a loud groan that I opened the next book – Borkmann’s Point (2006) by Hakan Nesser – to find it was about a serial killer called “The Axman.” How had I chosen two books about axe murderers??!! But this book was quite different in tone from the Mankell book: for one thing, there were multiple points of view, a lighter tone, and a sense of humor. Though Nesser is Swedish and wrote the book in that language, it is set in a country that might be Sweden, but is never actually identified as such. The names of the characters are mostly Dutch. The main character is DCI Van Veeteren (no first name is given), and he has a lively assistant named Inspector Munster, whose wife and children appear briefly but happily in the story. (Van Veeteren himself is divorced and has an incarcerated son named Erich.) This is definitely a whodunit, with clues and red herrings (I confess to being misled by one of them), and a few interesting plot twists. My only complaint: too many similar names in the female characters – Beate, Beatrice, Bitte, Brigitte! Though “Borkmann’s Point” sounds like a place, it’s actually an interesting concept: the moment in the investigation when enough evidence has been gathered to solve the case. (This reminded me of the old Ellery Queen mysteries, which frequently reached a point when the author challenged the reader to add up all the clues and find the solution.) Unlike my slog through the Mankell book, Borkmann’s Point went quickly and was thoroughly enjoyable.
Next up was Karin Fossum’s The Indian Bride (2007), set in a small village in Norway. Her detectives are Inspector Konrad Sejer, a 50ish widower, and his younger (and handsome) assistant, Jacob Skarre. Sejer has a live-in partner Sara, who is a psychiatrist, and an aging dog named Kohlberg, so he is less of a loner than either Wallander or Van Veeteren. Though Sejer is clearly in charge, the two men share equally in the attempt to solve the case. But what sets this book apart is the nature of the crime and the reader’s involvement in the characters. For this is no serial killer mercilessly disposing of mostly reprehensible men. The victim is Poona Bai, an innocent Indian woman who has come to Norway to live with the Norwegian man, Gunder Jomann, whom she has recently met and married in Mumbai. We follow Gunder from the start: his decision to go to India to find a wife, his courtship of Poona, his plans for their life together. And then we watch as his whole world falls to pieces, so the emotional investment in the solving of the crime is so much stronger than in the other books. Despite the somewhat ambiguous ending, I thought this was a masterful piece of writing.
I have one more to go: Nemesis (2008) by Jo Nesbo. I hope it’s as good as these last two. (I’ll write an addendum to this post when I finish it.) Meanwhile, I’ve found two more authors whose books I hope to continue.