Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Paula Arvas, Andrew Nestingen, Paula Arvas, Andrew Nestingen

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783164370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of articles studies the development of crime fiction in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden since the 1960s, offering the first English-language study of this widely read and influential form. Since the first Martin-Beck novel of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö appeared in 1965, the socially-critical crime novel has figured prominently in Scandinavian culture, and found hundreds of millions of readers outside Scandinavia. But is there truly a Scandinavian crime novel tradition? Scandinavian Crime Fiction identifies distinct features and changes in the Scandinavian crime tradition through analysis of some of its most well-known writers: Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Anne Holt, Liza Marklund, Leena Lehtolainen, and Arnaldur Indriðason, among others. Focusing on Scandinavian crime fiction's snowballing prominence since the 1990s, articles zoom in on the transformation of the genre's social criticism, study the significance of cultural and geographical place in the tradition, and analyze the cultural politics of crime fiction, including struggles over gender equity, sexuality, ethnicity, history, and the fate of the welfare state. Scandinavian Crime Fiction maps out the contribution of Scandinavian crime writers to contemporary European culture and society, making the volume valuable to scholars and the interested public.

PART I

REVISIONS OF THE SOCIALLY CRITICAL GENRE TRADITION

1

Dirty Harry in the Swedish Welfare State

MICHAEL TAPPER

Nationhood and masculinity are crucial terms with most war films, indeed combat films generally.¹

Though often living as an outsider within the society he protects, operating in its margins, the exceptional and muscular white action hero has always represented dominance, whether as the gunslinger in the Wild West, the colonial warrior on foreign soil, or as their urban successor, the vigilante with or without a badge. The superman ideal is also prominent in Soviet propaganda and monuments celebrating soldier heroes and Stakhanovite workers. Richard Dyer describes the physical force of white male heroes as powered by a strong will and determination; they have a ‘body made possible by their natural mental superiority’.² Their body becomes the ultimate political authority.

With its roots in Second World War movies and their bands of brothers, postwar police fiction celebrated the average guy doing his duty as part of a collective. The collective was the metaphor for the nation; far from gungho heroics, their strength lay in lunchpail work for the common good. Thomas Doherty’s description of how ‘the War Department seemed to issue American ethnicities with demographic precision’ in war films could just as well apply to Ed McBain’s police novels.³ However, beginning in the late 1960s, the colonial warrior of an earlier period returned, stepping out of the cynical and exhausted western genre.

Angered by ‘permissive society’, the revived superhero brought the Old Testament law into the urban nightmare of modern America. He was the vigilante cop, fighting both the escalation of crime and the liberal ‘system’ in the police film. Moreover, in a reversal of the multicultural cop collective as a democratic symbol of the nation, he reclaimed the law for himself and, in the Ku Klux Klan trad ition, he became the moral enforcer of ‘the silent majority’.⁴ One of the defining narratives was Clint Eastwood’s Arizona sheriff cleaning up New York in Coogan’s Bluff (1968). The mythological western–police transition continued with the controversial hit Dirty Harry (1971), which propelled the genre from ambiguous irony into an apocalyptic darkness of unspeakable crime and vice. Urban vigi lantism became a cultural phenomenon.

This reactionary backlash signalled the end of the age of reform and the return of punishment as the guiding principal in crime policy. The focus in social discourse shifted away from analysing the social and psychological roots of crime to mystifying crime as an act of irrational evil. With the criminal rewritten as a modernday demon – the serial killer and the terrorist being two popular examples at the millennium – the road was paved for the audience’s support of the lone cop hero’s bloody revenge on behalf of the crime victim and society. It might seem far fetched to claim a spiritual relationship between the backlash depicted in American police fiction and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s tennovel ‘Report of a Crime’ series, informed as it is by communism. Yet they shared a common enemy – the welfare state – and they use a common strategy, including body politics. In Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s case, their loner cop was originally a marginal character, who moved gradually to the centre of the novels and eventually became a fully fledged action hero expressing rightwing populist sentiments. He is Gunvald Larsson.

A Swedish dystopia

The Swedish name for the welfare state Folkhemmet (literally the People’s Home) was originally a conservative credo for a national fellowship. The Social Demo cratic Party appropriated the term during the 1930s to express its vision of a welfare state defined by social equality and moral decency. The 1930s marked a shift to an age of consensus politics, social reform and economic affluence, which replaced an age of social conflict. The welfare state promised to be the remedy for all social ills, including crime. Yet Folkhemmet was under attack from the beginning. The right (conservatives, liberals) attacked it for being communism in disguise. And the communists attacked the welfare state for being liberalism in disguise. During the 1960s, the MarxistLeninist movement in Sweden redoubled its attacks on Folkhemmet by reviving the Stalinist concept of social fascism to argue that the modern welfare state was a socialdemocratic betrayal of socialism. For the communists, the age of consensus was a conspiracy between social democrats and the bourgeoisie, which concealed capitalist society’s inherent fascism behind a façade of democracy with a social agenda.

Committed to this last perspective, Sjöwall and Wahlöö adapted the American police procedural as an instrument for an ‘analysis of a bourgeois welfare state in which we try to relate crime to its political and ideological doctrines’.⁵ For them, crime was the symptom of a brutal society marked by social conflict escalating into fascism to be followed by a communist revolution. In fact, Wahlöö alone had already written a kind of sequel to the ten novels subtitled ‘Report of a Crime’ in his two science fiction police novels about Inspector Jensen, who worked in a brave new world where a communist revolution eventually triumphs, Mord på 31:a våningen (1964, Murder on the 31st Floor) and Stålsprånget (1968, The Steel Spring).

Beginning with a sex murder of an American tourist in a picturepostcard landscape (1965, Roseanna) and ending with the murder of the prime minister in a Swedish police state (1975, Terroristerna/The Terrorists), the ten novels about Martin Beck and his homicide squad are a gradual unmasking of idyllic Sweden as a fully fledged fascist tyranny. As witnessed by the success and positive media reception – even for the later, more openly political novels – Sjöwall and Wahlöö appealed to conservative and leftist critics alike, benefitting from the enemyofmyenemy principle. Critics praised the novels not as fiction but as documentaries on the rotten state of Sweden, pointing ahead to the bleak future of the Inspector Jensen novels.

Body politics

In the hardened social climate of the Beck novels, the middleaged investigators at the national homicide squad in Stockholm seem like anachronisms – out of touch with the new social reality of a modern Sweden ravaged by violent criminal horrors. Consequently, their response to modern police work is one of defeatism and resignation. In the penultimate book, Polismördaren (1974, Cop Killer), Beck’s colleague Kollberg literally resigns from the force. As in the Inspector Jensen books, Sjöwall and Wahlöö use the main characters’ bodies as metaphors for the sick and decaying society: Melander is constantly on the toilet, Rönn always has a cold and Kollberg is fat and tired. Like Jensen, Beck is constantly plagued by stomach aches and nausea.

In the Jensen novels the metaphor is explicit, a prime example of the 1960s synthesis of Freud and Marx inspired by the Frankfurt School. Inspector Jensen is the law; his rigid and repressive appearance masks the turmoil within him. His ailing body is a telling sign of a society in need of a radical treatment. At the beginning of Stålsprånget, Jensen has a fit during which he feels his intestines being torn apart by a big drill. His pain increases when, on the way to his surgery, he spots an antiwar demonstration against the US engagement in Vietnam. When he recovers from the surgery, society has also undergone radical treatment – by way of a communist revolution led by a group of physicians.

Neither society nor Beck’s body is in the same state of decay, but we soon notice that his stomach acts up every now and then, especially when the authors want to stress their discontent with Western civilization. For instance in Den skrattande polisen (1968, The Laughing Policeman), Christmas as a celebration of consumer hysteria is recurrently associated with Martin Beck’s pain. As soon as he starts his relationship with the middleaged MarxistLeninist Rhea – lo and behold – his pains fade away. Does Beck subscribe to her ideology? We are not sure, but his life begins anew in his bed below a poster of Chairman Mao. She has put up the poster, but he does not take it down.

The body politics of Sjöwall and Wahlöö continue at the millennium with Henning Mankell’s Wallander and Håkan Nesser’s Van Veeteren. Their ailing bodies and withered souls are elegies for a postutopian society that holds no promise of a better tomorrow. Wallander’s diabetes and Van Veeteren’s colon cancer have the same origins as the ailments of Beck and Jensen. Just as Wallander’s and Van Veeteren’s conditions stabilize, we know that the social order will remain stable.

Wallander and Van Veeteren save themselves by retreating into private monasteries of comfort. Wallander buys a house and a dog, the most mundane of smallscale utopias. Van Veeteren retires into a secondhand bookstore and the life of an armchair detective, pondering ‘Determinata’, an essentialist moral philosophy invented by Nesser in which ethics and aesthetics merge to reveal a pattern in the seemingly chaotic and random character of modern crime.

The rise of Gunvald Larsson

While the tired and ageing cop’s body is a metaphor for the declining welfare state, his successor becomes essentially an embodiment of neoconservatism triumphant: the action cop. In Swedish crime fiction history it starts with an ambiguous character, an oddball who soon stands out as the person best equipped to confront modern crime in the mean streets of late capitalism: exnavy officer Gunvald Larsson. At first glance, he is often mistaken for a socialist as he raves against corruption and bureaucracy. Looking more closely, the key to Larsson’s ideological leanings is in his love for reactionary crime writers of the past like Sax Rohmer and Norwegian schlockmaster øvre Richter Frich. His physical similarity to the latter’s Aryan Übermensch Jonas Fjeld is striking: blonde, tall, muscular, determined, arrogant and selfreliant. When first introduced in Mannen på balkongen (1967, The Man on the Balcony) Larsson is so blunt and unsympathetic that he almost becomes a caricature bully cop.

Sexism, homophobia and a condescending attitude to everyone around him are character traits confirmed by his favourite literature. Like Fjeld, he is not an allout fascist but, rather, an individualist supreme, the lone crusader, embodying the law – not in the sense of an arbitrary paragraph to be manipulated by political compromise and social reform, but as the blackandwhite Manichean principle of absolute good versus absolute bad. Being a cop is for Larsson more of a vo cation than a profession. He does not have the ideological second thoughts or moral qualms of Beck. His task is simple and clear: to guard society – warts and all – from the powers of evil. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s intentions in reviving this archetype from the genre’s past remain unclear. Initially it may have been a parody of their predecessors, but perhaps unconsciously it prefigured times to come.

As Marxists, Sjöwall and Wahlöö stressed the ambiguity of their novels’ sub title, ‘Report of a Crime’, in their project. That is, they explain crime in socio political terms as the logical outcome of class oppression. At the same time, they make sweeping generalizations about alienation, drug use, sexual assault, brutalization, psycho path ology and crime in the big city (that is, Stockholm), which differ little from scenarios in urban nightmare films such as Death Wish (1974). In addition, their portrayal of ‘the system’ as a playground for inept bureaucrats and political careerists corresponds with the American backlash, shifting critical analysis away from capitalism and offering a simplistic critique of misguided liberal reformists.

Frequently Sjöwall and Wahlöö set their dystopian images of Stockholm against a nostalgic and idyllic image of rural and smalltown Sweden. Polismördaren features this motif most prominently. No surprise then that the novels got sympathetic reviews in the conservative press that raged against liberal ‘permissiveness’ and reform of the penal system under the social democratic government. As witnessed by his successful arrest of a violent robber in Mannen på balkongen, Gunvald Larsson is the only one to strike fear and respect into the brutal criminal heart. He becomes the key member of Beck’s team when it comes to physical con frontations and, as the series progresses, he transcends the role of a brutal man in brutal times. At the end of the series, he has already begun to be trans formed. He shifts from a figure that furnishes colourful guilty pleasure – spitting out memorable lines while delivering often comical and welldeserved retribution to the evildoers – to one that articulates the voice of reason within the police fo...