We might have another Wallenberg affair on our hands: review of The Man Who Went Up in Smoke.
From Monday, 7 May through Saturday, 12 May, I read Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (NY: Pantheon Books [a division of Random House], 1969; English translation by Joan Tate; originally published in 1966 in Swedish as Mannen som gick upp i rök by P.A. Norstedt & Söner, Stockholm; 1st U.S. ed. [May 1969]; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 69-15536; 183 pps.); I checked this out via inter-library loan. This is the second of the ten Martin Beck mysteries/police procedurals collectively known as The Story of a Crime; I read the first book in the series, Roseanna, back in March, also courtesy of inter-library loan.
The work of a common law Marxist couple, The Story of a Crime is a series of police procedurals that take "a scalpel" to "the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type"; happily enough, the social critique is more implied in the first few books, so they can be read as straightforward mysteries. That said, Sjöwall and Wahlöö's critique is pretty implicit, and it would take a fairly inattentive reader to elide entirely over it.
First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Homicide Bureau of the National Police is ganked off of his late summer holiday in the Swedish archipelago by the Foreign Office, who want him to investigate the disappearance of a celebrity journalist named Alf Matsson; Matsson, whose brief is covering entertainment and sport figures, was last seen in Budapest, but the weekly tabloid that he works for has a long history of attacking the Swedish government: the F.O. suits want to resolve Matsson's disappearance before his paper publishes still further attacks against them. Beck's boss, Hammar, tells him that the Third Section (Counter-Espionage) investigated Matsson three months previously, but found nothing of interest (pps. 20-2; Chapter 4). It is Beck's dissatisfaction with his domestic situation -- he has long since fallen out of love with his wife, and feels no particular attachment to his teenaged children, a boy and a girl -- as much as his curiosity and his vague sense of being flattered that the Foreign Office specifically requested his services that prompts him to accept the assignment. (His salary is paid by the Foreign Office while he conducts their investigation.)
It is to Sjöwall and Wahlöö's credit that such a vague case -- which the F.O. wants conducted on the Q.T., to forestall other journalists from trumpeting the news and embarrassing the government -- proves to be as interesting as it does: the snarky references to James Bond movies (which would've been at about their peak of popularity in 1965-66), first by Beck's boss (p. 21), are meant to cast ridicule on the thinking and motivations of the Foreign Office hacks, who admit to being concerned that "'we might have another Wallenberg affair on our hands'" (p. 20; Chapter 3), referencing the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg from the Siege of Budapest in 1945, and his reported death in the KGB's Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1947. While Beck is sent behind the Iron Curtain on his investigation, it's ironic that, "of all the capitals in the world, Budapest had the lowest crime rate" (p. 36; Chapter 7); sounding the theme of the brotherhood of man and that there is more that unites us than divides us, Beck eventually finds an agreeable comrade in Major Vilmos Szluka of the Budapest police, who observes, "'Being a policeman...is not a profession. And it's certainly not a vocation either. It's a curse'" (p. 101; Chapter 17). (Keeping with the "fact" of the relative orderliness of Hungarian society, Szluka remarks, "'They have as many murders in New York in a week as we have in the whole country in a year'"; pps. 102-03.)
There are some interesting bits of trivia salted throughout the narrative: a hard-drinking Swedish journalist complains that beer is no longer served in moustache cups (p. 32; Chapter 6); Beck overhears two Swedish women in Budapest grousing about the quality -- or lack of -- toilet paper in foreign countries, sounding rather like stereotypical British tourists (p. 91; Chapter 15); there is information about the customs and passport controls of various European countries, particularly as related to travel between the West and the Soviet bloc; the fact that Hungarian coins in the 1960s at least were made of aluminium (p. 130; Chapter 22); and there's a hint of the divide in Swedish society between the urban north and rural (or, at minimum, provincial) south, when Beck, returning from Budapest, takes a taxi from Linhamn to Malmö, and thinks that the driver's "southern Swedish dialect...sounded...almost as incomprehensible as Hungarian" (p. 133; Chapter 22). (This divide was also alluded to in Henning Mankell's first Kurt Wallender mystery, Faceless Killers.) But the things that most appealed to me about The Man Who Went Up in Smoke are its low-key, straightforward style; the lack of melodrama; the understated dialogue between Beck and his associates (and their everyday sarcasm: Beck, et al, don't talk like moonlighting stand-up comedians); the realistic portrayal of a would-be femme fatale (as in Roseanna, Sjöwall and Wahlöö show that it matters more how a woman acts than how a woman looks); and, most of all, the way that Beck's inner drift and dissatisfaction with his own life is implied through his actions. Indeed, the ending reverberates with a soul-crushing ennui that holds its own with anything in the work of John Cheever, Raymond Carver -- or, presumably, Richard Yates. I really hope that the series doesn't sink under the weight of the authors' political doctrine, as B. Traven's Jungle series ultimately did.
The work of a common law Marxist couple, The Story of a Crime is a series of police procedurals that take "a scalpel" to "the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type"; happily enough, the social critique is more implied in the first few books, so they can be read as straightforward mysteries. That said, Sjöwall and Wahlöö's critique is pretty implicit, and it would take a fairly inattentive reader to elide entirely over it.
First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Homicide Bureau of the National Police is ganked off of his late summer holiday in the Swedish archipelago by the Foreign Office, who want him to investigate the disappearance of a celebrity journalist named Alf Matsson; Matsson, whose brief is covering entertainment and sport figures, was last seen in Budapest, but the weekly tabloid that he works for has a long history of attacking the Swedish government: the F.O. suits want to resolve Matsson's disappearance before his paper publishes still further attacks against them. Beck's boss, Hammar, tells him that the Third Section (Counter-Espionage) investigated Matsson three months previously, but found nothing of interest (pps. 20-2; Chapter 4). It is Beck's dissatisfaction with his domestic situation -- he has long since fallen out of love with his wife, and feels no particular attachment to his teenaged children, a boy and a girl -- as much as his curiosity and his vague sense of being flattered that the Foreign Office specifically requested his services that prompts him to accept the assignment. (His salary is paid by the Foreign Office while he conducts their investigation.)
It is to Sjöwall and Wahlöö's credit that such a vague case -- which the F.O. wants conducted on the Q.T., to forestall other journalists from trumpeting the news and embarrassing the government -- proves to be as interesting as it does: the snarky references to James Bond movies (which would've been at about their peak of popularity in 1965-66), first by Beck's boss (p. 21), are meant to cast ridicule on the thinking and motivations of the Foreign Office hacks, who admit to being concerned that "'we might have another Wallenberg affair on our hands'" (p. 20; Chapter 3), referencing the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg from the Siege of Budapest in 1945, and his reported death in the KGB's Lubyanka Prison in Moscow in 1947. While Beck is sent behind the Iron Curtain on his investigation, it's ironic that, "of all the capitals in the world, Budapest had the lowest crime rate" (p. 36; Chapter 7); sounding the theme of the brotherhood of man and that there is more that unites us than divides us, Beck eventually finds an agreeable comrade in Major Vilmos Szluka of the Budapest police, who observes, "'Being a policeman...is not a profession. And it's certainly not a vocation either. It's a curse'" (p. 101; Chapter 17). (Keeping with the "fact" of the relative orderliness of Hungarian society, Szluka remarks, "'They have as many murders in New York in a week as we have in the whole country in a year'"; pps. 102-03.)
There are some interesting bits of trivia salted throughout the narrative: a hard-drinking Swedish journalist complains that beer is no longer served in moustache cups (p. 32; Chapter 6); Beck overhears two Swedish women in Budapest grousing about the quality -- or lack of -- toilet paper in foreign countries, sounding rather like stereotypical British tourists (p. 91; Chapter 15); there is information about the customs and passport controls of various European countries, particularly as related to travel between the West and the Soviet bloc; the fact that Hungarian coins in the 1960s at least were made of aluminium (p. 130; Chapter 22); and there's a hint of the divide in Swedish society between the urban north and rural (or, at minimum, provincial) south, when Beck, returning from Budapest, takes a taxi from Linhamn to Malmö, and thinks that the driver's "southern Swedish dialect...sounded...almost as incomprehensible as Hungarian" (p. 133; Chapter 22). (This divide was also alluded to in Henning Mankell's first Kurt Wallender mystery, Faceless Killers.) But the things that most appealed to me about The Man Who Went Up in Smoke are its low-key, straightforward style; the lack of melodrama; the understated dialogue between Beck and his associates (and their everyday sarcasm: Beck, et al, don't talk like moonlighting stand-up comedians); the realistic portrayal of a would-be femme fatale (as in Roseanna, Sjöwall and Wahlöö show that it matters more how a woman acts than how a woman looks); and, most of all, the way that Beck's inner drift and dissatisfaction with his own life is implied through his actions. Indeed, the ending reverberates with a soul-crushing ennui that holds its own with anything in the work of John Cheever, Raymond Carver -- or, presumably, Richard Yates. I really hope that the series doesn't sink under the weight of the authors' political doctrine, as B. Traven's Jungle series ultimately did.