"'They had no idea Sweden could be so nice! Damn it, I had no idea it could be either.'"
From Monday, 19 March through Friday, 23 March (23 skidoo!), I read Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Roseanna (NY: Vintage Crime / Black Lizard [Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.]; 1993 [English translation by Lois Roth; Roseanna originally published by P.A. Norstedt & Soners Forlag, Stockholm, in 1965; English translation copyright 1967 by Random House, Inc.]; 212 pps.; ISBN: 0-679-74598-X), thanks to an inter-library loan.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were a (common-law) wife and husband team who wrote the ten volume series of mysteries featuring a somewhat depressed police detective named Martin Beck; the series is collectively titled The Story of a Crime, and the fourth book, The Laughing Policeman, was made into an eponymous Hollywood movie in 1973 starring Walther Matthau as Beck's stand-in, Sgt. Jake Martin. (The setting was also changed from Stockholm to San Francisco.) Both Sjöwall and Wahlöö were Marxists, whose intention was "to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.'" Apparently, over the course of the series, Beck "serve[d] as the barometer of a changing atmosphere, reflecting shifts in the political, economic, social climate [of Sweden];" however, Roseanna is a straightforward police procedural (as are, purportedly, the second and third novels, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke and The Man on the Balcony).
The body of a naked brunette woman is discovered by workers dredging the Göta ("Gotha") Canal at the Borenshult lock; the investigation of her death is assigned to First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Homicide Bureau of the National Police. At this point, Beck is in his mid-thirties and in something of a middle-aged slump, both in his career ("Martin Beck wasn't chief of the Homicide Squad and had no such ambitions. Sometimes he doubted if he would ever make superintendent although the only things that could actually stand in his way were death or some very serious error in his duties"; p. 10) and his marriage (he married his wife after a summer romance and an unexpected pregnancy; "One year after the birth of their daughter, there wasn't much left of the happy and lively girl he had fallen in love with and their marriage had slipped into a fairly dull routine"; p. 11). Nonetheless, the case of the mystery girl slowly galvanizes him, at least partially, from his mid-life drift; Beck and his team eventually learn, thanks to a lucky break, that the murdered woman was named Roseanna McGraw, a librarian from Lincoln, Nebraska (amusingly, for American readers, none of the Swedish cops have a very good idea as to exactly where Nebraska, never mind Lincoln, are). Roseanna was in her late twenties and was something of a free spirit, especially sexually, particularly for the time of the events of the novel (1964 or, at latest, 1965) and where she lived. Beck and his team receive some help by correspondence from a Detective Lieutenant with the unlikely name of Elmer Kafka ("Be vewy, vewy quiet: I'm hunting cockwoaches! HUH-HUH-HUH-HUH!"), but, even so, they're faced with the unenviable task of winnowing a field of nearly a hundred suspects scattered over half the globe, given that Roseanna was likely murdered on and dumped from one of the tourist boats that ply the Götha Canal and Lake Vättern.
Roseanna is a surprisingly engaging mystery; there are no spectacular set-pieces here, but there is a skilled presentation of believable police work spaced over the course of several months, with just enough acerbic humor to give the reader the idea that Beck and his colleagues are neither justice-loving automatons nor moonlighting comedians. There are hints of darker elements to some of the policemen's personalities (as, for example, the implied racism of the eidetic and buttoned-up Fredrik Melander, who remarks that they should look for two South African tourists "'with tom-tom drums'" and is incredulous that Turks should visit the Göta Canal [p. 56]; one wonders at anyone thinking that Afrikaners or Anglo-Africans communicated by "tom-toms," or at a supposedly absurdly well-informed detective not knowing of the Gastarbeiter agreement that West Germany had with Turkey from 1961, thanks largely to U.S. pressure on West Germany), but nothing so great as to be indicative of criminal behavior. There is a suggestion of the cultural gap between inhabitants of southern and northern Sweden (a doctor from southern Sweden is described as speaking "calmly, evenly and methodically"; p. 139) that is apparently the mirror image of that found in England (vis. the "northern monkeys / southern fairies" divide in the 1998 British heist movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, co-written and directed by Madonna's second ex-husband, Guy Ritchie), as well as a quietly alarming aside about the regularity of murder in Göteborg ("There was the traditional new year's murder in Gothenburg which was solved within twenty-four hours"; p. 175). There is a confusing reference to "Harrison's Law" in the transcript of an interview that Lt. Kafka conducted with one of Roseanna's ex-lovers (in response to Kafka's query, "Did she have any particular habits [in bed]?," the man asks, "Harrison's Law isn't valid in Nebraska, is it?" [p. 76]; the only thing that I can think of is the Harrison Act of 1914, which was the first law in the United States against the distribution and use of opiates and cocaine, but that doesn't seem relevant or accurate here).
Happily enough, I found Roseanna more agreeable than Henning Mankell's first mystery featuring Kurt Wallender, Faceless Killers; I'm more likely to read subsequent volumes in The Story of a Crime (probably via inter-library loan) than I am to read many subsequent entries in the Wallender series.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were a (common-law) wife and husband team who wrote the ten volume series of mysteries featuring a somewhat depressed police detective named Martin Beck; the series is collectively titled The Story of a Crime, and the fourth book, The Laughing Policeman, was made into an eponymous Hollywood movie in 1973 starring Walther Matthau as Beck's stand-in, Sgt. Jake Martin. (The setting was also changed from Stockholm to San Francisco.) Both Sjöwall and Wahlöö were Marxists, whose intention was "to 'use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.'" Apparently, over the course of the series, Beck "serve[d] as the barometer of a changing atmosphere, reflecting shifts in the political, economic, social climate [of Sweden];" however, Roseanna is a straightforward police procedural (as are, purportedly, the second and third novels, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke and The Man on the Balcony).
The body of a naked brunette woman is discovered by workers dredging the Göta ("Gotha") Canal at the Borenshult lock; the investigation of her death is assigned to First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Homicide Bureau of the National Police. At this point, Beck is in his mid-thirties and in something of a middle-aged slump, both in his career ("Martin Beck wasn't chief of the Homicide Squad and had no such ambitions. Sometimes he doubted if he would ever make superintendent although the only things that could actually stand in his way were death or some very serious error in his duties"; p. 10) and his marriage (he married his wife after a summer romance and an unexpected pregnancy; "One year after the birth of their daughter, there wasn't much left of the happy and lively girl he had fallen in love with and their marriage had slipped into a fairly dull routine"; p. 11). Nonetheless, the case of the mystery girl slowly galvanizes him, at least partially, from his mid-life drift; Beck and his team eventually learn, thanks to a lucky break, that the murdered woman was named Roseanna McGraw, a librarian from Lincoln, Nebraska (amusingly, for American readers, none of the Swedish cops have a very good idea as to exactly where Nebraska, never mind Lincoln, are). Roseanna was in her late twenties and was something of a free spirit, especially sexually, particularly for the time of the events of the novel (1964 or, at latest, 1965) and where she lived. Beck and his team receive some help by correspondence from a Detective Lieutenant with the unlikely name of Elmer Kafka ("Be vewy, vewy quiet: I'm hunting cockwoaches! HUH-HUH-HUH-HUH!"), but, even so, they're faced with the unenviable task of winnowing a field of nearly a hundred suspects scattered over half the globe, given that Roseanna was likely murdered on and dumped from one of the tourist boats that ply the Götha Canal and Lake Vättern.
Roseanna is a surprisingly engaging mystery; there are no spectacular set-pieces here, but there is a skilled presentation of believable police work spaced over the course of several months, with just enough acerbic humor to give the reader the idea that Beck and his colleagues are neither justice-loving automatons nor moonlighting comedians. There are hints of darker elements to some of the policemen's personalities (as, for example, the implied racism of the eidetic and buttoned-up Fredrik Melander, who remarks that they should look for two South African tourists "'with tom-tom drums'" and is incredulous that Turks should visit the Göta Canal [p. 56]; one wonders at anyone thinking that Afrikaners or Anglo-Africans communicated by "tom-toms," or at a supposedly absurdly well-informed detective not knowing of the Gastarbeiter agreement that West Germany had with Turkey from 1961, thanks largely to U.S. pressure on West Germany), but nothing so great as to be indicative of criminal behavior. There is a suggestion of the cultural gap between inhabitants of southern and northern Sweden (a doctor from southern Sweden is described as speaking "calmly, evenly and methodically"; p. 139) that is apparently the mirror image of that found in England (vis. the "northern monkeys / southern fairies" divide in the 1998 British heist movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, co-written and directed by Madonna's second ex-husband, Guy Ritchie), as well as a quietly alarming aside about the regularity of murder in Göteborg ("There was the traditional new year's murder in Gothenburg which was solved within twenty-four hours"; p. 175). There is a confusing reference to "Harrison's Law" in the transcript of an interview that Lt. Kafka conducted with one of Roseanna's ex-lovers (in response to Kafka's query, "Did she have any particular habits [in bed]?," the man asks, "Harrison's Law isn't valid in Nebraska, is it?" [p. 76]; the only thing that I can think of is the Harrison Act of 1914, which was the first law in the United States against the distribution and use of opiates and cocaine, but that doesn't seem relevant or accurate here).
Happily enough, I found Roseanna more agreeable than Henning Mankell's first mystery featuring Kurt Wallender, Faceless Killers; I'm more likely to read subsequent volumes in The Story of a Crime (probably via inter-library loan) than I am to read many subsequent entries in the Wallender series.