MARK BILLINGHAM'S CRY BABY

Cry Baby is Mark Billingham’s twentieth novel, and the seventeenth featuring Tom Thorne. This makes me feel old, because I still recall vividly the impact Sleepyhead made back in 2001, and he had amply delivered on the promise of that novel. I’ve been lucky enough to work with the man some might dub lazily The King Of North London Noir, but I think it’s a telling and indeed brilliant stroke that Billingham has chosen this landmark book to be a prequel to the Thorne series.

Set in 1996, Thorne is a DS, and still reeling from the effects of an earlier case where he didn’t follow or trust fully his instincts. Now he finds himself caught up in the abduction of a child, a child whose father is a career criminal currently in prison, and a case on which the force is under extreme pressure to get a result, and quickly. So although Thorne wants to use and trust his instincts, his commander doesn’t agree, and doesn’t trust him.

This uncertainty is part of what makes the story work so well. There are suspects, false leads and unexpected discoveries. There are leaks to the tabloid press which work against solving the case. And there is throughout the self-questioning of Thorne as he encounters a mother faced with the greatest loss imaginable, and her friend, who was looking after the boy and her son when, just for an instant, she missed them. The contrast of the two women, unlikely friends whom tragic loss separates, is part of the beauty of the story: Billingham is excellent with character and with setting, the contrast of their lives is not just that one woman lives in a council flat with her husband in stir, and the other in a nicer part of North London, with her divorced husband father out, but the way in which their statuses drive them apart. The subtleties of distinction have always been the meat of Billingham’s books, he has the detective’s eye.

Which is where Thorne is different from many of the other detectives with whom he is linked, some of whom influenced Mark when he started writing. The instinct which Thorne felt in his previous case is a sign that, like say, Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck, he is a detective, by nature; it defines him above any other human qualities. But unlike Beck, he is, or wants to be, a more ‘normal’ person outside the job, always one of the key dilemmas detectives in police procedurals often face. Some, like John Harvey’s Resnick or Henning Mankell’s Wallender, appear to succeed; others like Marlowe or Graham Hurley’s Joe Farady battle throughout their series, with different ends. I find it interesting that Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason (Erlendur) brought their detectives to a recognisable end, then began prequel series with them as cops on the beat.

For Billingham, this taking Thorne back to 1996 is case specific, and as such it works brilliantly to reveal Thorne’s inner core. As a story on its own, it delivers too; with an unexpected twist at the end which casts a chilling shadow over the story, and a brief coda set in the present which reflects perfectly on Thorne’s self, as both person and detective.

One you ought to read.

Cry Baby by Mark Billingham Little Brown £20 ISBN 9781408712412
This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

STEFAN AHNHEM'S MOTIVE X

Do you remember when Wallander discovered an ATM in the centre square of Ystad, Sweden was about to crash the world economy? Well, Helsingborg is a bigger city than Ystad (just over 100,000) people but in the limited time frame of Stefan Ahnhem's Motive X it suffers enough big-time crime to make it Europe's murder capital. For example:

1. a young immigrant boy killed in a laundry room washing machine which might be related to

2. an active child molester or

3. neo-Nazis, whose Sweden Democrat party office is firebombed and who fire-bomb a refugee centre

4. a stabbing at the scene of a hit and run

5. a series of killings by a killer instructed by charts he has created and follows using probablity dice

6. a child kidnapping

7. a sex killer who stalks his victim while she sleeps, who turns out to be character legendary in a local sex club (Remember I Am Curious, Yellow?)

which seems a lot of business for one small crime squad, especially since detective Fabian Risk has decided one of the detectives, Ingvar Molander, is a serial killer himself, and has murdered another detective who had also figured th1s secret out. Molander, a know-it-all who considers himself far to smart for his colleagues, is the most interesting character in the series, and his name carries what seem to me playful reminders of both Wallander and Martin Beck's collegaue Melander, who knows everything but spends all his time in the police toilet.

That Ahnhem can keep all those balls juggling without dropping them is no mean feat, even though at times you find some of the villains, particularly the neo-Nazis, waste a lot of time rather than taking care of business, and he does rely on one pretty blatant bit of deus ex machina coincidence, but what makes it work is something that is the essence of Scandinavian crime fiction: the personalities of the police, and how they are affected by the pressures of their society.

This goes right back to Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck, and in Risk we have a cop whose home life makes Beck's look like Ozzie and Harriet's. In the previous novel, the family has nearly been killed by another serial killer, though some of this is understandable, but one of the key elements of this novel involves Risk trying to reason with his son while he's thinking through a crime problem, a very good piece of writing.

Ahnhem was a screenwriter on the Swedish Wallander series (with Krister Henriksson), and he's obviously learned from Mankell, as well as Sjovall & Wahloo and very much from Steig Larsson. But he's somewhat less concerned with Swedish society (although the Sweden Democrats are a right-wing nationalist party, and probably don't enjoy his neo-Nazi portrayal of them) than with the nature of control in individual relationships. This is the point where the crimes and the personalities intersect: questions of who controls whom.

He tells the story with almost teasing changes of scene and multiple points of view, and very matter of fact gory violence. Meanwhile his cops are falling apart, even beyond of them being a killer. It sometimes creaks, and sometimes the responses don't quite seem right, but as with Larsson, the impetus of the plot carries the reader on. And of course, two of the main storylines are left unresolved for the next high-Risk installment.

Motive X by Stefan Ahnhem

Head Of Zeus £18.99 ISBN 9781786694607

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

RAGNAR JONASSON'S ISLAND

It is 1987. Benedikt thinks he is in love, and has driven up with Katla to her parents' cottage up in Iceland's Westfjords. Everything is going perfect for the young couple, but days later Katla is found dead, and eventually her father is arrested, charged and convicted of her murder. At the same time, CID detective Hulda Hermansdottir is expecting a promotion, but realises quickly although she is the most experienced detective on the force, the job is going to go to Lydur, with less experience but crucially, a man. And it is Lydur who breaks the Westfjords killing.

Ten years later, Benedikt agrees to a reunion with his three best friends from that time, to mark the anniversary of Katla's death. They travel to Ellidaey, one of the uninhabited Westman Islands, with a single holiday cottage atop the high cliffs. Over the weekend, one of the four falls to her death. Hulda is sent to investigate, but it's not until she's back in Reykjavik and the body has been examined that it becomes evident she has been pushed off the cliffs, and murdered. And when the connection between the killings is recognised, Lydur, now her boss, insists on keeping his hands on her investigation. Meanwhile, Hulda is coping with the loss of her daughter, to suicide, and her husband, to a heart attack. She has travelled to the United States, trying to find the father she never knew, an American soldier who never knew he had left a pregnant woman behind in Iceland.

The Island is the second of Ragnar Jonasson's novels featuring Hulda; his 'Hidden Island' series. The first, The Darkness, was a tour de force, with one of the most audacious and moving endings I can recall. This one is a prequel, set some 15 years earlier. It is not necessary to have read the first novel to appreciate this one, and there are no spoilers that would affect your enjoyment of The Darkness. But it is interesting, that having read the first adds a certain depth to Hulda's character, which is useful because, despite the new twists to Hulda's tale, she is not as central to the crime stories as she was in the previous book.

This is not like other Scandinavian crime writers who've gone back to series characters in their earlier days—Mankell with Wallander, Jonasson's fellow Icelander Idridason with Erlendur are good examples—in an effort to write about someone who is, in effect, a new character. Jonasson is, in effect, building his protagonist in reverse; Hulda is a sympathetic character whose virtues as a cop are also her problems as a person, and who has had to battle simply to establish herself as both person and police.

Another of the fascinating angles to Jonasson's writing has been the way his 'Dark Island' series, which preceded the first Hulda novel, reflect his love of the classic whodunit form; he was a translator of Agatha Christie while still a teenager. This book could be looked at as Jonasson's version of And Then There Were None, a murder on an island with a finite number of suspects, and as in Christie its less a police procedural than a character study, though when the policeman realises something about the character, the unknown truth comes out in testimony. He doesn't cheat on the mystery; though the solution becomes fairly evident about two-thirds of the way through. But he brings in secondary plot lines that keep Hulda's investigations intriguing, and, as in the first book, he ends with multiple ironies that strike a note of sadness.

While I tore through the novel, the way I did whodunits when I was younger, I admired the writing, but wondered a bit about the translation, something I hadn't done in the earlier books. When you get cliches, especially if repeated, you wonder if phrases like 'avoided like the plague' or 'trusty car' are equally cliched in their Icelandic versions, or if the easy English equivalent is being used. Since I don't know the answer to that in Icelandic, I can't make a judgement, but it is a question. It is not something that slowed me down as I read this excellent novel, and, knowing Jonasson is moving back even earlier in Hulda's career for the next book (see my Shots interview with him here) I look forward to that one with great anticipation.

THE ISLAND by Ragnar Jonasson

Michael Joseph, £14.99, ISBN 9780718187255

Note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS BOOKS OF THE PAST YEAR

This is an odd Books of the Year list, because it basically includes only those books I wrote about on Irresistible Targets, or reviewed on The Crime Vault Live, and the books I read and wrote about were not necessarily written in 2016. And of course, some I haven't yet written about, which means a number of my favourite books of 2016 will, I hope, get mentioned here soon, including Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat, Reza Aslan's Zealot, Henning Mankell's Quicksand and David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. 

I admit I probably should have written about the books I reviewed on The Crime Vault, but once I'd done the podcast, reviewing them in some detail, I had pretty much said what I wanted to say. You can find links to all five of the the CVL podcasts here at IT, just use the search engine.  All the other books I mention you can similarly find in the past year.

My favourite 2016 crime novels were James Sallis' Willnot and Alex Marwood's Darkest Secret (CVL). Runners up were Michael Connelly's Wrong Side Of Goodbye, Robert Crais' The Promise (CVL), Graham Hurley's The Order Of Things, Stephen King's story collection Bazaar of Bad Dreams (CVL) and Johan Theorin's Made In Sweden (CVL).

I was also a judge for the CWA Short Story Dagger award, and John Connolly's Night Music, from which two stories made the judges' (and my) short list, was exceptional. The runner-up story came from another fine collection, Crimes, by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, from Venezuela.

But my favourite crime novel of the year was Sara Gran's Dope, which for some reason I came to late. Read my review; it really is as good as I say.

The other two non-crime books that stand out from the year's reading were Kevin Jackson's study of modernism and 1922, Constellation of Genius, and Joe Abercrombie's hugely entertaining story collection, Sharp Ends, which proves not only that the whole sword and sorcery genre is not dead, but that a good writer can do wonderful things with it.  Serious writing in a not always very serious genre. But then you probably watch Game Of Thrones, right?

HENNING MANKELL'S AN EVENT IN AUTUMN

My copy of the book was sitting in the pile, waiting to be read, and then Henning Mankell died, and I wrote my piece (you can read that here) and said my bit on The Crime Vault Live (follow the link you'll find here), and the very next day after that I read the story but found I couldn't write about it right away.

Although it's billed as a 'never-before published' novella, An Event In Autumn was not actually Mankell's final Wallander book; it was originally published in 2004 in the Netherlands, as a give away for people who bought books. It was the basis of one of the BBC Wallander TV shows, and finally Mankell took it back and published it in 2013. It is set, as Mankell explains in a brief afterword, just before The Troubled Man, which ended the series (you can read my review here), and it is very much an autumnal book, the metaphor as pure and shining as snow. Not only for the autumn of the character's life, but the autumn of the character in the author's mind, echoing his own autumn (Wallander was 'born' in Mankell's own birth year, 1948).

Wallander is thinking about buying an old house that belongs to his colleague Martinsson's wife's cousin. He's pretty much convinced himself to buy when a nagging thought forces him to look one more time. He returns and finds a skeleton hand poking up from the ground. The skeleton is of a middle-aged woman, and it's been in the ground some 60 years. Wallander no longer wants to buy the house.

The investigation is classic Wallander; slow, somewhat plodding, but complete; always asking the next question and leaving nothing unanswered. The mystery is solved through this plodding work, but the story ends with a somewhat deus ex machina twist. But that isn't really the point.

'It was getting colder' is how one early chapter ends, and like a long poem lines similar to that recur at the end of many other stanzas. At the same time, we are presented with Swedishness, people who only speak when they have something to say, neighbours being neighbours, not friends, and with the prospect of life in old-age homes, where the inner silence and the outer silence merge. It may be what Mankell has called 'the Swedish anxiety'.

In its own quiet way, this is a powerful piece of writing. It's as if its setting the stage for the last Wallander book, and it even recalls 'Wallander's First Case', which appeared in the collection The Pyramid. (You can read my review of that here). It makes an interesting bookend to that fascinating career. Mankell himself writes about Wallander in an essay appended to the story, dated 2013. It's interesting as much for what is left out as for what is included, but it's good for putting the character into the place in which the author would like him to rest. May he rest in that place, and in the ones many of us have made for him in our own imaginations.

An Event In Autumn by Henning Mankell

Vintage, £6.99, ISBN 9781784700843

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE CRIME VAULT LIVE! EPISODE 2

The second episode of The Crime Vault Live is online now, and it's a good one (if I do say so myself). Mark Billingham and I interview the erudite and wonderful Val McDermid about Tartan Noir, series detective novels, Jane Austen, Raith Rovers and everything you'd expect; we discuss the passing of Henning Mankell; highlight Michael Connelly's The Crossing, Ruth Rendell's final novel, Kareem-Adbul Jabaar's take on Mycroft Holmes, and Lawrence Block's take on pulpy Gold Medal-style fiction. There's a digression onto the franchising of characters like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond (you ought to hear the rundown of Holmes' pastiches that was left on the cutting room floor!). There's talk about the Beck TV series, The Corpse Of Anna Fritz and Sherlock in the London Film Festival; the audio book versions of Ngaio Marsh, and there is music by Elvis Costello (thank you Mr.Costello sir, for the kind permission). All in a very listenable 50 minutes, believe it or not.

Here's a link via soundcloud but you can also find it on ITunes, at The Crime Vault website, & through many other noise providers on the interweb. Smash that link now!

HENNING MANKELL: IN MEMORIAM

Henning Mankell was important as a crime writer because his Wallander books sparked what had become an explosion of Scandinavian crime fiction which went nuclear after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and I find it hard to believe that Steig Larsson wasn't inspired in some way by The Fifth Woman one of the best of the Wallander series.

Otherwise, Mankell's influence was more in terms of marketing than style, though you can see a good bit of him in the best of the Nordic writers, Iceland's Arnaldur Indridason. But Mankell himself was influenced by the godfathers of modern Scandinavian crime fiction, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and their ten Martin Beck books. Like Beck, Wallander is a dour detective with a depressing private life, and functions within an ensemble cast that both complements and contrasts with him. Mankell spends more time on Wallander himself, perhaps, which reflects the changing times to some extent (our literary cult of fictional personality) but also reflects Sjowall and Wahloo's own influences, especially Ed McBain's 87^th Precinct.

Mankell was often dismissive of the label 'crime writer', but he was very generous to Sjowall and Wahloo, and wrote the introduction to the Harper Perennial reissue of the first Beck novel, Roseanna. When I wrote the introduction to Murder At The Savoy in the same series, I noted that its basic premise, the death of an industrial with fingers in many shady multi-national deals, is mirrored in Mankell's The Man Who Smiled (a very Martin Beck sort of title), and noted a few other parallels in the series. I also quoted the description of Beck's colleague Fredrik Melander, logical, calm, dull, with a 'modest' sense of humour, an excellent memory, and a propensity for being in the toiler whenever he was needed. As Sjowall and Wahloo wrote: 'briefly, he was a first-class policeman'. The one time I interviewed Mankell, appropriately enough at the Savoy (but in London, not Malmo) I asked if Wallander were in some ways an hommage to Melander. 'Oh, did they write that?' he replied. He also had little false modesty; I asked him who the man was who had greeted him just before we sat down. 'Oh, he's Sweden's second greatest novelist,' he said.

What also links Mankell to Sjowall and Wahloo was their dissection of the failures of Sweden's experiment in Social Democracy from a perspective often noted to be left-wing, but more accurately described as true to the ideals of that experiment. Mankell's political commitment is strong throughout his work, both in Sweden and Mozambique, and strongly consistent to a sense of rational help for those who need help and justice, and a society based on those principles. It was no surprise he chose to sail on the flotilla of ships trying to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, it was even less of a surprise that he reported the summary murder of 10 activists by masked Israeli commandos, and refuted very simply and strongly allegations that the killings were self-defense. He had a field day with the fact that he was captured in international waters, brought to Israel, and then charged by the Orwellian government with entering the country illegally.

Wallander was well-served by television. Rolf Lassgard nailed his character, but Krister Henriksson was justifiably more popular, because he brought some humour to Wallender, just through his quick smile and twinkle in his eye; it made his interactions with the rest of the ensemble less confrontational. Kenneth Branagh's Wallander virtually eliminated the ensemble, concentrating on the superficial problems of Wallander's life, most notably drinking and shaving. It's good that the series has not been continued, like the Beck which for all its strengths has little of Sjowall and Wahloo left to recommend it. And it should be noted that Henriksson's performance in the final Wallander story, The Troubled Man, is every bit as touching as Mankell's own conclusion to the series (and it's one of the most overtly political of the series as well).

There isn't much humour in the books; Mankell wrote a comic novel, Tea Bag, about literary types and immigration—the humane portion about the life of immigrants in Sweden works muich better than the literary comedy. But his work for children is surprisingly good, including Chronicler Of The Winds, an adult story based on a play written to be performed in Portugese, in his adopted Maputo.

Faceless Killers, the first Wallander book, is a good place to start. One Step Behind and Fifth Woman are my idea of the series' best. I'd also recommend his 2006 novel Depths, (you can read my review of that book here), set on bleak islands in the archipelago during World War I; it is to my mind the most Bergmanesque bit of Swedish writing I've encountered (reminiscent of Strindberg as well) and deeply moving. Of course Mankell was married to Eva Bergman, Ingmar's daughter, which may or may not mean anything.

We discuss Mankell in the second episode of The Crime Vault Live; I could not do the same on BBC Front Row that night because we were recording CVL at the same time. I might have said that sometime in the future people will look at Mankell as a transitory figure, between the trail-blazing of Sjowall and Wahloo and the worldwide phenomenon of Steig Larsson. But he's more important than that, and the consistency of his vision for both his iconic character, his other work, and beyond fiction to his country and the world; in many ways he represents the moral focus of the Swedish character. This should make him a major figure no matter from what distance literary critics are looking back.

MARI JUNGSTEDT'S DANGEROUS GAME

Mari Jungstedt's series of police procedurals set on the Swedish island of Gotland, and starring Anders Knutas, started out as one of the best of the Nordic new wave. There were many familiar elements: Knutas was a particularly thoughtful everyman Depressive Detective, there was a well-drawn ensemble, and the addition of television journalism gave it a touch of the point of view that works so well for Lisa Marklund. What was particularly strong was the sense of isolated place: Visby, especially the old town of this once influential port, contrasted nicelty with the rugged barren sense of Gotland itself. Like Mankell's Ystad, Visby turned out to be particularly crime-ridden paradise, but it acted as a sort of microcosm for the Swedish society it could in a sense observe at a distance.

The Dangerous Game, the sixth Knutas novel, takes a wider view, being set in the world of high-priced fashion modelling, and thus also in Stockholm. The story is built around Jenny Levin, a teenaged modelling sensation who happens to come from a farm on Gotland. When Sweden's best-known fashion photographer, with whom Jenny is having an affair, is murdered on a Gotland shoot, the investigation falls to Knutas and his team. And it just happens that the local TV reporter Johan Berg's partner is a friend of the Levin family.

Jungstedt's real strength is charting the choppy waters of the relationships of this cast; Knutas is discovering his jealousy of his colleague Karin's happy relationship, just as he seems to be making progress with his own marriage, at least until his obsession with solving the murder interferes. Berg is likewise driven to family trouble by his concentration on work. The investigation gives Jungstedt lots of room to explore those craggy paths.

But running alongside the main story is another, involving Agnes, a former model now confined in a home suffering extreme anorexia. This is one of the dark sides of the fashion world, and Jungstedt conveys it in chilling detail. But because this is a novel, it points the way toward the solution. Writers often make this work by giving the solution away, and writing from the killer's perspective. But here the killer's identity is kept secret, with a series of red herrings that become less and less effective. So that even a nice twist at the end has been telegraphed in advance, and fails to surprise as it should.

This is disappointing mainly because Jungstedt does such a good job of getting the reader involved, and keeping the story moving on its multiple levels. And despite the let-down of predictability, it leaves one looking forward to a return trip to Visby.

The Dangerous Game by Mari Jungstedt

translated by Tiina Nunnally

Doubleday £12.99 ISBN 9780857521507

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ARNE DAHL'S TO THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN

Television has overtaken Arne Dahl. The small problem with the publishing of his 'new' novel, written in 2000, is that fans who watch the torrent of Scandinavian series on BBC4 will have seen the two-part adaptation of it last year. It's a small problem because the writing is a different enough experience, and the time-frame is long enough, for this to be a unique experience worth savoring on its own.

I wrote about Dahl's Blinded Man last year (you can link to that here) and pointed out its place in the Sjowall/Wahloo and Henning Mankell tradition, but how Paul Hjelm, Dahl's erstwhile lead character, actually isn't a protagonist in the same way as Martin Beck or Wallander. Dahl's sense of the team dynamic is very strong, and it is that dynamic that carries the books, and the TV series, though in different ways for each. In fact, on television, it is the casting which helps give the characters depth, and oddly enough, the one bit of casting that doesn't seem to reflect the novels is Shanti Roney, a bit too young and edgy for Hjelm. They've also changed Hultin, the unit commander, to a woman, but that actually works fine.

The novel begins with the Intercrime unit having been disbanded, after the events of Bad Blood, but they are reunited when a series of crimes – a prisoner being blown up in a maximum security prison, a massacre in a bar, and attacks on a major drug lord all seem to tie together. What makes it more interesting is that Gunnar Nyberg, the former Mr. Sweden, has been working with the paedophile unit, and is torn about whether to give up that work or return. Eventually, of course, that strand will intersect the others, in effect making the decision for him.

It's a fine story. Dahl works easily with complicated plots, and only once has to resort to the helpful hand of coincidence: Aarto Sodersted, the Finnish-Swede, is checking the personals in the Swedish equivalent of Car Buyer, and finds an important clue. Dahl's tried to set up the likelihood, but it still seems a catching point. On television, of course, such coincidences can be sped past in the car chase of resolution, which is an advantage.

But what makes the story work so well is Dahl's handling of characters. He's deft at giving out enough of his cops' emotions to create dilemmas within the story, but he's almost as good with the supporting cast and the villains, keeping point of view firmly in line, and thus creating the framework of a classic whodunit but filling it in with the depth of conflict which makes this one of the very best police procedural series being written anywhere.

To The Top Of The Mountain by Arne Dahl

Harvill Secker £14.99 ISBN 9781846558085

This review will also appear in Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ANDREAS NORMAN RUSHES INTO A RAGING BLAZE

Politics often plays a huge part in Swedish thriller writing, but usually it's the politics of the past. Stieg Larsson's trilogy moved from who-dun-it to chase thriller before moving into politics in its third volume (The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest), which centered, in the end, around the assassination of Olaf Palme, and the idea of elements of the Swedish state working against its elected government. This trope recurs constantly; in Henning Mankell's final Wallander novel, The Troubled Man, the crime goes back to relations with allies, and subterfuge (literally) concerning the crisis of submarines caught in the Stockholm archipelago.

So it is no surprise that Andreas Norman's first novel should take up those themes, of the state within a state and the abuse of Swedish trust by allies. What is new and surprising is the way he does it, in the present day context of the war on terror, and Sweden as a part of the European Union.

Carina Dymek works in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She's a career-minded, unexciting, dare we say boring, prototype Swede. On a trip to Brussels, after a meeting of the EU's committee on security, she is approached by stranger who claims to be an EU civil servant, and who hands her a memory stick. On it is a proposal for a unified EU security service, one which would have the right to spy on suspected terrorists in any EU state, and share such spying with EU allies, like the US.

Being a good civil servant, she immediately turns the stick over to her superiors back in Stockholm. And quickly finds herself suspended from her job, and being invetsigated as a potential terrorist. To make things worse, Carina has a boyfriend, a fellow civil servant called Jamal, born in Egypt, and within hours MI6 is in Stockholm, saying Jamal is a terrorist, and Dymek is part of a major terror plot to strike against the EU in Brussels. The Swedes assign one of their toughest agents, Bente Jensen to the case, and she soon discovers there is more going on than she, and her department, are being told.

There is a lot that is familiar from novels of paranoid conspiracy in Into A Raging Blaze, but what makes it work so well is Norman's familiarity with the milieu; he worked in the Swedish foreign ministry, and he is very good at conveying that sense of humdrum bureaucratic inevitability about the progress of this case. The novel starts slowly, but gradually gathers momentum as Dymek, in effect, goes on the run. There's a little of the deus ex machina of Larsson's trilogy; skilled hackers seem not only thick on the ground in Sweden but also remarkably accessible—after all it is a small country so everybody knows one. The story is forced to resolve itself somewhat mechanically—but not until Dyke herself has been rendered; a nice touch as Sweden's putative allies turn out to be taking liberties with Swedish liberties...this is the other subtext of much of Swedish political thriller writing, a sense of naivete, a willingness by sections of the democratic society to throw ideals away for a chance to play with the big boys.

What also helps this novel work well are the two main characters, both women, whose contrasts are evident, but whose similarities, while more subtle, are even more telling. If we think of Swedish society as being, in theory, fair and rational, it's interesting how it is left to the women in the tale to display those characteristics, and for the men to be the ones duped.

Because what is most chilling, and realistic in the wake of what the world now knows about the NSA and GCHQ and their massive spying on their citizenries and on those of putative allies, is that when an intelligence organisation chooses not to believe in something, facts don't matter. And Norman does a brilliant job of putting that idea into context by using a book of Arabic poetry send to Jamal by his uncle, whom MI6 are claiming is a terrorist. The idea of MI6 as literary critics is both amusing and frightening.

As with most thrillers of paranoia, unless the ending be tragic, it tends to be a little forced. But here there is a realistic element of unhappy resolution, enough to suggest that the abuses will continue and any checking will be only temporary. In the meantime, this thriller starts slowly, builds nicely, and manages to do a good job of putting the reader into the mind of the character whose position is rendered almost hopeless by the security state. An impressive debut.

Into A Raging Blaze by Andreas Norman

translated from the Swedish by Ian Giles

Quercus £12.99 ISBN 9781782066033

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ARNE DAHL'S BLINDED MAN

I haven't yet watched BBC4's broadcasts of the TV adaptation of Arne Dahl's novel, but when I read the book a few months ago I was struck by how firmly it was anchored in what I consider the classic Swedish tradition, which flows from Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck, and how consciously it seems to address modern society, while still maintaining its suspense as a police procedural.

The Blinded Man begins with two seemingly unconnected events—a well-planned bank robbery and a hostage situation in an immigration office. The first is unexplained. In the second, we follow Paul Hjelm, whose day begins with yet another instance of missed communicaton with his wife. Hjelm then has to deal with the Kosovar Albanian who's been let down by the system in the only way he can figure out how, by shooting him, non-fatally. For that, he is suspended and investigated for misconduct, but in the meantime he is recruited to join a new elite task force being assembled to deal with the murders of two of Sweden's leading businessmen.

You can see familiar elements already: while Hjelm is not quite as depressive as the popular image of Scandinavian detectives dictates, he is serious, inward, and finds communicating a challenge. Most of the best Scandinavian detectives function within a team—which serves as a microcosm of the society and its ethos in which they function. In Hjelm's case, this microcosm is a sort of rainbow coalition: an almost equally serious woman; an aggressive body-builder, who once in roid-rage turned wife beater; a Finnish intellectual (which plays on some Swedish ethnic stereotypes); a plodding Norrlander called Norlander (which plays on others of the same) and a 'new Swede' of Latin American decent. What is particularly interesting is the way Dahl plays, within the group, on generational differences in traditional Swedish values—particularly racism, and not only in regard to immigration. Perceiving minute differences in their own native society, Swedes have been both open to immigration and felt swamped by it, and this is an important side issue throughout the novel.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the serial killer has a somewhat clockwork feel to it—there is actually an Agatha Christie reference which seems somewhat self-conscious. There are secret societies and a clue built around an obscure jazz tape, Monk recorded live, that would be worthy of Michael Connelly or John Harvey had they ever worked in that fashion. Slightly less self-conscious is the analysis Arto Soderstedt, the braniac left-wing Finn, presents of what makes serial killers in the first place. It's worth quoting: 

'Plenty of magazines in the United States make heroes out of serial killers and mass murderers. It's related to the fact that their society is on the verge of collapse. A widespread feeling of general frustration makes it possible for an entire nation to empathise with extremists and sick outsiders...their disregard for all social rules exerts a strong fascination...we need to ask ourselves what sort of effect this sort of mess could have on the national soul of the Swedish people. There's no such thing as a simple act.'

This resonates within the book's approach to Swedish society, if you go back to Beck the whole idea of serial killing hasn't occured, while in Wallander it is a particularly bizarre crime. But it's also crucial

that both Beck (in Murder At The Savoy, to which I wrote the introduction to the Harper Collins edition) and Henning Mankell's Wallander (in The Man Who Smiled) were brought face to face in confrontation with Sweden's upper crust businessmen—Hjelm faces the same challenges, made more intriguing because the businessmen themselves are the targets.

Hjelm reminds me a bit of Leif Persson's Lars Martin Johnsson (who is a Norrlander himself) in that he's not, as previously suggested, as depressive as a Beck or Wallander or Harry Hole. Hjelm is decent, relatively good with people, but, as with most good Nordic detectives, finds his real battles come within the bureaucracy he faces—and that, again, echoes the society the police are supposedly serving.

Hjelm's relationship with his wife Cilla, however, is pure Beck, though Dahl writes it with more emotion than Sjowall and Wahloo. Here's their marriage, and their lives, in a nutshell: 'Did those few moments in the kitchen draw them closer together? Or had the final chasm opened up between them? It was impossible to say, but something decisive had taken place; they had looked right into each other's naked loneliness.'

These are the things television would find hard to adapt. In some ways, I expected The Blinded Man would find its way to television—more along the lines of the Danish Those Who Kill. The ensemble playing can be managed, and the plot itself works well. As with all police procedurals, the question of reveals, and thus managing tension, becomes crucial. But what made the novel most interesting was the inward-looking part, as with the above, and that would be the hardest to transfer to the small screen. I found The Blinded Man a worthy, if unspectacular addition to the line of Scandinavian police procedurals, and Hjelm potentially a major figure. I will turn to the adaptation with keen interest.

The Blinded Man by Arne Dahl, translated by Tiina Nunnally
Vintage £7.99 ISBN 9780999575689 

Note: This review will also appear at Shots (www.shotsmag.co.uk)

HENNING MANKELL'S TROUBLED MAN

Kurt Wallander is 60 years old. He's living in his isolated house with a view of the sea. He's starting to forget things, including one night when he gets drunk and leaves his gun behind in a restaurant. On the home front, his daughter Linda, who followed him into the police, is having a baby, partnered with a Swedish businessman whose father is a naval officer from the old aristocracy. As always with Wallander, he has time to think, especially as he sits out his suspension while the punishment for losing his gun is decided by the odious bureaucratic cop Mattson.

Then Linda's partner's father disappears, and Wallander is drawn into the search—made more personal because Hakan von Enke had previous chosen to share with Wallander the fact that he was troubled, though not the specifics of what it was that was troubling him. Wallander's search eventually involves foreign submarines run aground in Swedish waters, international spying and evasdropping, and even murder. This touches on those keys moments of modern Swedish society—the time of Olaf Palme, and his assassination—which has been at the core of much modern Swedish crime fiction, and which continues to defines the problems of Sweden's view of itself and its place in the modern world. Of course, Wallander's quest is not an official investigation, but that is perfect because it is the detective doing what he has always done best—attempting to solve a mystery, the mystery of human behaviour, the one thing that has always been hardest for him to do.

What develops as he searches for von Enke, and then for von Enke's wife, is something different: it becomes a trawl through Wallander's own past. At times, the devices become a bit strained, as Henning Mankell attempts to cover lots of ground from the past that's been shared through the series, and indeed some that has not. But even if it at times creaks at the edges, the core of it is filled with the rise of emotions, as always restrained and even repressed, in the overwhelmingly Swedish sense, as Wallander and we contemplate his life.

He receives a visit from Baiba, the Latvian woman who was his one true love; he has to deal with Mona,his ex-wife and first love. He is forced to examine himself, and we are given the same opportunity to examine him. It is not always pleasant, but then, it never has been—the reality of Wallander has never been tortured genius, as portrayed by Branagh, or affable insecurity, like Krister Hendriksson. It has been his ordinariness, his restraint, his inability to fit in comfortably with the society he examines as he works. It has been a most Swedish inwardness, made more poignant by the ways in which Mankell has brought the outside world, the modern world, to bear on him. The core of his work has always been Wallander himself, which is what this novel, in its sombre way, celebrates.

For it is Wallander himself who is the troubled man, and his troubles are framed by his past on one side, and his newly-arrived grandaughter on the other. The prospect of tragedy hangs over this entire novel—the reader sits on a sharp edge of fatal anticipation-- but in the end Mankell resolves the Wallander series in exactly the way he has built it over the years, with a simple and, dare I say, Swedish realism or practicality about the nature of our lives themselves. If it isn't optimistic or affirming, neither is it tragic. It is, instead, exactly what it is, and deeply moving, particularly if you have followed the series. This is, obviously, not the place to start reading Wallander—you do not have to have followed the whole series, but the more you know of the man, the more affecting this valedictory novel will be, and the better you will understand Mankell leaving Wallander his last private moments.

LEIF G.W. PERSSON'S SWEDISH WINTER'S END

(warning: this review contains some spoilers)

Lars Martin Johansson differs in some ways from the type of detective we've come to expect in Swedish police procedurals, from Beck to Wallander. But although he is charming, adept in some ways at negotiating the police bureaucracy, Johansson is a dedicated, honest cop, and he is also alone. That last characteristic is one that we see throughout the novel, but one whose importance doesn't become important until the story is resolved, and we learn that many of his assumptions, and ours, have not been false as much as incomplete. And this, I think, is Leif G.W. Persson's crucial point.

Between Summer's Longing And Winter's End reads like a cross between Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck books and the third volume of Steig Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest. It has the humour implicit in the Beck books, the almost sheer comic delight in the innate blundering mixed with intricate politicking, and the deeper concern with Swedish society, at least as reflected in a right-wing establishment and deeply conservative police force. This history of Cold War Sweden, and the positions taken by its intelligence agencies, is at the heart of Larsson's trilogy—and in the third volume it takes over the narrative. By melding these two strands, Persson moves from the evident suicide of a young American journalist to the central event of post-war Swedish politics, indeed life, the murder of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. It is to Swedish society what JFK's assassination was to America, only moreso. And Persson's tale in Summer's Longing, that Palme was killed by elements of the Swedish intelligence establishment, and the investigation was bungled simply through police incompetence, seems to be one that many Swedes, and probably most Swedish crime writers, would find unsurprising.

The strength of Persson's novel lies in the gap between Johansson's honesty and efficiency as a cop, and the realities of life, personal, political, and police. That Johansson winds up alone, while the secret police man, Claes Waltin, behind the killings in effect gets the girls, is an irony that echoes the fact that Johansson's findings about Palme's past will never be made known, the fact that the American was murdered will never be known, and the killer of both will go free. Johansson remains blissfully unaware that one woman he approaches is a cop, another he feels attracted to is an NSA agent. He is clever in the way he puts on his country Norrland accent when he needs to, but in the end he is just a cop—and Persson's point is that good honest cops have very little effect on what happens in the world. That Waltin is also, beneath his suave exterior, a rather disturbed sexual fetishist, is just a further irony. And that the Swedes have layer upon layer of secret police, to keep some secret from the ones that become known, mixes the irony with humour brilliantly. Not least in its references to Jan Guillou, the left-wing journalist despised by Sweden's secret establishment; his crime novels were best-sellers in Sweden but sadly made little impact outside the country.

Persson, like Sjowall and Wahloo, likes to tell the reader what the characters are really thinking while they say and do what they do. This makes for some very dry humour, and reinforces the sense of bureaucratic infighting, and self-protection, within the police establishment. His cops are not as one-dimensional as Beck or Wallander, but one wonders what Beck might have seemed like were Sjowall and Wahloo to delve that much deeper—or whether the point was there was no deeper to delve! But at times, Persson over-eggs his mixture; this is a 600 page novel that contains too much repetition, too many asides, and too many scenes that in the end merely repeat information we've had before. I enjoyed it, but when you're going to have to spend a long time explaining both the assassination in the book's present and the deep background in its past, it's probably too much. But I found Summer's Longing both compelling and entertaining, and its explanation of Palme's killing makes as much sense as any I've read. Or maybe I, like so many Swedes, am being overly Manichean.

Between Summer's Longing And Winter's End by Leif GW Persson
Black Swan, £7.99, ISBN 9780552774680

WHY IT'S OK TO BE NOT SO QUEENAN ON ALL-BRANAGH

Last week the Guardian devoted an entire page of their Friday review section to Joe Queenan's discovery that Kenneth Branagh was not the second coming of Laurence Oliver. Since this acclamation is now more than two decades old, and because most of us have long since been disabused of the notion, Queenan's decision to use the upcoming Thor movie for a re-evaluation that turns out to be merely a confirmation of the existing evaluation is an interesting one, more interesting because he seems to miss the essential point of Branagh's original appeal and his career since then.

Where the comparison with Oliver held up best, I believe, is in the transition from stage to film. Oliver understood very well how to convey theatrical effects, and also understood even better the uses of the camera to provide those effects, like close-ups, which could not be delivered on the stage. Watching his Hamlet, Richard, or Harry is to get the best sense of theatrical performance. Branagh had a similar sense of transferring some of the immediacy of the stage, some of the control the lead actor has, to the screen. Problem was, he had much less to work with.

Years ago I wrote about Branagh's Henry V, noting that his was a performance for Thatcherite Britain. Oliver's had been empowered by World War II; Branagh's by the Britain of war in the Falklands ('rejoice!', 'gotcha!') and war against miners. His was a performance full of stature but lacking presence. I called it a cost-accounting prince; the newly upwardly-mobile striver's version of nobility. It's not, as Queenan believes, a question of looks, though Branagh is a potato compared to Oliver, or indeed to most Hollywood action men. It's a question of posture. I never got the sense Branagh's Harry knew what battle, or comradeship, were all about. Olivier got it, even with the bad haircut and dye job. Branagh was more like posing for a photo op, taking a chance to deliver some good PR and move on; Nick Clegg with an army behind him. He was adept at organising, at putting things together with his RSC and Oxbridge stock company, and getting the reflected spotlight onto himself; the actual acting, full of pomp and circumstantial evidence, got lost in the shuffle.

The difference between Oliver and Branagh was exactly the difference between Sean Connery's James Bond and Daniel Craig's hold-em playin', football-supporting, hands clenched in knife-edge sprinting version: not so much dumbed down as aimed down. Craig grabs one note of Bond, technology, and like a junior clerk who's just watched Top Gear, jumps into the role. Branagh avoids one-note by projecting technique; thus he failed miserably in Dead Again because he was unable to tap into the ambiguities real noir would require; instead he and Em did their Footlights thing in the shadows, half-full of sound, some fury, and signifying almost nothing at all.

Branagh fell prey to the same sort of problem when he did BBC's version of Wallander, a dully-hammered one-note sombre based on some English idea of Scandinavian alienation. His Wallander is closer to Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole than to Mankell's detective, and not a patch on Krister Henriksson's more nuanced version.

Queenan notes than Branagh has done some excellent work for television (though he includes Wallander in that) but fails to figure out why. It's mostly that the small screen gets filled with Branagh's actorly emoting, where on the bigger screen it gets overpowered and lost. Interestingly, his two best TV roles have touched on his quintessential strengths as a performer. As Shackleton he got to project beyond and through English reserve; enduring unnecessary hardship and managing to triumph in defeat.

But his greatest performance may well be as Heydrich in the HBO/BBC Conspiracy, the story of the Wannsee meeting at which the logistics of the Final Solution were agreed. Branagh gets to display a little flash, but primarily the performance is a perfectly controlled exercise in bullying petty bureaucracy; the Thatcherite ideal transformed on the wider historical context. He plays off well against the more anguished performances of some of his 'nice' Germans (Ben Daniels in particular), and he gets brilliant support from Stanley Tucci as Eichmann; Tucci understands exactly the mundanity at the heart of the evil on display. Without meaning to take the historical context lightly, the nature of these characters could just as easily have been those at the meeting where Dave Cameron and Nick Clegg drew up their own final solution (the Big Society) for Britain. They are the children of Thatcher, just as Branagh will be remembered as Thatcherism's greatest actor.

Directing Thor is not beneath Branagh's talents; there Queenan has it wrong. Playing him would be. But Loki might well be perfect for him.

JO NESBO'S LEOPARD

The Leopard opens with Harry Hole in Hong Kong, losing himself after having triumphed over the Snowman, but having lost his love, Rakel, and her son Oleg in the process. But there's another serial killer on the prowl in Norway, and they need Harry back. The lure of the chase doesn't get Harry to return, but the impending death of his father does, and he heads back to Oslo to find himself caught in the middle of a battle for control of the investigation, between his boss Hagen, and the Kripos boss, Mikael Bellman. Meanwhile, the bodies keep turning up.

Jo Nesbo has pulled out all the stops for this one, though in some ways more is less. There are three continents, a chilling execution device, and an action-packed finale that almost screams out for film adaptation. If this is an opening, or widening, of Hole's appeal, it's a brave thing to do, because Nesbo is already being compared, inevitably, to Henning Mankell, and by setting parts of the book in Africa, and titling it The Leopard, he invites such comparisons (recall The Eye Of The Leopard). In fact, the Harry Hole who returns from Hong Kong, and must stay sober rather than lose himself completely is much closer to Wallander than the Hole of earlier books; less abrasive, more vulnerable, more sympathetic. There's also an element of homage to Thomas Harris here, not just with the arcane torture devices, but also as Hole goes back to the Snowman, and to Katrine Bratt, the brilliant but twisted cop from that book, to help him find this new killer.

But it's also uniquely Nesbo. The plot involves many aspects of rural Norway, and in effect offers two villains, but the most interesting battle is not between them and Hole but between Hole and Bellman, who is the most chilling of all the villains in the novel, even though (or perhaps because) he is a cop. As the labyrinthine plot moves forward, the chess game between Hole and Bellman proves in some ways more suspenseful and dangerous than the pursuit of the killer—the affinity between Harry and the killers he pursues is far closer than that to cops like Bellman.

This conflict brings out the most abrasive parts of the Hole who won so many followers originally, and they may be disappointed in a kinder, gentler Harry. Though, since Nesbo's now billed on the cover as 'the next Stieg Larsson' perhaps Harry needs to be as irresistible to women as Mikke Blomqvist? His relationship with Kaja Solnes, the cop sent to bring him back to Norway from Hong Kong, isn't totally convincing, but it does offer its own shadowy twists, and their last scene is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. Which in the end is what it's all about, and though this is a typically long novel, Nesbo has the ability to keep complicated plot lines going, keep characters in conflict, deal with red herrings, and even in translation make it all feel immediate. He's not the next Stieg Larsson, though he deserves to be that successful, but he does have some of the same ability to convey a wider perspective on the Norwegian world. He's more like, as I suggested earlier, a cross between Mankell and Harris, though Hole is a character either would envy. And in the final scenes of The Leopard, I again thought of Thomas Harris, with a strange echo of Hannibal Lecter and new directions for the character. With Nesbo on top form, that's something to look forward to. It something the very seductive cover of the German edition suggests...

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo
Harvill Secker, £12.99, ISBN 978184655401

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

WALLANDER FILMS: GUEST ESSAY BY BOB CORNWELL

NOTE: IT welcomes the New Year with only its second guest essay. Bob Cornwell wrote a version of what follows as a comment following my response to The Man Who Smiled (you can link to that here), but before the post which precedes this one--for some reason the site refused to post it. If you've followed IT's response to Wallander, in books and on film, I think it will interest you. As you'll see, Bob and I have somewhat different takes on the focus of One Step Behind, as I'm more willing to let some of the overt social comment be subservient to the development of the main characters. We're also a little at odds over the Branagh versions; I'm not convinced it's a question of length as much as Branagh's preference for an existential hero, and a diminishing of the ensemble cast of cops. Perhaps we should get together on picking and choosing the best bits of each series--Nyberg and Linda from the TV series, Martinsson from the TV movies, Wallander's father from the Branagh series, and edit them into one killer version!

THE WALLANDER TV MOVIES IN CONTEXT
by Bob Cornwell

I too was puzzled by the ending of the The Man Who Smiled. That final shot, with Lassgård/Wallander grooving along to the Hepcats' ‘Cadillac’, must have sent a shiver down Mankell's spine. Strange that anyone thought that was appropriate, particularly Lassgård (Mankell’s own choice for the role). Or did I detect a certain glee from him, eight years into the series? The adaptation, as you suggest, is pretty free, omitting key parts of what is the book’s central theme, the corrosive effects of untrammelled capitalism, not only on big business (with the book’s link to Robert Maxwell in the UK) but also its effect on individuals and local government. The IVF sub-plot appeared to me as totally gratuitous. The ending was, I thought, a neat compromise, if a little over-idealistic.

I was less happy with the lack of context to Wallander’s anonymous sex with the hotel prostitute, as well as with the scene itself, which shows Wallander out of character, and surprisingly naive for a senior policeman! As you know, in the book Wallander is on leave of absence after the concluding events of The White Lioness, in the depths of despair and considering a possible end to his police career. He knowingly embarks on that brief relationship (it occupies 15 lines in the book) and the character does not recur. Later he takes under his wing the newly arrived younger policewoman Ann-Britt Höglund, a non-sexual relationship which develops innto one that echoes Wallander's relationship with Rydberg, his deceased colleague and mentor) whilst still filled with longing for Baiba Leipa, the Latvian woman he met in The Dogs Of Riga.

Clearly that wasn’t enough for the two scriptwriters you mention, who invented Maja, presumably to spice up the previous film, The Fifth Woman, and beyond: she lasts through to Firewall. I wonder what they do with her in the later The Pyramid, written as a prequel to Faceless Killers? Significantly perhaps in Sidetracked, which markeds the resumption of the Lassgård series after a five year gap, and which according to IMDB, has Mankell as a contributing screenwriter, there is no Maja and Högland appears in her own right.

One issue this series does highlight is the question of runtime. It has always irked me that so many of the facile verdicts on which series is ‘better’, ignore the fact that the Branagh versions are all 90 minute condensations of what are complex 400+ page books, whilst the Hendriksson series, with one exception (After the Frost) are based on Mankell story outlines, not even short stories, and (presumably) lack the careful structure and detail of the books, therefore enabling the screenwriters to produce a product more in accord with conventional series thinking. This is not to decry the Hendriksson series, which has produced some notable episodes, but simply to point out that they are two different beasts.

As is the Lassgård series. Faceless Killers (1995) is a 4-part series running to 209m (again according to IMDB, not always the best source of runtime info) – and this the shortest of the Wallander novels. Later we get 166m for Sidetracked, 127m for The Man Who Smiled, and 180m for Firewall. Such generosity with screentime is surely more likely to produce an adaptation likely to find favour with those who have actually read the books. Wallander’s father appears in these early films, for example, as does Baiba. The exception to the rule is the version of One Step Behind, 90m in the Branagh version, 100m in the Lassgård version. On first viewing, I am far from convinced that the Lassgård version uses its extra minutes wisely (though I think Lassgård’s performance is the superior one). But at least the Branagh version does not ignore Mankell’s underlying theme of the rise of irrational violence in Swedish society, whilst the Lassgård version (though often beautifully directed by Birger Larsen) ludicrously over-emphasises the homosexual aspects of the story to produce a killer who is all-too explainable, and therefore at variance with Wallander’s own post-arrest investigations (ignored in both adaptations). Nevertheless I join you in hoping that the BBC will let us see the earlier episodes in the series, including The White Lioness (1996) to date the only film version of this novel.

WALLANDER FILMS REDUX: FIREWALL AND ONE STEP BEHIND

Following from my watching the Swedish TV film version of The Man Who Smiled (you can link to that review here)I've been locked down on BBC IPlayer over New Year's, plowing through more of Henning Mankell's Wallander. After the two-part Firewall and the excellent One Step Behind, I am now won over completely by Rolf Lassgard's performance in the title role. And I love the way its Swedish DVD package (see right) presents Wallander as an action hero! Lassgard catches the occasional moment of ingratiating humour, but more importantly the detective's essential vulnerability, which is what drives his obsession with solving crime and putting that small part of his universe right. Firewall, in which a cash machine in Ystad's town square turns out to be the trigger for a world-wide cyber-terror plot, is somewhat slow-developing, which in fairness reflects actual police work; it might well have been called One Step Behind. But its real focus is on Wallander's relationship with his colleagues Martinsson (more fine work by Lars Melin), who, lacking the obsession with his police work, is many of the things Wallander is not, and of course Maya. Marie Richardson is very good, but this is a character created to simplify Wallander's complicated relations with female colleagues, but the key feature is is relationship with Elvira, the diabetes therapist, who turns out to be a plant.

The real firewall is the barrier Wallander has erected between himself and others, even between his own feelings and the rest of the world. His hiding of his diabetes is the reflection of this, but the relationships reveal far more, as his private needs affect his work on the case. By alienating Martinsson, who wants a letter of recommendation for a cushier job in Malmo, a letter Wallander is reluctant to write, he creates a persistent critic of his investigation, marginalising himself as the CID arrive from Stockholm. And of course by failing to see through Elvira, he puts the young computer hacker he's brought into the case. Oddly, the hacker, Robin (the engaging Pia Ojansdotter), has been made a young woman in the film, sort of a kinder, gentler Lisbeth Salander, but also a stand-in for his daughter Linda, who doesn't appear in these adaptations. Salander and Wallander, now that's a pairing to consider! But to Wallander, it's the realisation that his own loneliness has blinded his cop instincts which turns out to be the focal point of the film.

Although in fairness, Wallander's police instincts often seem to be fogged by the reality of his life, and by dropping his other obsession, with opera, these films keep that on a very personal level—opera is all about expressing big emotions in a big way, and one of the points of Mankell's books is to examine the way Swedish society and culture discourage just such expression.

That, indeed, is the point of One Step Behind. The focus is not so much on the revelation of that Svedberg was gay, nor that none of his colleagues suspected as much, but the fact that none of his colleagues knew anything about the man away from the job. Wallander is shocked to discover that Svedberg considered him his best friend, indeed, was in love with him. The key scene is when the police gather to watch the peeping-tom videos the killer has taken of all of them, revealing the things that they hide from each other, and the key moment comes when we see Maya with the Danish cop HC (Peter Gantzler). The scene seems gratuitously explicit, but one of the points is the difference between the out-going, fun-loving Dane and his repressed Swedish colleagues. You can even hear it in the faster, slightly slurred Danish contrasting with the more precise Swedish. The other point, of course, is that everybody lies about their personal lives, if only by omission, to keep them secret even from those closest to them.

Birger Larsen's direction of One Step Behind is the sharpest of the three movies BBC4 has shown, he keeps the pace moving in what, once the identity of the killer has been revealed, becomes a fairly standard story. But he is equally as dynamic with the personal stories, and that's what makes this one the best of the three. Interestingly, watching it after Firewall, which preceded it in terms of release, helps put the characters into better, if slightly confusing, context, and noticing that both stories feature killers shooting themselves makes one wonder if it's an easy way out, both in plot terms and for the killer. Certainly, both are justified in the characters' own minds: Solomon has done wrong, and knows it, whereas Ake wants to keep Wallander alive to let him suffer with loss and not give him the satisfaction of bringing him to justice. It would be somewhat perverse to follow these in reverse order, but I suspect the later adaptations may have lent themselves more to foreign sales; needless to say I'm looking forward to the rest of the series appearing in whatever order.

THE REAL MIKKE BLOMKVIST? JAN GUILLOU'S ENEMY'S ENEMY: A Forgotten Friday Entry

For years, whenever I would discuss Henning Mankell or later Stieg Larsson with Swedish friends or relatives they inevitably would suggest I start reading Jan Guillou, whose series of spy novels featuring Swedish intellgience agent Carl Hamilton were the country's most popular books. I also think it was Guillou's back I saw after he'd exchanged a greeting with Henning Mankell when I was interviewing Mankell in the lobby of London's Savoy; Mankell pointed and said 'that's the second-best novelist in Sweden.'! I finally came across a copy of Enemy's Enemy, the fourth in the series, originally published in 1989 and in English in 1992. The novel's translation was credited to Thomas Keeland, who apparently was actually Tiina Nunnally and Steven Murray working jointly; Murray later would translate Stieg Larsson, and unhappy with the published reslt, use the pseudonym Reg Keeland.

What is fascinating, given the Swedish enthusiasm for Guillou, is the idea that he turns out to be a real-life Mikke Blomkvist. If you recall Larsson's Millennium trilogy, it begins with Blomkvist, a journalist for a small left-wing magazine, being sent to prison for libelling a major industrialist. Jan Guillou was one of three people (his co-writer and editor being the others) sent to prison in 1973 for espionage, after publishing a series of articles in their small left-wing magazine. Even more interestingly, given that the Millennium trilogy turns out to be about exposing a small, unknown group within Swedish intelligence which has had Lisbeth Salander committed to protect their secrecy, Guillou's expose was of something called the 'Information Bureau', which turned out to be a secret agency within Swedish intelligence which was spying domestically on Swedish citizens suspected of being communists, subversives, or other leftish undesirables.

There are more parallels in the work itself. Enemy's Enemy is a sophisticated work of spy fiction, more concerned with political reality than thriller action. Although Hamilton is often called the Swedish James Bond, this novel at least carries a sort of realism, un-romantic, matter-of-factly violent, which reminds me more of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm, who is nominally of Swedish descent, and made me wonder if Hamilton's name was intended as some kind of hommage. The Helm books, if you don't recall, or only saw the Dean Martin movies, were very much in the Gold Medal mode, and Helm was the kind of efficient, everyday kind of killer one could appreciate working for a quasi-secret branch of intelligence. Guillou is also playful with his Swedish influences; there is a character in this book named Gunvald Larsson, who makes a point of disassociating himself from Martin Beck's colleague; there is also a character named Stig Larsson, which could be a name-check for the Stig who caused the big Stieg to add the 'e' to his name, but would be very prescient otherwise, as Stieg was still writing for small magazines in 1989.

Enemy's Enemy pits Hamilton against his fellow Swedish agencies as much as against the Russians, and eventually unites the ostensibly neutral Swedes with their Red enemies (there is much reference to a previous Swedish operation against Russian submarine intelligence in Swedish waters) chasing a turned mole. Guillou is excellent at Hamilton's time in Moscow, which rings true from my (admittedly non-spying but journalistic or business) experience in the city. He also plays the relationship between Hamilton and the Russians brilliantly, even skipping the chance for one final twist which would have made it a different story entirely, and may have been a more realistic, if less happy, ending.

But the tour de force of the book is an extended courtroom scene, just as it is in the third of the Millennium trilogy. Here Hamilton faces down a parliamentary committee, transforming himself from suspected abuser of Swedish democracy and human rights world-wide, to national hero. Guillou handles it extremely well, shifting the tension and the equilibrium between politicians and spies brilliantly. As I said, the focus of the novel is indeed politics, and this not only resolves much of the book's action, but reinforces and explains its reason for being.

As far as I can tell Enemy's Enemy is the only Hamilton novel translated into English; not even the first, Coq Rouge, appears anywhere. Guillou is in print in English with a trilogy of novels set in the Crusades, which is interesting because part of Enemy's Enemy is set in Beirut. I've picked them up, and will look at them sometime soon, because Guillou is the real deal. I just hope they did well enough, or the Mankell/Larsson phenomenon is strong enough, to get more Carl Hamilton novels into English print.

Enemy's Enemy by Jan Guillou (translated by Thomas Keeland)
Bloomsbury 1993, £10.99 paper, ISBN 0747515778
The Crusades trilogy, translated by Steven Murray,
published in paperback by Harper