Wendy Lesser - Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery

Sometime in the early 1980s, I began reading a series of mysteries that featured a Swedish homicide detective named Martin Beck. I was living in Berkeley at the time, studying for a PhD in English literature as I worked at a variety of part-time jobs, and I knew a lot of people both inside and outside the academy. Being a talkative sort, I started telling everyone around me about this incredible Scandinavian cop series. Soon we were all reading it.

What I knew at the time was that it was written by a couple, Maj Sjwall and Per Wahl, who had from the very beginning envisioned it as a sequence of ten books that would portray Swedish society from a distinctly Marxist perspective. Published between 1965 and 1975, the Martin Beck series grew noticeably darker as it moved toward its endthough whether this was because Sweden itself (not to speak of the world beyond it) had worsened during that decade, or because Per Wahl had learned in the early 1970s that he was dying of cancer, was something no one could answer. Wahl died, I later learned, on the exact day in June of 1975 when the tenth volume was published in Sweden, having worked like a maniac to finish it on time. (Sjwall, who was his equal partner in many waysthey would write their alternating chapters at night, so as not to be interrupted by their small children, and would then exchange chapters for editinghas said that at the very end Wahl was pretty much writing everything himself.) At any rate, he left behind exactly what he had intended to produce: ten books containing thirty chapters each, which, taken together, constitute a single continuous social narrative comparable in some ways to a Balzac, Zola, or Dickens project, though clothed in the garments of a police procedural.

It would be a melodramatic exaggeration to say that the Martin Beck series changed my life, but like all such exaggerations, this one would be built on a nugget of truth. Both my idea of Scandinavia and my sense of what a mystery could do were shaped by those books. If I later became a veritable addict of the form, gobbling up hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year in Kindle purchases of Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian mysteries, that habit could no doubt be attributed to many things besides the Martin Becks: the invention of digital books, for instance, which allowed for impulse buying and virtually infinite storage; the massive and surprising success of Stieg Larssons Lisbeth Salander series, which encouraged American publishers to bring out any and every available Scandinavian thriller; the introduction of the long-cycle police procedural on American television, including such gems as Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and ultimately The Wire, all of which cemented my fascination with the form; not to mention dozens if not hundreds of similar behavior-shaping factors that remain, for me, at an unconscious level. We never know for sure why we read what we read. I cannot, at the moment, even call to mind who first recommended the Martin Becks to me (though I know it was a person and not, say, a bookstore display or a newspaper review). Whoever it was, in any case, deserves my eternal gratitude.

What is so special about these ten books? Ora slightly different questionwhat was it that so appealed to me back in 1981 or 1982, when I was about to turn thirty and America was on the verge of becoming what it is today?

Ronald Reagan, remember, had just been elected president. Many of us who voted against him (particularly among the Californians who had suffered through his governorship) had sworn that we would leave the country if he won. We didnt actually carry out these threatsone never does, as I have learned repeatedly in the years sincebut in my imagination I must have pictured Sweden, that haven for dissident Americans since the time of the Vietnam War, as one of the ideal refuges to which one could flee in such circumstances. That the society in which the Martin Beck novels took place represented a form of humane, non-Soviet socialism was certainly a great part of their appeal for me. What I failed to notice at the time was how severely Sjwall and Wahl were in fact