The Troubled Man, by Henning Mankel

Troubled, and troubling. This is apparently the last Kurt Wallander novel. No, he doesn't get killed.

Wallander's daughter decides to have a child with a man named Hans. Wallander meets Hans's parents, and observes that his father is worried about something.

Soon, the father disappears, and the mystery begins.

This is not only a tale of police work in Sweden, but  one of international intrigue, and a query into what any of us can really know about any other, even those very close to us.

The Shadow Girls, by Henning Mankell

This novel is not like others I've read by Mankell. It is not a crime novel, at least not in the usual sense, and does not feature a policeman named Wallander as the main character. Instead, the main character is a Swedish poet, Jesper Humlin. Humlin is, as the story sets out, not a very sympathetic character. He is, for one thing, overly concerned with the state of his tan.

Humlin's life is not without its problems: he has a troubled relationship with his own mother, a girlfriend who wants him to have a child with her without delay--he's not so enthusiastic, a publisher who doesn't listen to his protests when the publisher tells him that he will next be writing a crime novel (ha, ha, Mankell), and a stock broker who has cheerfully guided him into bankruptcy.

Into Humlin's life, in a semi-comic series of accidents, come three young girls, refugees who are illegally in Sweden. As Humlin learns their stories, and begins spending time trying to help them write, the novel takes on a new direction. In the end, things are different.

A review in The Telegraph,

Faceless Killers, by Henning Mankel

An audio book.

One of the Kurt Wallander series of detective novels. Translated from Swedish.

I think I've noted before that I suspect translation hurts these novels a little. Wallander's life is so depressing that it starts to rub off when I read one of these. As a commuter's boredom relief it was okay. I wonder about the structure.

Real police work is probably something like what is related here. False leads, loose ends, periods of time during which nothing happens. Whether this makes good crime fiction is debatable. Perhaps Mankel is more interested in simply writing a novel about a character who experiences a great deal of adversity in his life, and how he deals with it.

This story begins with a gruesome and violent murder of an elderly couple in a remote farmhouse. As the plot progresses, we learn that the husband's life was a little more complicated than his neighbors thought. There is a clue that the perpetrators may have been "foreign." This leads to some public reaction to the large numbers of refugees living in the area. Hate crimes are committed.

As the plot progresses, Wallander's life is complicated by his father's dementia, which is beginning to get out of hand. As acting police chief during a time when more than one horrible crime has been committed, he is ill prepared to deal with this situation.

One of the issues that was never resolved to my satisfaction is the brutality of the murder, including the use of a certain eclectic knot in a cord used to strangle one of the victims. Why Mankel imagined the murder in this way, and added that detail, as well as others, is not clear to me. This is one area where I expect something did not come through the translation process -- or it may simply be my own sloppy reading.

The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson

Christopher Hitchens on Stieg Larsson

The second in the famous, popular, and excellent trilogy by the late Mr. Larsson. What a legacy.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland.

Excellent, just excellent. Try to put this book down. Just try.

Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative financial journalist. At the beginning of the novel he has been convicted of libel, and will be paying a large fine as well as doing prison time.

He is hired by Henrik Vanger, an elderly, retired industrialist, to investigate the unsolved disappearance of his granddaughter Harriet in 1966. (The novel takes place circa 2003.)

As this story unfolds, we are treated to glimpses into the life of Lisbeth Salander, an unusual young woman with a great deal of difficulty in her life, as well as a great deal of talent and skill.

Salander and Blomkvist come together to solve one of the best mysteries I've ever read.

The Terrorists, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

(Translated by Joan Tate. Swedish title: Terroristerna)

According to the dust jacket, this is the last in the Martin Beck series, finished only a few weeks before Per Wahlöö's death in 1975.

This novel begins with detective Gunvald Larsson travelling to South America to observe security at a state visit from a foreign diplomat. There is an assassination by bombing during the visit, with grisly circumstances, that is later accredited to a terrorist group known as "ULAG."

Back in Stockholm, Martin Beck, with Larsson and his other hand-picked men, prepare for a similar state visit, fearing that there will be an attempt similar to the South American tragedy.

Beck and his team are opposed by a cool sociopath named Heydt, and three others, including a French electronics expert and two Japanese bomb experts. The terrorists enter the country undetected and prepare to carry out their mission, while the police and national security try to stop them.

Interspersed with this is another plot, the story of Rebecka Lind, a young and single mother living in Stockholm. Although the dust jacket describes this character as a "hippie," I feel that Rebecka is quite a bit more complicated than that stereotype allows for. Her first adventure involves being arrested for robbing a bank. This is -- believe it or not -- a misunderstanding due to her remarkable level of naivete.

Rebecka's desperate struggle to survive and provide a good life for her baby is threaded through and contrasted with the other plot, where all the cleverness that Beck and his team can summon is used to prevent the assassination of an unnamed unpopular Senator from the United States. The father of Rebecka's child is a U.S. citizen who was avoiding the draft by living in Sweden during the Vietnam war. He returns to America on some bad advice, and winds up in prison.

This is a suspenseful yet strangely calm story, with the usual backdrop of bumbling political idiots trying their best to control Beck and his people. Beck is, as usual, doubly challenged to both defeat the terrorists and outwit the foolish maneuverings of his superiors to implement actions that would ensure the failure of his efforts. In the midst of this, he tries more than once to help Rebecka, with whom he has a brief contact when she is tried for bank robbery early in the novel.

The dust jacket says that Sjowall and Wahlöö wanted to write "a series that ...would trace 'a man's personality changing over the years..." That is, they wanted to show how Beck would change as a result of the forces of society and politics around him.

I found it interesting to re-read this novel as well as Cop Killer, having forgotten the exact flavor and content of these works. There are characters and connections from Cop Killer in this book,; it was a pleasant surprise to have selected these two to read out of the series.

It is interesting, 30 years after the writing of these books, to reflect on the weary cynicism expressed herein. Many Americans seem to think that the Scandinavian countries have achieved a sort of Utopia, an ideal mixture of benevolent socialism and democracy. While they surely have solved some problems, one wonders at what cost, and how well. It's an odd place to find inspiration for thinking about social change, socialism, and the welfare state, but I did find it there.

Police are one of the services that most people will agree the government should provide. It may be the vantage point that this allows that prompts the atmosphere for thinking about just what we do expect from our government, and what we're prepared to trade for it.

Cop Killer, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

I read some of the "Martin Beck" series several years ago, but I don't remember them well. This book is, as well as I do recall, a good example of the series. I found it throughly enjoyable. The reading list from Donald Knuth cited earlier in this journal reminded me of them, so I took this novel and another, The Terrorists, out of the library.

Cop Killer is a delightful read, and a short one. Sjöwall and Wahlöö were apparently believers in "leave them asking for more".

In it Martin Beck, Chief Inspector for the Swedish National Homicide Squad, is summoned to the little town of Ånderslov, near Malmo because a woman has disappeared. Foul play is suspected, but hasn't yet been confirmed.

As Beck works on this mystery, the incident that gives the book its title occurs in Ljunghausen. A fugitive from the scene of that crime is coincidentally involved in Beck's mystery in Ånderslov, and leads Beck's associate, Lennart Kollberg, to a solution of the original crime.

The book carries a strong flavor of tired cynicism, and despair with the state of society in 1970s Sweden. Many comments are made about the social damage caused by the welfare state, and a general attitude of disgust with the National Police force and its bureaucracy pervades the book.

I expect that the best known novel in this series is The Laughing Policeman, as it was made into a movie. I'll have to read, or re-read, that one as well