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)

LEIF G.W. PERSSON'S ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE

Note: This review does contain a spoiler of sorts. You can leave the final paragraph until after you've read the novel...

When I reviewed Leif G.W. Persson's Between Summer's Longing And Winter's End earlier this year (you can link to that here), I likened it to a cross between Sjowall & Wahloo and Stieg Larsson (particularly The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest). There the subject was the murder of Olaf Palme, and it was ironic that policeman Lars Martin Johansson, investigating a different murder, is not only unable to 'solve' the most important crime in Swedish history, but that the man most responsible not only gets away with it, but gets the girl Johansson fancies.

In Another Time, Another Life it's years later, 1999, iand Johansson, is now married to that woman, though the circumstances of their re-connection are not as innocent as he knows. Thought of as a safe pair of hands, has just joined the Security Police, Sepo, one of the many layers of secret police set up to protect themselves from public scrutiny each time the public is given scrutiny to the previous layer. But the story begins in 1975, when the Red Army Faction took over the West German embassy in Stockholm, leaving four dead, two of them the terrorists. Johansson discovers that files on two Swedes who allegedly helped the Germans, have disappeared and reappeared in his files, and want to find out why. One of them was the victim of a murder in 1989, and the statute of limitations is about to run out—but Johansson's friend Bo Jarnebring, who also appeared in the previous book, and the competent, attractive Anna Holt, were the detectives on that killing. Their investigation got nowhere, primarily because it was headed by the pig-headed, corrupt, alcoholic Backstrom (think NYPD Blue's Bunz without the conscience).

Now, reopening that investigation takes Johansson deep within the workings of the Swedish state—not only in terms of solving the crime, but also in terms of figuring out just who wanted the whole thing reinvestigated, and why. And why it was covered up in the first place.

If Summer's Longing crossed Martin Beck with Mikke Blomkvist, Another Time, Another Life is like Beck crossed with Joseph Wambaugh, and Backstrom, convinced this is a simple homosexual killing barely worth solving, is a character worthy of Wambaugh at his best. Johansson, who in the previous book showed signs of being bound for the lonely life of a Beck, here seems much more in command. The subtleties required by his new job are still a strain, but not beyond him, and in the end he achieves a result that satisfies his sense of justice, and probably pleases those above him as well. My one criticism of Summer's Longing was for its being somewhat prolix, but not only is this book written much more tightly, the result for Johansson means the story is resolved in a way the Palme killing never could be. In that sense, despite the fact that you almost need to know the characters' backstory from the previous book, and you can see where some of their personal lives are headed, this might be a better place for newcomers to Persson to begin.

The brilliance of the story, however, lies in its coda, where Backstrom gets the last laugh, in the end 'solving' the 1989 murder, pinning it on a gay serial killer. That he uses liquor he stole from the murder victim's cupboard ten years earlier, and that the bottle is a banana liqueur which even the thirsty Backstrom presumably found unapproachable, is a bit of subtle irony which Swedes would recognise, and I assume find even more amusing than I did. Underneath the humour, Persson does shine a light on Swedes and their society, and in that broader sense may be the most interesting of the novelists in the current Swedish crime boom.

Another Time, Another Life by Leif G.W. Persson

Doubleday £16.99 ISBN 9780385614191

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

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