A DARKER SHADE
of Sweden
A DARKER SHADE
of Sweden
Original Stories by Sweden’s
Greatest Crime Writers
Edited and Translated by
John-Henri Holmberg
The Mysterious Press
New York
TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT © 2014 JOHN-HENRI HOLMBERG
Introduction copyright © 2014 John-Henri Holmberg
Pages 359–361 serve as a continuation of the copyright page.
Jacket design by Charles Rue Woods and Christopher Moisan
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ISBN: 978-0-8021-2243-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9244-8
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CONTENTS
John-Henri Holmberg, Introduction
Tove Alsterdal, Reunion
Rolf and Cilla Börjlind, He Liked His Hair
Åke Edwardson, Never in Real Life
Inger Frimansson, In Our Darkened House
Eva Gabrielsson, Paul’s Last Summer
Anna Jansson, The Ring
Åsa Larsson, The Mail Run
Stieg Larsson, Brain Power
Henning Mankell and Håkan Nesser, An Unlikely Meeting
Magnus Montelius, An Alibi for Señor Banegas
Dag Öhrlund, Something in His Eyes
Malin Persson Giolito, Day and Night My Keeper Be
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Multi-Millionaire
Sara Stridsberg, Diary Braun
Johan Theorin, Revenge of the Virgin
Veronica von Schenck, Maitreya
Katarina Wennstam, Too Late Shall the Sinner Awaken
Acknowledgments
Permissions
INTRODUCTION
JOHN-HENRI HOLMBERG
This book is, in its small way, a landmark. It is the first overview anthology of Swedish crime fiction published in English, and consequently—given today’s global culture—the first one accessible to readers around the world.
It presents seventeen stories by twenty Swedish writers. Several are original to this book. None has ever before appeared in an English translation. They cover a wide range of styles and themes: you will find examples of fairly traditional detection, of police procedure, regional tales, stories carried by social or political concerns, as well as stories written primarily to entertain. One story is historical, set in a fairly recent past of which few of today’s readers even in Sweden are aware; another is set in the future.
The choice of authors is similarly diverse. You will find a story by the writing team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose ten novels, originally published from 1965 through 1975, brought international attention to Swedish crime fiction and totally transformed the way in which that form of literature was written and perceived in the authors’ home country. You will find another by Stieg Larsson, whose three Millennium novels have made him the most translated and read Swedish author of all time. You will find stories by many of the most highly regarded and award-winning Swedish crime authors of today—all told, the authors represented in this book have won twelve of the twenty best crime novel of the year awards (called the Golden Crowbar, and consisting of a miniature gilded crowbar) presented since 1994 by the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy (also translated as the Swedish Academy of Detection), as well as five of the eight annual Glass Key Awards for Best Nordic Crime Novel ever given to Swedish authors. But you will also find a surprise or two—the first professionally published story by Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson’s life companion and otherwise an architect and nonfiction writer, and a story by Sara Stridsberg, currently perhaps Sweden’s foremost literary author—but not one ordinarily associated with crime fiction.
In all, my aim has been to present as wide-ranging and eclectic selection of stories and authors as possible in the hope of giving a fair reflection of the diversity, vitality, and concerns of current Swedish crime writing. One item of note: a few of these stories contain references to customs, places, or other peculiarities known to most Swedes but probably unknown to most non-Swedes. In my introductory notes to the stories, I have tried to provide the brief explanations I think may help non-Swedish readers to fully appreciate each story.
That this book is possible is, of course, due to the enormous interest in Swedish crime fiction shown by international—and not least American and British—readers during the last five years or, more precisely, since the first of Stieg Larsson’s novels, published in English in early 2008, became a publishing phenomenon. During the forty years between the first Sjöwall and Wahlöö novel and the first by Stieg Larsson, a number of Swedish crime authors were translated, but most of them only in other continental European countries. To English-language readers, only a very few authors—primarily Henning Mankell, whose work has been translated into English since 1997—were available. But of course Sweden had crime writers before Sjöwall and Wahlöö, as well as between them and the present. For those readers interested in the development of crime fiction writing in Sweden and its current and possible future state, I offer the rest of this introduction as a fairly brief historical and critical overview, with a few personal attempts to explain the specific directions in which Swedish crime writing has developed.
Crime fiction is a wide literary field, encompassing numerous, very different kinds of stories. You have the classical stories of rational deduction written by Edgar Allan Poe and fifty years later by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, still later by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, and so many others. You have the hard-boiled private-eye stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, and Dennis Lehane. You have the psychological thrillers by such writers as Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, and Ruth Rendell. An equally well-established category is the spy thriller, possibly created by W. Somerset Maugham, later with Ian Fleming and John le Carré as its most famous writers, but in Sweden with so far only one major practitioner, Jan Guillou, whose thirteen novels about Swedish secret agent Carl Hamilton have been immensely popular since 1986 but have so far had virtually no competition. For this reason, Jan Guillou and spy thrillers are excluded from the following discussion. You have most of noir literature, although my conviction is that noir is in fact defined emotionally, not by plot elements; even so, most major noir writers, from Cornell Woolrich through David Goodis and Jim Thompson to Roxane Gay, do include crimes in their bleak stories of alienation and hopelessness. You have the many depictions of police at work, where the earliest notable writers were John Creasey and the unsurpassed Ed McBain; the serial killer thrillers, from Robert Bloch’s Psycho to
Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini’s The Running of Beasts to Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs and innumerable later works. And we haven’t even mentioned courtroom stories, financial thrillers, political thrillers . . .
Most, if not all, of these various subgenres within the field of crime fiction initially appeared in either Great Britain or the United States. The detective story, the hard-boiled private eye story, the police procedural, and most of the other dominant kinds of crime fiction are initially Anglo-Saxon developments. But just like science fiction, another of the important literary traditions first established in the nineteenth century, crime fiction also quickly became popular in other countries and is today read and written throughout the world.
In fact, not only today but for quite a while.
Sweden is a case in point. Forty years ago, American and British crime readers suddenly became aware of the existence of Swedish crime writing when the ten police procedural novels featuring Detective Inspector Martin Beck and written by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were translated and became bestsellers. They are still in print, and Henning Mankell achieved considerable recognition in English translations, so perhaps it is unreasonable to say that Sweden was again quickly forgotten and remained so until only six years ago, when in 2008 the first novel in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was translated as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and became the next worldwide Swedish crime fiction bestseller. This time, however, the appeal of Stieg Larsson’s talent and sales led to an increasing number of other Swedish crime authors being introduced in English translations, something that did not happen in the wake of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s success.
What virtually no one will remember is that if Stieg Larsson followed forty years after Sjöwall and Wahlöö, they had also followed forty years after the first internationally successful Swedish crime writer: the pseudonymous Frank Heller, who enjoyed considerable popularity not only throughout Europe but also in the United States during the 1920s.
But, even if Frank Heller was the first Swedish writer of crime fiction to achieve success in translation, he was far from the first Swedish crime author, and indeed stories of crime and detection have been a flourishing part of Swedish literature since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. But most of this tradition is entirely unknown to non-Swedish readers.
Most Swedish experts place the birth of Swedish crime fiction in 1893, when a novel called Stockholms-detektiven (The Stockholm Detective) was published. The author’s name was Fredrik Lindholm, but he chose to publish his novel under the pen name Prins Pierre and, during the next decades, several other early Swedish crime writers also wrote pseudonymously. Individually, they may have had different reasons for this, but, collectively, a major reason was almost certainly that they shied away from being associated with what most critics and intellectuals at the time considered vulgar trash. We will get back to this a bit later.
Although The Stockholm Detective was hardly a bestseller—indeed, the novel was almost entirely forgotten for many decades until it was finally republished to coincide with its centenary—several other early crime authors were enormously popular. In 1908, a vicar named Oscar Wågman, writing as Sture Stig, published the first of two collections of parodic Sherlock Holmes stories; both clever and funny, his work remains the earliest still-readable Swedish crime fiction. One of his readers, according to his own statement, was the young Gunnar Serner (1886–1947), a brilliant scholar who entered Lund University at the age of sixteen and received his doctorate (on a dissertation written in English and entitled On the Language of Swinburne) at twenty-four. However, due to his family’s relative poverty, Serner was forced to finance his studies by short-term loans, and in the end found himself with no other alternative than to forge a number of bank letters of acceptance; in September 1912, he fled Sweden. Trying to make his fortune at the Monte Carlo Casino, he instead lost everything and decided to try his hand at fiction. Surprisingly, he succeeded and quickly began selling stories under a variety of pen names—in Serner’s case an absolute necessity, since he was wanted by the Swedish police.
In 1914 Serner’s first book was published, establishing the name Frank Heller—from then on his only pseudonym. Until his death, “Heller” published a total of forty-three novels, story collections, and travelogues; he also edited anthologies of crime fiction as well as fantasy and science fiction, and he wrote poetry. Several further short story collections were issued at a later time. Heller became not only a bestseller in Sweden, but also Sweden’s internationally most successful entertainment writer of his time. His inventive, humorous, and exciting stories of swindlers, gentlemen adventurers, and criminals were bestsellers throughout Europe and the basis for five feature movies; in the United States, eight of his novels were published by Crowell during the 1920s. With a single exception, the work of Frank Heller is the best Swedish crime fiction written during the first half of the twentieth century and is still both readable and interesting.
That exception is a short novel called Doktor Glas (1905; translated as Doctor Glas) by Hjalmar Söderberg, generally acknowledged as one of the major Swedish twentieth-century authors. Doktor Glas, however, was not viewed as crime fiction; it is a psychological novel of a young doctor who decides to commit murder, and it is still both chilling and convincing in its careful and empathetic portrayal of a good man convincing himself to do evil.
Other early authors include Harald Johnsson, writing as Robinson Wilkins, whose master detective, Swede Fred Hellington, was employed by Scotland Yard and so solved cases in England. Samuel August Duse, writing as S. A. Duse, who published thirteen novels about lawyer and genius detective Leo Carring, silly, racist, and snobbish entertainments, though with sometimes innovative plots (in a novel called Doktor Smirnos dagbok, The Diary of Dr. Smirnos, Duse already in 1917 lets the murderer record a police investigation in his diary without revealing, until the end, his own role. This contrivance became world famous when repeated by Agatha Christie in her 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). Julius Regis, often signing himself Jul. Regis and born Petersson, was immensely popular for his ten crime novels, most featuring journalist and detective Maurice Wallion.
These were the major Swedish crime writers until the 1930s. Most detectives had un-Swedish names; so did most major criminals. The crime story was perceived as a non-Swedish literary field, and so native authors chose to make their stories more international by importing both their protagonists and their adversaries. “Frank Heller” was the exception, writing primarily about Swedish heroes—but on the other hand, virtually all of his stories are set outside of Sweden: his method was simply the opposite, since he chose to export instead of import his detectives.
The reason for this is obvious. Foreign crime writers were voluminously translated and quickly became popular. The Sherlock Holmes stories began appearing in Sweden as early as 1891; they were followed by translations of work by Maurice Leblanc, G. K. Chesterton, R. Austin Freeman, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, and the other major British and American writers. During the 1930s, early crime-fiction pulp magazines also began appearing in Sweden. These were quite different from the American pulps of the same period, and in fact more similar to the German popular-fiction magazines: generally of small size, stapled, and usually presenting a single long story rather than many short works. Most were translations; when written by Swedes, they were mostly disguised as translations by being set in England or the United States and published under English-sounding pen names. The pulp crime magazines lingered in Sweden until the beginning of the 1960s, but had for a decade largely been replaced as a primary source of crime entertainment reading by low-priced original paperback novels and translations.
Meanwhile, the first Swedish crime writer to firmly place his stories in Sweden and also create thoroughly Swedish detectives with unmistakably Swedish names was Stieg Trenter. Most of his novels were told by photographer Harry Friberg, but the problem solver is primarily Detective I
nspector Vesper Johnson, a friend of Friberg’s. Trenter is generally considered one of the finest literary chroniclers of the growing Stockholm during the postwar years. He published twenty-six books from 1943 through 1967, the last few cowritten with his wife, Ulla Trenter, who after his death published a further twenty-three crime novels until 1991, many still featuring her husband’s protagonists but with markedly weaker plots and little of his trademark depiction of Stockholm settings.
Stieg Trenter can be said to have been the author who made crime fiction accepted by Swedish critics. He had followers during the 1940s and 1950s, most notably Maria Lang, a pen name for Dagmar Lange (1914–1991), though as her novels always featured not only romantic but often erotic subplots, they were often dismissed as “women’s romances” with detective intrusions. Nevertheless, Lang’s first novel remains interesting; Mördaren ljuger inte ensam (Not Only the Murderer Lies, 1949) was extremely daring in sympathetically depicting a murderer who turns out to be a lesbian killing the woman who scorns her passionate love. The shocked reactions to this book may well have contributed to the fact that Lang minimized her discussion of serious issues in her following forty-two adult novels; she had her social standing and position as a high school dean to worry about. Even so, the scorn heaped by male critics on her output seems out of proportion: the fact that the leading female characters in her novels (though the primary detective is always male) actually concern themselves with commenting on men’s looks, potential as partners, and sex appeal—things male protagonists in novels from the same period written by men constantly do about women—seems to be one of the primary so-called failings of “Maria Lang.”
The first Swede to write only about professional policemen was Vic Suneson, a pen name for Sune Lundquist, who published more than thirty novels and story collections from 1948 through 1975. Many of his novels are experimental, with shifting points of view, told in a nonlinear fashion, or combine depictions of criminal investigations with psychological portrayals. After Suneson, the last of the major Swedish crime writers before the 1960s published his first novel in 1954. H(ans)-K(rister) Rönblom wrote about historian and teacher Paul Kennet, who reveals killers not primarily to serve justice but to make certain that the historical record is set straight. Rönblom was in a sense the first recognizably modern Swedish crime writer, since his novels are also insidiously critical of the small-town life they portray: below the idyllic day-to-day life is seething corruption, religious intolerance, sexism, racism, narrow-mindedness, and self-righteousness, all brought to life by the meticulous, rigorously honest Kennet. Rönblom, a journalist, began writing fiction late and died early (1901–1965); still, he managed to publish ten novels.
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