A Darker Shade of Sweden (2 page)

Stieg Trenter can be said to have been the author who made crime fiction accepted by Swedish critics. He had followers during the 1940s and 1950s, most notably Maria Lang, a pen name for Dagmar Lange (1914–1991), though as her novels always featured not only romantic but often erotic subplots, they were often dismissed as “women's romances” with detective intrusions. Nevertheless, Lang's first novel remains interesting;
Mördaren ljuger inte ensam
(
Not Only the Murderer Lies
, 1949) was extremely daring in sympathetically depicting a murderer who turns out to be a lesbian killing the woman who scorns her passionate love. The shocked reactions to this book may well have contributed to the fact that Lang minimized her discussion of serious issues in her following forty-two adult novels; she had her social standing and position as a high school dean to worry about. Even so, the scorn heaped by male critics on her output seems out of proportion: the fact that the leading female characters in her novels (though the primary detective is always male) actually concern themselves with commenting on men's looks, potential as partners, and sex appeal—things male protagonists in novels from the same period written by men constantly do about women—seems to be one of the primary so-called failings of “Maria Lang.”

The first Swede to write only about professional policemen was Vic Suneson, a pen name for Sune Lundquist, who published more than thirty novels and story collections from 1948 through 1975. Many of his novels are experimental, with shifting points of view, told in a nonlinear fashion, or combine depictions of criminal investigations with psychological portrayals. After Suneson, the last of the major Swedish crime writers before the 1960s published his first novel in 1954. H(ans)-K(rister) Rönblom wrote about historian and teacher Paul Kennet, who reveals killers not primarily to serve justice but to make certain that the historical record is set straight. Rönblom was in a sense the first recognizably modern Swedish crime writer, since his novels are also insidiously critical of the small-town life they portray: below the idyllic day-to-day life is seething corruption, religious intolerance, sexism, racism, narrow-mindedness, and self-righteousness, all brought to life by the meticulous, rigorously honest Kennet. Rönblom, a journalist, began writing fiction late and died early (1901–1965); still, he managed to publish ten novels.

Crime fiction became popular in Sweden first in translation. With the exception of the very talented Frank Heller, the relatively few Swedish crime authors writing before the 1940s were highly derivative and were considered unworthy of critical notice; Heller himself, though often praised for his prose, erudition, and inventiveness, was also often accused of “seducing the young” by glamorizing his amoral swindler heroes. Gradually, however, translated stories of clever detectives, primarily those of Christie and Sayers, later those of Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, and Georges Simenon, gained acceptance and were openly read as entertainment by the middle class. This paved the way for Swedish authors to write in the same style: Trenter, Lang, Suneson, and Rönblom dominated Swedish crime fiction for twenty years with their novels of murder within the upper middle class. With the partial exception of Rönblom, despite their storytelling and literary qualities, their novels were as conservative, unchallenging, and devoid of social criticism and daring themes as those of Agatha Christie. These were the writers published in hardcover by reputable Swedish publishers; one latecomer must also be mentioned, the hugely talented Kerstin Ekman, whose first six novels (1959–1963) were pure stories of detection, but who later mainly wrote contemporary literary fiction, though she often includes crime elements in her work and published two later novels which can reasonably be categorized as crime fiction. In 1978 she had the distinction of being the only author of initially popular fiction, and only the third woman in its then 192 years of existence, to be inducted as a life member of the Swedish Academy.

Simultaneously, an undercurrent of what Swedish critics and intellectuals referred to as “dirt literature” (yes, honestly) also began appearing in the period between the wars. At first this form of entertainment fiction was published in adventure weeklies and in small-size pulps, then starting around 1950 in original pocket-book lines sold only through newsstands and tobacconists, never in ­bookstores —and for that reason, absurdly, not considered to be books at all. By the mid-1950s several hundred such paperbacks had appeared, and with them the hard-boiled crime fiction of the 1930s and later had arrived in Sweden. Peter Cheyney, Mickey Spillane, and James Hadley Chase were bestsellers during the first years of the 1950s—but never mentioned in reviews or overviews, since they were published outside of the established and respectable book trade, as were the few but existing Swedish authors trying to imitate them. Swedish encyclopedias still claim that “pocket books first appeared in Sweden in 1956,” since that was the year when one of the major publishers first began issuing pocket-size books to be sold in bookstores.

Consequently, an extreme double standard existed: blue-collar workers, teenagers, and presumably more than a few white-collar readers (though one can suspect without admitting it) consumed hard-boiled crime, but the only crime stories officially published in the country were of the traditional armchair detective variety. In fact, such crime novels are still written and published in Sweden, and have had leading practitioners continually: Jan Ekström, whose first novel was published in 1961, may be the most meticulous of all Swedish puzzle crime writers; his closest competitor in later years is probably Gösta Unefäldt (debut in 1979), though his detective is in fact also a policeman; a current practitioner is Kristina Appelqvist, who published her first novel in 2009.

The first authors to dramatically break with the Swedish upper-class drawing room crime tradition were also the first Swedish crime writers in forty years to become successful outside of the country: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who published the first novel in their cowritten, ten-volume police procedural series, The Story of a Crime, in 1965. This novel,
Roseanna
, was by no means an immediate success in Sweden: critics found it too gritty, too depressing, too dark, too brutal. However, gradually the Sjöwall and Wahlöö series began to be hailed as a unique literary experiment and became a bestselling phenomenon. They achieved this success largely due to the political message of their novels. Where earlier Swedish crime writers had been politically conservative or liberal, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were both left-wing activists and consciously planned their ten novels to become more overtly political. The motives behind the crimes gradually become connected to the social background of the victims and of the criminals; the later books in the series directly address issues like fascist tendencies within the police, the betrayal of the working class by the purportedly socialist government, the emptiness of the capitalist-bourgeois lifestyle.

Swedish political life since the mid-1930s was dominated by the Social Democrat party, to which all government heads from 1932 until 1976 belonged. Beginning in the 1930s, the party gradually transformed Swedish society into a centrally planned welfare state, though at a much slower speed than its rhetoric usually promised. A consequence of this was that many Swedish intellectuals, as well as a growing number of young people, began to view the Social Democrat party as derelict in its dedication to socialist ideals. Thus, during the 1960s, social criticism in Sweden tended to come from the radical left, and the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels changed the way in which many leading intellectuals viewed crime fiction: what had once been dismissed as a pointless bourgeois pastime could be turned into a force for political analysis, education, and change. Suddenly reading, and even writing, crime stories became respectable among left-wing Swedes; interestingly enough, this coincided with the coming of age of generations of young readers who had grown up not on their parents' Agatha Christie-inspired novels, but on the hard-boiled crime novels published in the disreputable “kiosk books” lines, and this combination of circumstances quickly transformed Swedish crime fiction as a whole.

Of course, the success of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and the following tide of crime novels written from a politically radical perspective, did not extinguish the more traditional or purportedly apolitical kinds of crime fiction. They had their readers, and continued to be published; indeed, one of the most popular writers of the 1968 through mid-1980s period was the pseudonymous Bo Balderson who, in a total of eleven novels, poked fun at Swedish government circles from a clearly conservative point of view. Other new writers, considerably more accomplished than Balderson, proved that the more traditional kind of detective novel could still be written brilliantly; among the foremost of these were psychiatrist Ulf Durling, with his first novel in 1971 and his sixteenth, and so far latest, in 2008, and the very prolific Jean Bolinder, whose first crime novel was published in 1967. Even so, around the time when the tenth and last of the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels was published in 1975, most of the new authors were writing about police collectives, and most were combining their crime stories with an underlying political agenda. Some of the most notable authors of this generation were Uno Palmström, K. Arne Blom, Olof Svedelid, and most particularly Leif G. W. Persson, a professor of criminology who published three novels in 1978–1982, then returned with a fourth in 2002, and has since written a further six crime novels; their intricate plots, often based in actual Swedish crimes (his trilogy
Between Summer's Longing and
Winter's Cold
, 2002,
Another Time, Another Life
, 2003, and
Falling Freely, as in a Dream
, 2007, dealing with the unsolved 1986 murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, is an impressive case in point), their careful atmosphere and obvious literary merits have made him one of the foremost Swedish crime writers; he is one of only two three-time recipients of the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy's Best Novel of the Year Award, the other being HÃ¥kan Nesser.

Persson, indisputably not only one of the best but also one of the most influential Swedish crime writers, also helped set the tone of social criticism in Swedish crime fiction. His background—as a criminologist with the national board of police, as an influential government adviser, as an expert adviser to the Swedish minister for ­justice—gives a unique weight to his novels, which are often extremely critical of Sweden's rampant police inefficiency, of the legal system, and of the political and bureaucratic establishment, whose primary aim seems to be to perpetuate and extend its own power and privileges.

Parallel to Persson, similarly critical views of Swedish society also played a central part in the novels of Kennet Ahl, pen name for journalist Christer Dahl and later writer and actor Lasse Strömstedt, who had spent eight years in prison. They wrote seven novels from 1974–1991, adding inside knowledge of the prison system, police brutality, the narcotics trade, and the precarious existence of addicts. Also important was the already mentioned Uno Palmström, originally a journalist, later a publisher, whose nine novels (1976–1990) also expressed fundamental doubts about Swedish society, which Palmström viewed as largely a corporate state where the unholy alliance of politicians and financiers repressed the population in order to further its own interests. Lawyer and naturalist Staffan Westerlund wrote a series of novels where a common theme was the inhumanity of both big business and big government; he wrote about the meddling and callous outrages perpetrated by Swedish authorities and the indifference towards individuals shown by medical, chemical, and energy corporations in their quest for profits.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, this trend of social criticism was not only firmly established but further enhanced in the work of important new authors. Journalist Gunnar Ohrlander published a first thriller in 1990, chosen Best First Novel of the Year by the Crime Fiction Academy, and Henning Mankell published his first crime novel in 1991, chosen Best Novel of the Year by the Academy; these two were the first Swedish authors to seriously treat the subject of Swedish racism and anti-immigrant feelings in literary form, and they did so in crime novels.

When Stieg Larsson's novels were translated in 2008 and on, many critics seemed surprised at their negative depiction of a Swedish welfare state swollen to a monstrosity willing to sacrifice the rights, liberty, and lives of its citizens in order to preserve its privileges and power. This, to readers in the United States and Britain, seemed a dramatic reversal of the earlier, rosy picture painted of modern Sweden as a wealthy, liberal welfare society, characterized by openness, tolerance, and compassion. In fact, the bleak view of Swedish society set out in the Millennium trilogy was a direct continuation of the social criticism of the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels, and thus established as central to Swedish crime writing since almost forty years.

We have already touched on the reasons why so many—though, as we shall also note, not by any means all—of the Swedish crime writers came to express strongly leftist political views. In brief, Maj Sjöwall's and Per Wahlöö's novels had broken entirely with
the earlier tradition in Swedish crime fiction: they chose a much more realistic approach both to crime and to crime solving, they wrote from an underdog perspective, they were often critical of both the efficiency and motives of the police and of the close ties between the legal system and the political establishment, and they examined
the social and economic factors contributing to crime. This made their novels not only acceptable but required reading for intellectuals sympathetic to their views, which created a whole new readership for original Swedish crime fiction. At the same time, their novels were published when the Swedish political landscape was being radicalized. The 1968 youth revolt throughout much of the western world also had a considerable impact in Sweden, where opposition to the Vietnam War became a unifying symbol to a number of radical groups: the Marxist-Leninists, the Maoists, and the few but intellectually significant Trotskyites. By taking control of the anti–Vietnam War movement, the Maoists and in some cases the Trotskyites managed to influence a generation of Swedish high school and college students. Very consciously, these groups also encouraged their members to choose professions which would give them the opportunity of influencing others; many became entertainers, actors, teachers, social workers, and certainly not least writers or journalists—for a number of years, the Stockholm College of Journalism was popularly called the “College of Communism.” That a number of them also chose to follow in the footsteps of Sjöwall and Wahlöö by expressing their views and concerns via crime novels is hardly surprising, and indeed many of the major Swedish crime writers of the last decades have a background in the radical groups of the late 1960s and 1970s. Stieg Larsson was a Trotskyite; Henning Mankell is a Maoist, as was Gunnar Ohrlander; these three have spoken openly of their affiliations, which is why they are named while others are not.