by Alice Bolin
At the same time Gone Girl was blowing up in theaters, yet another cultural phenomenon was worrying over the received wisdom that the husband (or boyfriend) did it. On the flip side of Gone Girl’s sensational pulp was the meandering minutiae of the podcast Serial. In it, This American Life reporter Sarah Koenig delves with eccentric myopia into the details of a 1999 Baltimore murder case in which then eighteen-year-old Adnan Syed was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Koenig becomes particularly obsessed with the obvious inconsistencies in the story of the state’s star witness, Adnan’s friend Jay, who claims he was enlisted by Adnan to help him bury the body. Koenig is disturbed by how much dishonesty and uncertainty the criminal justice system allows for before ceding reasonable doubt. She consults Jim Trainum, a former Washington, D.C., detective who now is an advocate for preventing false confessions. He acknowledges that while the inconsistencies in Jay’s story are worrying, Koenig must also “look at the consistencies.” In an interview with The Intercept after the podcast ended, the case’s prosecutor, Kevin Urick, says essentially the same thing, insisting that witnesses rarely give a perfectly honest testimony, but that Jay’s testimony on “material facts” was consistent and backed up by other evidence.
“The cops probably settled for what was good enough to be the truth,” Trainum tells Koenig on Serial, and from Urick’s statements, that is what happened, and it was probably what had to happen. Trainum’s main warning to the police forces he trains is to watch out for verification bias—that is, looking only for evidence that fits their preconceived story of the crime. But that picking and choosing, the arranging of compelling details, is the very basis of our justice system: the case, which is not a compendium of all the evidence about an event, but a rhetorically convincing narrative of it. “Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit,” Janet Malcolm writes in The Crime of Sheila McGough, “and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain for appearances, has chosen as her uniform.” Koenig recognized that the state’s story of the crime was not the truth, but the shapeless, contradictory, and hopelessly incomplete truth she discovered did not satisfy her either.
It is easy to see why this tricky relationship to the truth is worrying: police and prosecutors’ offices are powerful organizations that are heavily invested in maintaining an essentially unfair social order, and the presumption of innocence cannot be counted on to overcome juries’ psychological biases. One of the more tone-deaf moments of Urick’s Intercept interview is when he dismisses the notion that racism against people from the Middle East could have played a part in Adnan’s conviction, saying, “This was well before September 11. Nobody had any misgivings about someone being Muslim back then.” It is obvious that the prosecutors’ story of the crime contained racist language and stereotypes. “He felt betrayed that his honor had been besmirched,” Koenig quotes from Urick, as he sounds a racist dog whistle about the misogyny of Muslim culture. Serial’s crazy popularity may have had an implicit connection to the biggest news story of 2014, the wrongful lack of indictments in the cases of policemen who shot and killed unarmed black men, especially the murder of the St. Louis teenager Michael Brown, which sparked mass protests. Part of what was so baffling and depressing about those stories was the grand juries’ refusal to even let the cases go to trial, as if it were important above all to preserve the image of who is a criminal and who is an authority. Clearly, there is damage done just by raising the question.
When a cop kills an unarmed man, it is because he senses his power being threatened by fear that he believes he should never have to feel. When a man kills his ex-girlfriend because she leaves him, he is saying the same thing: shame and sadness are feelings I should not have. Honor killings, as it turns out, are as American as apple pie. Serial is ultimately frustrating because it conflates a mistrust in unfair legal narratives with a mistrust in patterns that are all too real, namely “the most time-worn explanation for [a woman’s] disappearance: the boyfriends, current and former.” Skepticism about whether the husband did it shows a weird, classically American disdain for both authority and the powerless.
“Everyone loves the Dead Girl”—it’s true. On Dateline, one of Karen Pannell’s friends says that she was “pretty, smart, smiled all the time.” At the end of the episode, the voice-over says that she “loved her friends, loved the beach, and died too young.” On Serial we hear that Hae was athletic, outgoing, and funny, but after the second episode, where we hear excerpts from her diary, she disappears from her own story. From then on, it’s all about Adnan and Jay, the evidence, the trial. But of course that’s why we love her: because she’s dead, and her death is the catalyst for the fun of sleuthing. It’s why Forensic Files spends so much more time on debunking Permenter’s obviously bogus clue, the message written in blood, than describing his history of abuse. I was more and more astonished reading the episode synopses from Netflix’s Forensic Files collection: “When a woman’s body is found in a burned-out house, microscopic clues on a piece of pipe help determine whether her death was an accident or murder.” “When a woman is raped and murdered on the beach, investigators track down the killer through a pair of shoes left near the body.” “At an apartment where a mother was stabbed to death, investigators find plenty of evidence but have no suspect to compare it against.” It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again, but not enough to see a pattern. She is always singular, an anomaly, the juicy new mystery.
The Daughter as Detective
My parents met as library students at the University of Kentucky in 1979. From my intimate point of view, library school is a bit of an academic catchall, sometimes a plan B, appealing to weirdos of many backgrounds. People assume that librarians love books, but that isn’t even it. University librarians like my parents love flying below the radar, omniscient about university curriculum but not bound by classroom teaching, grading, or even regular students. When she went to library school, my mom was a twenty-five-year-old polyglot, very pretty and shy, who until then had been taking graduate German courses and hanging around Lincoln, Nebraska, listening to the Who. My dad was thirty-two, starting a new career after years of working for the army as an Arabic translator. He is very loud and friendly, bubbly even. Contrary to the stereotype, he is a librarian who is constantly being shushed.
On their first date, he raced up the stairs to her apartment too enthusiastically and fell and broke his arm. He tried to deny that he had injured himself, and they went to a showing of Casablanca. He cradled his arm like a baby in the dark of the movie theater until the pain became too great, and my mom took him to the emergency room. The next day was Labor Day, and no pharmacies were open within walking distance of my dad’s house. He didn’t have a car, so he sheepishly called my mom to ask if she would drive him to get his prescription. She took him back to her house and made him grilled cheese and tomato soup.
The patently adorable and weird quality of their first date seems to have set the tone for their entire relationship. Early on, my dad gave my mom a copy of one of his favorite books: Roseanna, the first in a series of ten mystery novels by Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö that follow the detective Martin Beck. “You’ll find it ironic,” he told her coyly, and she did: the title character, whose murdered corpse washes up on the shores of a Swedish lake, is a librarian in her twenties from Lincoln, Nebraska. My mom was not put off by the implications of this macabre coincidence, and she and my dad are still together now, many decades later. Improbably, my parents’ marriage echoes the Dead Girl story, but with a happy ending.
Uncovering the origins of my dad’s Martin Beck obsession has been more of a project than I first anticipated. When I asked how he discovered the books, he first told me that he read about them in a footnote in Robin Winks’s 1969 essay collection The Historian as Detective, a study in the methods and pitfalls of the academic historian, imagining historians as sleuths solving t
horny cases. Throughout the book, there are references to actual detective fiction, which my dad used as a syllabus. He talked to me at length about The Historian as Detective, but later was fuzzy on whether Winks had mentioned Sjöwall and Wahlöö at all. He was only certain that it was where he had heard about Robert Hans van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels, historical mysteries about Tang Dynasty China. (The last Judge Dee mystery is called Poets and Murder, a possible alternative title for this book.)
When that lead dried up, he launched into a story from when he was in the army, working a desk job in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, as he told me, “having a lot of fun.” Unexpectedly in 1973, he was called back from vacation and ordered to report to Fort Bragg. The Russians were in danger of joining the Arab-Israeli War, which might require reciprocal action from the United States. Nixon had put all of the 82nd Airborne, of which my dad was nominally a member, on alert. His superiors on the base refused to issue him a uniform because they didn’t know how long he would be staying there. Instead of having him run in formation in street clothes, they sent him to the library and told him to read whatever he wanted. “I asked them whether they could teach me to jump out of an airplane if we had to go to the Middle East,” he said of his time at Fort Bragg. “They told me, ‘Eh, no problem.’” He read several of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books there, but he was already very familiar with the series, so in the end they were not very important to that story.
A few days later, he called to tell me he actually first read the Martin Beck books when he was a student at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He had known he would be drafted and sent to Vietnam, so he joined the army and became an Arabic translator, an ironic way to avoid combat, considering our current geopolitical situation. In Monterey, he said, he had studied stupidly hard and had no fun, but he found a Martin Beck book on a rare trip into town. Later, he emailed me another confounding update: he visited a relative, a man named Jim who he claimed was his father’s “cousin/nephew,” the night Nixon had fired his attorney general. Jim had worked briefly in the Nixon White House, he told me. His stories unfold this way, full of the small, intriguing details that in a novel might work as foreshadowing. “I typically spent the first hour of the workday looking though The Washington Post to see what the latest Nixon news was,” he went on to say before circling back. “I think I was at Jim’s when I got a call instructing me to go to Fort Bragg.”
I have found his stories often share an eccentric focus on what he was reading during his somewhat Forrest Gumpy journey through the twentieth century. Once he regaled me with memories of his time as a firefighter in Idaho in the late sixties, when he lived with an agriculture student who was later a prisoner in the Iran hostage crisis. (Rory Cochrane, the guy who played Lucas in Empire Records, portrayed Dad’s roommate in the movie Argo.) Dad hitchhiked down to Jackson Hole during a day off and got The Twenty-Seventh Wife, Irving Wallace’s biography of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young’s wife, and Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon from the library. He took issue with my saying in an early version of this essay that he checked out books about the Mormon Trail. “I was more interested in biography than the settler experience,” he wrote me. “I have since read books like Angle of Repose, and taken an interest in TV shows like Deadwood and Hell on Wheels.”
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were a pair of Swedish journalists, a married couple who wrote the Martin Beck novels over long nights after their kids were asleep, working on alternate chapters. Their ten novels, released between 1965 and 1975, were an unexpected sensation, popular worldwide and the subjects of dozens of film and TV adaptations. The books are violent, sexually frank, and political, updating the hard-boiled American noir for the liberal Scandinavian sixties. Nearly everyone acknowledges Sjöwall and Wahlöö as the origin point for Nordic noir, a regional genre that has produced international stars like Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Jo Nesbø. But Sjöwall and Wahlöö didn’t just inspire other Scandinavian writers to embrace the murder mystery: they shaped the genre so completely that all of their descendants bear their eccentricities. The Martin Beck series is bizarre, a fitting starting point for what has become a multimillion-dollar industry selling other bizarre, exasperating books.
The novels follow the melancholy detective Beck and his cohort in the Swedish National Police’s Homicide Division as they solve cases including a serial sex murderer preying on children, a mass shooting on a bus, a “locked room” mystery involving a corpse decayed beyond recognition, and the assassination of the Swedish prime minister. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books hold very little allegiance to the typical noir that is sparsely written and pessimistic, showing one man against the world. Beck is the putative hero, but in practice the books are ensemble dramas, shading often into ensemble comedies. His colleagues are annoying misfits, described by their quirks, like the fastidious Fredrik Melander, who has a photographic memory, passionately loves his ugly wife, and spends too much time on the toilet. The series abounds with pairs of hapless bozos whose comedic value is underlined by their alliterative names. Bumbling beat cops named Kristiansson and Kvant wreak havoc at several crime scenes until Kristiansson is tragically killed. After that, Kvant gets a new partner named Kvastmo.
Sjöwall has said she and Wahlöö were influenced by “progressive” crime writers like Dashiell Hammett and Georges Simenon, but they took this progressive imperative rather further. Believing that “people read more mysteries than they do political pamphlets,” they set out to write a Marxist indictment of the failures of the Swedish welfare state disguised as a series of mystery novels. They titled their series “The Story of a Crime”—that is, the crime of a cruel and unequal society. They described their political agenda as “the project,” as if it were a covert mission of infiltration, when it could not have been more obvious. In book after book the authors include pages-long polemics about the nationalization of the police system, Stockholm’s overdevelopment and the miseries of urban life, and the many demographics that had fallen through society’s cracks. Their political tirades are written in a strident, journalistic tone, fissures where narrative conceit drops out completely. A visit to Beck’s elderly mother becomes an occasion to bemoan (at length) the state of Swedish retirement homes:
Nowadays they were called “pensioners’ homes,” or even “pensioners’ hotels,” to gloss over the fact that in practice most people weren’t there voluntarily, but had quite simply been condemned to it by a so-called Welfare State that no longer wished to know about them. It was a cruel sentence, and the crime was being too old. As a worn-out cog in the social machine, one was dumped on the garbage heap.
My notes from the books are filled with comments like “So didactic” and, more to the point, “Why didn’t somebody cut this?”
Critics revisiting Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books now are fawning, using that canonizing method of inverting their weaknesses instead of acknowledging them. A write-up in The Wall Street Journal from 2009 hilariously calls the Martin Beck books “anything but polemical.” Louise France writes in The Guardian that while the action in the books is “often slow,” they are addictive: “You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints.” I admit that I don’t recognize the impulse to stay in bed for a week binging on mints, so maybe that’s why I found the experience of reading these slow books a bit slower than France. The sometimes-tedious lack of action in the books is often pointed to as a strength. In his introduction to Roseanna, Henning Mankell writes that “it’s probably one of the first crime novels in which time clearly plays a major role.” Sjöwall echoed this idea recently, saying that “slowness, and the tension that waiting, distance, and irritating gaps in communication create, became an aspect of the books’ realism.” This argument smacks of imitative fallacy to me, but the wonky pacing of the series does point to its redeeming strength: the u
tter wonkiness and unconventionality of their entire approach.
Roseanna is more wrapped up in Dead Girl genre tropes than the rest of the books. At first the series seems less a treatise against corrosive changes in Swedish society than a darkly funny and melancholy meditation on the absurdity of Swedish bureaucracy. The novel opens by describing the administrative procedure for dredging the lake that eventually reveals Roseanna’s body: it is unclear who can okay plans for dredging, and papers for it move among agencies, “passed from one perplexed civil servant to another,” a process that takes months. This critique is more existential than political, a mirror for the frustration Martin Beck experiences in his marriage and his career. As a good Dead Girl should, Roseanna haunts and excites Beck, who for a time is unable to identify her. The case consumes him, so that “when he closed his eyes he saw her before him as she looked in the picture, naked and abandoned, with narrow shoulders and her dark hair in a coil across her throat.” Once he identifies Roseanna, though, his image of her is inevitably complicated. In conversations with her roommate and her boyfriend, back in Nebraska, Beck learns that she was promiscuous and odd, that she looked messy and slept with her friend’s boyfriends. Where Beck thought he had found a Dead Girl, he had in fact found an ordinary dead woman.