Crime fiction became popular in Sweden first in translation. With the exception of the very talented Frank Heller, the relatively few Swedish crime authors writing before the 1940s were highly derivative and were considered unworthy of critical notice; Heller himself, though often praised for his prose, erudition, and inventiveness, was also often accused of “seducing the young” by glamorizing his amoral swindler heroes. Gradually, however, translated stories of clever detectives, primarily those of Christie and Sayers, later those of Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, and Georges Simenon, gained acceptance and were openly read as entertainment by the middle class. This paved the way for Swedish authors to write in the same style: Trenter, Lang, Suneson, and Rönblom dominated Swedish crime fiction for twenty years with their novels of murder within the upper middle class. With the partial exception of Rönblom, despite their storytelling and literary qualities, their novels were as conservative, unchallenging, and devoid of social criticism and daring themes as those of Agatha Christie. These were the writers published in hardcover by reputable Swedish publishers; one latecomer must also be mentioned, the hugely talented Kerstin Ekman, whose first six novels (1959–1963) were pure stories of detection, but who later mainly wrote contemporary literary fiction, though she often includes crime elements in her work and published two later novels which can reasonably be categorized as crime fiction. In 1978 she had the distinction of being the only author of initially popular fiction, and only the third woman in its then 192 years of existence, to be inducted as a life member of the Swedish Academy.
Simultaneously, an undercurrent of what Swedish critics and intellectuals referred to as “dirt literature” (yes, honestly) also began appearing in the period between the wars. At first this form of entertainment fiction was published in adventure weeklies and in small-size pulps, then starting around 1950 in original pocket-book lines sold only through newsstands and tobacconists, never in bookstores —and for that reason, absurdly, not considered to be books at all. By the mid-1950s several hundred such paperbacks had appeared, and with them the hard-boiled crime fiction of the 1930s and later had arrived in Sweden. Peter Cheyney, Mickey Spillane, and James Hadley Chase were bestsellers during the first years of the 1950s—but never mentioned in reviews or overviews, since they were published outside of the established and respectable book trade, as were the few but existing Swedish authors trying to imitate them. Swedish encyclopedias still claim that “pocket books first appeared in Sweden in 1956,” since that was the year when one of the major publishers first began issuing pocket-size books to be sold in bookstores.
Consequently, an extreme double standard existed: blue-collar workers, teenagers, and presumably more than a few white-collar readers (though one can suspect without admitting it) consumed hard-boiled crime, but the only crime stories officially published in the country were of the traditional armchair detective variety. In fact, such crime novels are still written and published in Sweden, and have had leading practitioners continually: Jan Ekström, whose first novel was published in 1961, may be the most meticulous of all Swedish puzzle crime writers; his closest competitor in later years is probably Gösta Unefäldt (debut in 1979), though his detective is in fact also a policeman; a current practitioner is Kristina Appelqvist, who published her first novel in 2009.
The first authors to dramatically break with the Swedish upper-class drawing room crime tradition were also the first Swedish crime writers in forty years to become successful outside of the country: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who published the first novel in their cowritten, ten-volume police procedural series, The Story of a Crime, in 1965. This novel, Roseanna, was by no means an immediate success in Sweden: critics found it too gritty, too depressing, too dark, too brutal. However, gradually the Sjöwall and Wahlöö series began to be hailed as a unique literary experiment and became a bestselling phenomenon. They achieved this success largely due to the political message of their novels. Where earlier Swedish crime writers had been politically conservative or liberal, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were both left-wing activists and consciously planned their ten novels to become more overtly political. The motives behind the crimes gradually become connected to the social background of the victims and of the criminals; the later books in the series directly address issues like fascist tendencies within the police, the betrayal of the working class by the purportedly socialist government, the emptiness of the capitalist-bourgeois lifestyle.
Swedish political life since the mid-1930s was dominated by the Social Democrat party, to which all government heads from 1932 until 1976 belonged. Beginning in the 1930s, the party gradually transformed Swedish society into a centrally planned welfare state, though at a much slower speed than its rhetoric usually promised. A consequence of this was that many Swedish intellectuals, as well as a growing number of young people, began to view the Social Democrat party as derelict in its dedication to socialist ideals. Thus, during the 1960s, social criticism in Sweden tended to come from the radical left, and the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels changed the way in which many leading intellectuals viewed crime fiction: what had once been dismissed as a pointless bourgeois pastime could be turned into a force for political analysis, education, and change. Suddenly reading, and even writing, crime stories became respectable among left-wing Swedes; interestingly enough, this coincided with the coming of age of generations of young readers who had grown up not on their parents’ Agatha Christie-inspired novels, but on the hard-boiled crime novels published in the disreputable “kiosk books” lines, and this combination of circumstances quickly transformed Swedish crime fiction as a whole.
Of course, the success of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and the following tide of crime novels written from a politically radical perspective, did not extinguish the more traditional or purportedly apolitical kinds of crime fiction. They had their readers, and continued to be published; indeed, one of the most popular writers of the 1968 through mid-1980s period was the pseudonymous Bo Balderson who, in a total of eleven novels, poked fun at Swedish government circles from a clearly conservative point of view. Other new writers, considerably more accomplished than Balderson, proved that the more traditional kind of detective novel could still be written brilliantly; among the foremost of these were psychiatrist Ulf Durling, with his first novel in 1971 and his sixteenth, and so far latest, in 2008, and the very prolific Jean Bolinder, whose first crime novel was published in 1967. Even so, around the time when the tenth and last of the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels was published in 1975, most of the new authors were writing about police collectives, and most were combining their crime stories with an underlying political agenda. Some of the most notable authors of this generation were Uno Palmström, K. Arne Blom, Olof Svedelid, and most particularly Leif G. W. Persson, a professor of criminology who published three novels in 1978–1982, then returned with a fourth in 2002, and has since written a further six crime novels; their intricate plots, often based in actual Swedish crimes (his trilogy Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s Cold, 2002, Another Time, Another Life, 2003, and Falling Freely, as in a Dream, 2007, dealing with the unsolved 1986 murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, is an impressive case in point), their careful atmosphere and obvious literary merits have made him one of the foremost Swedish crime writers; he is one of only two three-time recipients of the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy’s Best Novel of the Year Award, the other being Håkan Nesser.
Persson, indisputably not only one of the best but also one of the most influential Swedish crime writers, also helped set the tone of social criticism in Swedish crime fiction. His background—as a criminologist with the national board of police, as an influential government adviser, as an expert adviser to the Swedish minister for justice—gives a unique weight to his novels, which are often extremely critical of Sweden’s rampant police inefficiency, of the legal system, and of the political and bureaucratic establishment, whose primary aim seems to be to perpetuate and extend its own power and privileges.
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allel to Persson, similarly critical views of Swedish society also played a central part in the novels of Kennet Ahl, pen name for journalist Christer Dahl and later writer and actor Lasse Strömstedt, who had spent eight years in prison. They wrote seven novels from 1974–1991, adding inside knowledge of the prison system, police brutality, the narcotics trade, and the precarious existence of addicts. Also important was the already mentioned Uno Palmström, originally a journalist, later a publisher, whose nine novels (1976–1990) also expressed fundamental doubts about Swedish society, which Palmström viewed as largely a corporate state where the unholy alliance of politicians and financiers repressed the population in order to further its own interests. Lawyer and naturalist Staffan Westerlund wrote a series of novels where a common theme was the inhumanity of both big business and big government; he wrote about the meddling and callous outrages perpetrated by Swedish authorities and the indifference towards individuals shown by medical, chemical, and energy corporations in their quest for profits.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, this trend of social criticism was not only firmly established but further enhanced in the work of important new authors. Journalist Gunnar Ohrlander published a first thriller in 1990, chosen Best First Novel of the Year by the Crime Fiction Academy, and Henning Mankell published his first crime novel in 1991, chosen Best Novel of the Year by the Academy; these two were the first Swedish authors to seriously treat the subject of Swedish racism and anti-immigrant feelings in literary form, and they did so in crime novels.
When Stieg Larsson’s novels were translated in 2008 and on, many critics seemed surprised at their negative depiction of a Swedish welfare state swollen to a monstrosity willing to sacrifice the rights, liberty, and lives of its citizens in order to preserve its privileges and power. This, to readers in the United States and Britain, seemed a dramatic reversal of the earlier, rosy picture painted of modern Sweden as a wealthy, liberal welfare society, characterized by openness, tolerance, and compassion. In fact, the bleak view of Swedish society set out in the Millennium trilogy was a direct continuation of the social criticism of the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels, and thus established as central to Swedish crime writing since almost forty years.
We have already touched on the reasons why so many—though, as we shall also note, not by any means all—of the Swedish crime writers came to express strongly leftist political views. In brief, Maj Sjöwall’s and Per Wahlöö’s novels had broken entirely with
the earlier tradition in Swedish crime fiction: they chose a much more realistic approach both to crime and to crime solving, they wrote from an underdog perspective, they were often critical of both the efficiency and motives of the police and of the close ties between the legal system and the political establishment, and they examined the social and economic factors contributing to crime. This made their novels not only acceptable but required reading for intellectuals sympathetic to their views, which created a whole new readership for original Swedish crime fiction. At the same time, their novels were published when the Swedish political landscape was being radicalized. The 1968 youth revolt throughout much of the western world also had a considerable impact in Sweden, where opposition to the Vietnam War became a unifying symbol to a number of radical groups: the Marxist-Leninists, the Maoists, and the few but intellectually significant Trotskyites. By taking control of the anti–Vietnam War movement, the Maoists and in some cases the Trotskyites managed to influence a generation of Swedish high school and college students. Very consciously, these groups also encouraged their members to choose professions which would give them the opportunity of influencing others; many became entertainers, actors, teachers, social workers, and certainly not least writers or journalists—for a number of years, the Stockholm College of Journalism was popularly called the “College of Communism.” That a number of them also chose to follow in the footsteps of Sjöwall and Wahlöö by expressing their views and concerns via crime novels is hardly surprising, and indeed many of the major Swedish crime writers of the last decades have a background in the radical groups of the late 1960s and 1970s. Stieg Larsson was a Trotskyite; Henning Mankell is a Maoist, as was Gunnar Ohrlander; these three have spoken openly of their affiliations, which is why they are named while others are not.
Let me add, for clarity, that my point here is not to denounce these writers, but to give an intelligible background to the specific direction in which Swedish crime writing has developed: already in their teens or early twenties, the writers maturing in the 1960s and 1970s learned to view society from a principled standpoint, in a dialectical manner, and to attribute both social problems and individual actions to political and economic factors. I have no doubt that very similar forms of social criticism would have appeared if a number of leading Swedish writers had been guided by equally strong liberal or libertarian views, but such views are seldom part of the consensus-driven Swedish political discourse. On the other hand, there are certainly examples of politically conservative writers using crime fiction to criticize Swedish society.
By the mid-1990s, a new generation of leading writers had established itself, with Mankell, Håkan Nesser, who began writing crime in 1993, and Åke Edwardson, with a first crime novel in 1995, as its most important authors. Both Nesser and Edwardson to some extent broke with the social realist tradition. Nesser placed his highly literary novels in a fictitious city, Maardam, in an unnamed country which is a composite of Sweden, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands, with his emphasis largely on the psychology of his main characters, not least his police protagonist Van Veeteren. Most of Edwardson’s novels feature his Gothenburg Detective Inspector Erik Winter, but Edwardson as well has chosen to deal primarily with existential and psychological issues, also in a highly literary fashion. Mankell, Nesser, and Edwardson brought the Swedish crime novel to a level of literary accomplishment that made it not only accepted as potentially serious fiction, as indeed it already was since the 1960s, but viewed as a potentially important part of contemporary Swedish literature.
What was largely lacking, however, were female authors. With the exception of psychiatrist Åse Nilsonne, virtually all of the foremost Swedish crime writers were men. The turning point came towards the end of the nineties, when Inger Frimansson, Liza Marklund, Helene Tursten, and Aino Trosell all published their first novels in 1997 and 1998. They also brought a much needed renewal to the forms of Swedish crime writing. Frimansson from the start concentrated on psychological thrillers with few recurring characters; Marklund wrote about a journalist investigator, Annika Bengtzon, and Aino Trosell featured crime-solving female “anti-heroes” in her largely proletarian realist novels. Of the four, only Helene Tursten, a registered nurse and dentist, writes about a police officer, Detective First Irene Huss at the Gothenburg police.
Despite this, the police procedural is alive and well in Sweden. Among those still writing in that tradition, the most important newer writer may well be Arne Dahl (penname of Jan Arnald), who introduced his fictitious “A Group,” specialized in internationally related violent crimes, in 1999 and, after eleven books, in 2011 began writing about Opcop, a fictitious secret operational unit within the European police organization. Other impressive police procedural writers include Anna Jansson, who introduced her police protagonist Maria Wern in 2000; Mons Kallentoft, writing about the brilliant but damaged and heavy-drinking Detective Inspector Malin Fors since 2007; Carin Gerhardsen, who began writing about the police in Hammarby, a part of southern Stockholm, in 2008; and Kristina Ohlsson, with protagonists Fredrika Berman and Alex Recht, introduced in 2009.
Nowadays, however, many of the most highly regarded Swedish crime novels fall outside the police procedural field. Camilla Läckberg published her first novel about writer Erica Falck and her police boyfriend Patrik Hedström in 2003, and quickly became one of the most popular authors in Sweden. Her novels, as do those of many of her later followers, emphasize the personal lives and relationships of her main characters while the crime story, though central
to the plots of her novels, is not always the most important element in them. This kind of “crossover” between relationship novels and crime fiction has become a standard part of Swedish crime writing, in a sense harking back to the structure used in Maria Lang’s 1950s novels, but written in a decidedly more realistic fashion. Others successfully writing in this vein include Mari Jungstedt and Viveca Sten; it also has attracted male writers like Jonas Moström.
Among those writing about lawyers, Åsa Larsson may be foremost. Her first Rebecka Martinsson novel was published in 2003 and was considered that year’s finest first novel; two of her later four books have won the Crime Fiction Academy award for Best Novel of the Year. In her novels, regional traditions and religious and psychological conflicts play major parts; she is among the most accomplished, as well as original, current Swedish crime authors. A recent lawyer writing about a lawyer and using her novels to criticize or question aspects of the Swedish justice system is Malin Persson Giolito, daughter of the previously mentioned Leif G. W. Persson, who published her first crime novel in 2012. Among the finest of current crime authors are also Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, writing together since 2004. Roslund is a journalist and previous TV crime reporter; Hellström a former criminal, now engaged in helping criminals readjust to society. Their novels are closely tied to the Swedish tradition of using crime fiction to discuss and criticize social problems, and have a traditional police protagonist, but rise above most similar work through their literary skill, their wide range of themes, and their level of ambition—all of their six novels vary greatly in plot, form, mood, and style.
A Darker Shade of Sweden Page 2