The Troubled Man, by Henning Mankell

9780307593498
Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf
2011; originally published as Den orolige mannen, 2009
translated by Laurie Thompson

Without giving anything away, pretty much everyone knows by now that The Troubled Man is the last Wallander novel, and once again within the space of a month I'm having to say goodbye to not only a favorite series, but to a favorite character as well.  I hate when this happens, but series readers know it's likely inevitable at some point.

"It began with the troubled man," who in this case is Håkan von Enke, retired naval officer, husband of Louise and father of Hans. Hans, as it turns out, is a hedge-fund manager and Linda Wallander's significant other, with whom she has a new baby girl.  At Håkan's 75th birthday party, he takes Wallander aside and tells him a rather odd story about a strange incident that occurred during the Cold War, involving Soviet submarines in a Swedish naval installation.  As Wallander listens with interest, he notices Håkan watching someone watching him.  And then, shortly afterwards, Håkan simply disappears while out on a routine walk.  Even though he vanishes out of Wallander's police jurisdiction, Linda begs her father to find out what happened, and Wallander becomes involved.  But when Louise vanishes without a trace, his involvement deepens, and he begins to wonder if both incidents have anything to do with events that happened in the past, in terms of both politics and long-held family secrets.  But von Enke is not the only troubled man in the story -- that title can also be applied to Kurt Wallander himself.  At 60, with a new granddaughter, he spends a great deal of time looking back at life and his relationships -- with Linda, his ex-wife Mona, his father, his co-workers and old friends, often with regrets, sometimes with questions about what might have been.  But more importantly, he's got another cause for concern: lapses in his memory that begin to worry him, especially as he reflects on his father.

I've loved this series from its beginning, and although I've  liked some books better than others, it's always been consistent even up to this last installment.  Wallander remains the same old gloomy Gus he's always been, deeply involved in whatever case he takes on to the detriment of his health and sometimes his family.  This is a much more morose Wallander in The Troubled Man, but he's still working hard to solve the mystery of the two disappearances.  Unlike most of the other books, however, there's a lot of detail here that tends to bog things down sometimes -- mostly involving Swedish Cold War politics, NATO, the US Government -- that can get a bit tedious after a while.  Not that it's not important to the story...it's just a bit overdone. And Mankell's novels (like those of many author Scandinavian authors)  all have a message to be conveyed dealing with politics or social issues -- that also is the case here.  But what really made this book for me unlike the others in the series  was not so much the mystery or the detective work (both of which are well plotted, by the way), but this time it was Wallander himself. Seasoned Mankell veterans who've followed the series book by book will notice through Wallander's reflections and other devices little reminders of the other Wallander stories scattered throughout, all the more poignant now that this is the last of them.

You don't need to read them all in order, but why wouldn't you? Especially given that this is the last of one of the best crime fiction series out there, wouldn't you want Wallander's entire history before opening this final book?  As Mankell is telling his readers in this story, there are just some things you need to figure out for yourselves, but as for me,  I'm happy I read each one book by book.

Thanks to  Henning Mankell (like he'll ever see this, but what the heck) for the number of hours throughout my life I've had my nose buried in a Wallander novel  -- I've loved every second.

Frozen Assets, by Quentin Bates

9781569478677
Soho Press, 2011
330 pp.

Frozen Assets is both the author's first novel and the first entry of a new series featuring Gunnhildur Gisládottir of the Hvalvik police in Iceland.  Gunna is in her mid-thirties, a widowed mother of two, and used to dealing with small town crimes like speeding and the occasional uncooperative drunk. But things change when the body of a drunken stranger is discovered floating in the water of a small boat dock with no ID except an odd tattoo.  In trying to identify the dead man, her investigation leads her to a company called Spearpoint, a PR firm headquartered in Reykjavik which just incidentally happens to have an interest in a development project in Hvalvik. The inquiries remain pretty routine until one of the staff at Spearpoint reveals to Gunna  that some time back, a friend of the dead man had been killed in a car accident.  Gunna begins to wonder if there is a link between the two deaths, and the investigation takes off from there, with Gunna setting her sights on catching a killer and not letting up until the job is done. 

But wait...there's much more. Interwoven into the main story are entries from an anonymous and elusive "Skandalblogger," a muckraker who seems to have his or her finger on the pulse of what's happening in government circles and in the private lives of connected others, such as the owner of Spearpoint, Sigurjóna Huldudottír and her randy sister, two of the blogger's favorite targets.  The blogger's mission is to expose high-level government corruption and personal greed that affects the average tax-paying citizen, while simultaneously spilling personal secrets that embarrass and enrage the already high-maintenance Sigurjóna,  who wants the Skandalblogger's head on a platter.  As things heat up, the author also  builds on the environment and Iceland's banking crisis of 2008 to add another dimension to the story. All of the various threads are eventually linked together, with enough of a hint of a series yet to be at the end.

Considering that this is the author's first novel, Gunna's character is quite well developed. She's down to earth, common sensical and follows her nose, despite unwanted interruptions from superiors.  She's to the point, often brash in her role as cop, but at the same time, the reader senses some vulnerabilities within her on a personal level.  And she's not a stick-figure gorgeous detective like so many authors insist on having as a main character but more on the bigger side, and is often referred to as the fat cop or even once "a big fat lass with a face that frightens the horses." It is downright refreshing  to have a strong female lead character who isn't too overly concerned with her love life or lack of one, who is built like a real person and in her mid-30s and one who speaks her mind and follows her instincts and her nose.   The author also does a great job with the people you come to dislike in the novel as well -- Sigurjóna, the histrionic owner of Spearpoint whose employees cringe when anything goes wrong knowing they're going to hear about it; the bad guy who has a personality as cold as glacial ice, government officials who don't care about the average citizen, and others as well.

You won't find any romance or silliness here (yay) but what you will find is an intriguing story that is well paced, with a sense of place that adds to the overall atmosphere of the story.  It's definitely not in cozy league, but  it's not quite as edgy or dark as an Indridason novel.  What you get is  something a bit lighter in overall tone that picks up as the story moves along.  The author continues the trend of adding in the political and economic woes of the system, a trend I happen to like,  but I know of many other people who can't get past it and want only the action of the crime and its solution. Personally speaking,  I think incorporating these various elements only adds to the overall sense of place and time, creating something more realistic in the long run.

 It's  difficult to believe that Frozen Assets is the author's first novel. I think this one will appeal to crime fiction readers in general because of the strong lead character, and regular readers of Scandinavian crime fiction will also find it to be a good start to another ongoing series.

The Terrorists, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

9780307390882
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
2010
280 pp
translated by Joan Tate
originally published 1975 as Terroristerna

The Terrorists is the tenth and final book in Sjöwall and Wahlöö's series featuring Martin Beck. In this installment, an unpopular American senator has planned a visit to Sweden, and Beck is chosen as head of the security team for the duration. The biggest worry is terrorist activity, and as Gunvald Larsson finds out while observing in a Latin American country, the terrorists do not play nice.  While Beck is busy with trying to keep the would-be assassins from killing the Senator, he is also investigating a case dealing with pornography, drugs, and murder. Although the main focus of this novels is the measures put into place to prevent the death of the senator from a group who kill, get out and go on to their next job, the authors also reveal that there are other forms of terrorism that exist beyond the political -- and that they exist in every society.

Excellent book, especially the scene when Larsson is in Latin America, but consistently good throughout. My only problem was this nit-picky thing: in the Vintage/Black Lizard edition of Cop Killer, Martin Beck's friend and fellow detective inspector had the last name of  "Allwright," where in The Terrorists, his name was changed to "Content." I know exactly what happened and that each translator does things differently to try to fully convey the nuances of a language, but at the same time, it should be more consistent in a series of editions.  I spent a few minutes puzzled, but it dawned on me that the name change was in the translation.

Now that this series is over and my Vintage/Black Lizard Crime editions are all neatly shelved together, it's sort of a bittersweet kind of moment. I'm rather sad that I've finished all of the books, but the getting there was great.  These authors have put together an outstanding set of novels that no readers of crime fiction should miss, even if you do not agree with the authors' political statements.  The series was launched when Wahlöö sold only a minimal amount of copies of a book of his own political philosophy, and the two authors came to the realization that although no one was paying to read what Wahloo wrote, they would pay to read crime fiction.  Thus began the Martin Beck series, collectively known as "The Story of a Crime."  Actually, they managed to get their various points across quite effectively, and there are some truths to what they say.   On the other hand, as Dennis Lehane points out in the introduction to this particular edition,

One wonders how Sjöwall and Wahlöö managed to live there through the writing of the ten Martin Beck novels, so negative is their depiction of not just the failed welfare state but the physical landscape as well ...The courts don't work, the schools produce little but rot, and the ruling class skims the cream off the top and turns its back as the poor fight over the coffee grounds. 

They've also commented on the state of the police force since it was nationalized, the treatment of the elderly, and a host of other issues that they felt arose as a result of what they saw as the failure of the Swedish welfare state to take care of its people, setting aside the interests of regular citizens for the interests of those most actively involved in capitalism.

But politics aside, Sjöwall and Wahlöö gave us Martin Beck, the detective who started out on a patrol beat and became good at his job on the way up, and all of his co-workers, friends and associates whose lives we've followed throughout all of the books.  And there are many humorous moments throughout the series as well -- the Keystone cop-like antics of some of the patrolmen, the inept Stig Malm, Beck's boss whose job includes a great deal of toadying to his superiors, and there are many standing examples of Sjöwall and Perlöö's wry humor that run throughout all of the novels.  But the best part of these books lie in the authors' ability to create believable plots, to come up with ever-developing characters who often become frustrated to the point where they want to chuck it all but inevitably show up the next day for work (if they go home to sleep at all), and then they throw all of that in with their political opinions, and still manage to create a crime fiction series that stays on task, never getting excessive.  The bottom line is that Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö began these books as their personal mission, but the series stayed consistently excellent, and it has entertained and will continue to satisfy millions of crime fiction enthusiasts around the world.

fiction from Sweden

Cop Killer, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

9780307390899
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
originally published as Polismördaren
 1975
translated by Thomas Teal
296 pp.


It's been about a year now since the events of  The Locked Room.  Martin Beck's life has gained some stability since he met Rhea Nielsen, the landlady of the victim in the previous novel.  Now he's called to the small rural town of Anderslöv, where a young woman, Sigbrit Mård, has gone missing. Described as a "highly normal" person, Sigbrit isn't the type to just up and wander off into another life, so the police suspect foul play.  The two main suspects in the case are her ex-husband and a returning character from the first book in this series, Roseanna, and it is because of the latter that Beck becomes involved in the crime.  Things heat up when Sigbrit's body is discovered, and the press has a field day, putting immense amounts of pressure on the police to solve the crime, and literally trying the case in the newspapers. Beck's superiors in the National Police feel that the public will be happy if Beck takes the most obvious suspect into custody, but they're not the ones directly involved and Beck is frustrated. His instincts tell that him something is just not right here, and that the obvious may not be everything it seems.  While this investigation is going on, there's another crime -- this time against three members of the police force when they make a traffic stop where things go very badly and a shooting occurs.  One of the accomplices in this crime gets away, and the police must try to find him -- but not solely for his participation in this crime.  In the meantime, one of the members of the Homicide Squad begins to wonder if maybe he's had enough. 

The ninth of out ten books in this series, Cop Killer is a thought-provoking novel, with one of the key discussions that runs throughout the story centered on whether or not police should be armed, and whether or not an armed police force is the cause of so many gun-related deaths.  But beyond this debate, the book's title also gives a clue into the growing disenchantment of more seasoned members of the national police force, who realize that their abilities are being hampered by the rise in bureaucratic ineptitude.  For example, Stig Malm, Beck's boss, begins to call the shots from his comfy desk and tell the detectives how to do their jobs, even though in Beck's murder case, Beck knows that if he follows Malm's orders, he may be committing a miscarriage of justice. The same is true for the other case, but Malm is more concerned with pleasing the National Police Commissioner than anything else.  Even worse, to get his name and face in the newspaper, he takes command of operations in which he has no business being involved, and time has proven that things turn out very badly when he insinuates himself into these situations.  But on the whole, the  police force has changed both from within and from without, and not always for the better, and for some people it's just too much to deal with any more. 

Once again, these authors have given their readers a terrific story while continuing their tradition of social critique of what they see as the betrayal of the ideals of the welfare state. You may or may not agree with them or care about a Sweden of 40+ or so years ago, but you can't help but admire their sophisticated plotting talents, their ongoing characters who act and think like real people, and above all their literary talent.  Personally I'm rather sad that the series is almost at an end, because I know I'm never going to experience anything like it again. While there are some well-known modern writers of Scandinavian crime fiction that are quite popular right now  (for example Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson), I would hate to think that these fine books are being overlooked when they are clearly a part of the best that the Nordic countries have to offer.

Definitely recommended, but you should read the series in order to get the most out of it.

-sigh. On to the last book.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie

9780007234370
HarperCollins, 2006
originally published 1926


The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has long been one of my favorite Christie novels, not so much for Poirot's detection skills, but for its classic ending.  This time around was my second reading of this book, and knowing the ending, it was still fun watching the solution to this rather baffling crime unravel.

Because of the nature of the story, I can't really give an in-depth summary here. If you decide to read this book, believe me, you'll thank me later.  In the quiet English village of King's Abbot, Roger Ackroyd, as the title suggests, ends up murdered in the study of his home Fernly Park.  As it just so happens, Poirot is in the village, staying in the house next door to Dr. Sheppard (the narrator) and his sister Caroline, where he spends his days growing vegetable marrows.  Dr. Sheppard believes his new neighbor is a hairdresser, based on the evidence of Poirot's moustache. But Poirot reveals his true colors as he gets down to the business of Ackroyd's murder, using his "little gray cells" to comb through the staggering amount of red herrings and a number of suspects in the case. 

While this book is extraordinary in terms of the case, there are also a number of humorous moments throughout. An entire chapter is devoted to a rather crazy mah-jong game where the players share their own theories about the case in between calling out plays.  And at one point, one of the suspects calls Poirot a "little foreign cock duck," and I swear I heard the voice of John Cleese in my head, as the epithet reminded me of that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the French knights mercilessly taunt King Arthur and his men ("your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries").  But on the serious side, I have to say that this second reading provided me with a deeper appreciation for Christie's attention to minute detail -- as even little things turn out to be important in this book.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is one of Christie's best works, with an ending you won't soon forget. It's a definite must read in the Christie canon and one of my personal favorites.

--what is a vegetable marrow, by the way?

*Scream Black Murder, by Philip McLaren

1890768421

Intrigue Press/WorldKrime, 2002

originally published 1995

252 pp.

Although this story is fictional, there is a true backdrop to this novel.  In Sydney, Australia, 1989, a police raid resulted in three arrests and one death, that of the homeowner, David John Gundy. To make matters worse, in 1992, an appalling video was shown on national TV of a police staff party where two cops arrived in blackface, one with a hangman's noose around his neck. Signs were hanging around their necks, one with the name of Lloyd Boney (who mysteriously died in police custody), and one bearing the name of David Gundy, both indigenous Australians. Political pressure had been put on the police regarding the number of unsolved black deaths, and with the death of Gundy and then the airing of the tasteless video, several human rights groups including Amnesty International got involved, protesting against the racist component of policing. 

In Scream Black Murder, a unit known as the Aboriginal Homicide Unit has been created, based largely on this pressure.  [To be honest, I have tried to find any reference to this unit on the internet and cannot, so I can't say whether or not this is a real part of the New South Wales police. Any info would be helpful just to answer my question.]  Out of fifty Aboriginal officers, two made the cut: Gary Leslie and Lisa Fuller. Their first case involves the deaths of two indigenous Australians, one male, one female. The State Police are the first to respond; after Leslie and Fuller arrive, the case is turned over to them. The two face a series of challenges in getting to the heart of the matter -- not the least of which is the fact that their involvement isn't much welcomed. And, as more bodies are discovered, one of them white, the two find themselves under intense media scrutiny, only heightening the pressure to nail the killer.  The narrative is told in alternating points of view -- first, in a third-person narrative detailing the lives of Gary and Leslie both on the job and off, and then the musings of the killer, who offers a look inside his head as he targets his victims and then kills them.

I actually read this some time back and then took some time to give some thought to my response to this novel.  Scream Black Murder gets great reviews on Amazon.com and on Goodreads, with about a 4.5-stars average rating.  I have mixed feelings about this book. Although I appreciated the author's commentary on the problems of the Aboriginal community, the racism of the police department, and his storyline about indigenous children being taken away from their parents at an early age (all done quite well, by the way), the mystery component of the story seemed rather tame.  It's sort of a thing where the tension ratchets and then we're off into a foray into the personal lives of the two officers -- for me, there were just too many interruptions in the flow in the progress of the criminal investigation.  I realize this is a personal issue, but when I read crime fiction, I'm in it for the crime and how it's solved (or not), preferring a tighter narrative that gets to the point and stays on target throughout.   On the other hand, the author highlighted many important aspects of  the racial and social issues confronting indigenous Australians, many of which I was previously unaware.

I'll definitely try more of McLaren's work in the future. I recommend Scream Black Murder to crime fiction enthusiasts who aren't so much on the edgy side of crime reads as I seem to be, and I also recommend it as a work from an indigenous Australian writer who isn't hesitant about setting forth the issues mentioned above. 

fiction from Australia

The Locked Room, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

9780307390493
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
originally published as Det Slutna Rummet, 1972
translated by Paul Britten Austin
311 pp.

Some fifteen months have passed since the events of The Abominable Man, and Martin Beck is still recovering from a bullet wound that almost killed him. As the novel opens, he's going back to work, and upon his return, Kollberg hands him a case file. He notes to Martin Beck that it was too bad Beck didn't read detective stories, because if he did, he'd probably appreciate the case even more.  As it turns out, what he's handed over is the case of Karl Edvin Svard, who died from a gunshot in a locked room.  The police suspect suicide, but the problem is that there's no gun anywhere. Because the original investigators thought it was suicide, they treated the case rather lackadaisacally, and this attitude rippled outwards, even down to the medical examiner.  Beck now has to go back and start over from the beginning to make any sense of the case.  Meanwhile, there is an ongoing series of bank robberies that are plaguing the police, and the National Police Commissioner has turned the investigations over to one Sten "Bulldozer" Olsson, in charge of a newly-formed special squad. Olsson isn't a policeman, but an overconfident and overzealous district attorney, for whom life was "one big jolly game". The squad spends a great deal of its time working on a small group of criminals who Olsson is convinced are the robbers -- but who also may be using their ill-gotten gain to fund larger crimes.  There's a great deal to be said about the obvious differences in the ways in which Martin Beck and Olsson go about doing their jobs in this book.

This time the authors do something a bit different than in previous books, offering a look at the criminals and their dealings with each other. I'm not so sure I liked this diversion so much -- one thing I enjoy about these books is their ability to tell several stories at once without being superfluous. Personally, this was a disruption in my reading flow.  But on the other hand, the backstory of another of the characters, Monita, was well done and fit better into the narrative as a whole; in fact, her story was necessary to the novel on several levels.  What is ongoing in this novel, as in all of the Martin Beck series, is the social and political commentary.  This time it's the police department, the state of care for the elderly, and other facets of society that fall under the authors' axe.  Also continuing is the humor, which is at times rather wicked in this novel. And then there's Rhea, a woman whom Martin Beck meets during the course of his investigation, who after all of Beck's troubles in life, is able to free him from his own locked room. Is this a sign that love is in the offing? I suppose I'll have to wait and see in the next book.

The Locked Room is perhaps not of the intensity of its predecessor The Abominable Man, but it's still quite compelling and a good read. Highly recommended, as is the entire series.