Swedish Crime Scenes Introduction Although few murders are actually committed in Sweden, the Swedish crime novel has become a modern classic and has gained a worldwide reputation in just a short space of time. From Gotland in the east to Fjällbacka in the west, from Ystad in the south up to Kiruna in the north, the country is seen in a new perspective: via murder investigations where the focus is not only on the crime but also on the Swedish welfare model and human psychology. The Swedish crime novel was in fact born over a century ago with the publication of “The Stockholm Detective” in 1893, written under the pseudonym of Prins Pierre.
The original golden age of the crime genre in Sweden was the 1950s, when Stieg Trenter’s Stockholm series competed with Maria Lang’s “feel-good” novels set in both Stockholm and Bergslagen. But today’s crop of authors is infinitely larger. Sweden’s current crime fiction phenomenon has largely been shaken out of the shabby overcoat of Inspector Martin Beck, the protagonist in “The Story of a Crime”, the legendary ten-book series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. “Roseanna”, 1965, marked the arrival of the modern Swedish crime novel, rich in social criticism and portraying fairly ordinary characters trying to deal with a crumbling society. Swedish Crime Scenes
ÅSA LARSSON
KERSTIN EKMAN
LARS KEPLER
MICHAEL HANS JENS HJORTH AND ROSENFELDT LAPIDUS LEIF G.W. PERSSON STIEG LARSSON ARNE HÅKAN DAHL Anders BÖRGE NESSER Roslund and HELLSTRÖM KRISTINA OHLSSON LIZA CAMILLA MARKLUND LÄCKBERG
MONS MARIE KALLENTOFT JUNGSTEDT
ÅKE EDWARDSON
HÅKAN ÖSTLUNDH
HENNING JOHAN MANKELL THEORIN
The texts in the exhibition are written by Lotta Olsson, crime fiction critic at the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter Photo: Florian Plag
HENNING MANKELL Of all the fictitious police inspectors currently at work, Kurt Wallander is the doyen: a gloomy, opera-loving man in the Skåne mudlands who frequently asks himself where Sweden is heading. He lives in the small town of Ystad in the very south of Sweden, is divorced and has a daughter who will eventually follow in his footsteps and become a police officer herself. In the course of ten novels, Kurt Wallander has solved many cases that in one way or another describe a Sweden in transition, cases that begin in his immediate surroundings but often branch far out into the world. An added ingredient is Henning Mankell’s empathic description of the ageing of a lonely man. The books about Commissioner Wallander cover a different aspect of the idyllic small town of Ystad.
ÅKE EDWARDSON Inspector Erik Winter lives in Gothenburg, listens to modern jazz and loves cooking, especially Italian food. He is talented, rich and well-dressed, but works in a carefully depicted and surprisingly credible police community. The officers are a mixed bunch of everyday cops who struggle patiently in a dozen books to put a stop to the worst kinds of criminality: serial murders, sex killings, showdowns in the underworld and racist acts. The day-to-day lives and personal development of individual officers are given plenty of scope. Photo: Dick Gillberg Photo: Dick
The modern port city of Gothenburg is portrayed in the books of Edwardsson.
CAMILLA LÄCKBERG One of Sweden’s bestselling crime writers is Camilla Läckberg, who
moved the Swedish detective story closer to the chick lit genre in her Photo: Henrik Trygg eight novels. She writes both about Inspector Patrik Hedström, who pursues traditional police investigations, and about the woman he lives with, Erika Falck, who always gets involved but can do things that police are not allowed to. Their life together is given considerable attention in the books, not least all the problems faced by families with young children. They live in the idyllic seaside town of Fjällbacka, a fishing port on the west coast, where Läckberg often bases her murder stories on historical events. The granite archipelago of Bohuslän outside of Gothenburg where Inspector Hedström’s village Fjällbacka is described by Camilla Läckberg. LARS KEPLER The established literary couple behind this pseudonym, Alexander and Alexandra Ahndoril, made a dramatic breakthrough in 2009. So far, they have written four novels about the Finno-Swedish police inspector Joona Linna, a calm figure at the centre of the storm, and his young colleague, Saga Bauer, a slip of a girl who possesses almost supernatural powers. The pair are based in MONS Stockholm and it is in the suburb of Tumba that the first murders occur, but their work takes them to different KALLENTOFT parts of the country. To the north on several occasions, To date, six novels have been published in the series like when a murder is committed at a treatment home about Malin Fors, a divorced, highly strung police officer north of the Indalsälven river, but also out into the with a drink problem and a teenage daughter, living in Stockholm archipelago and increasingly to the forensic the windblown university town of Linköping. But Fors is department of Löwenströnska Hospital, where a serial also one of the best officers around, intuitive and almost killer is being kept in isolation. manically persistent when hunting the truth. Mons Kallentoft often gives the victims a voice as well – people caught between two strange worlds and who cry out for justice. The stories range over a wide spectrum, from the man hanging from an oak tree in “Midwinter Sacrifice”, with its references to ancient Swedish sacrificial rites, to the explosion in “Savage Spring” that appeares to be a terrorist attack. Photo: Niklas Freidwall
Mist over Indalsälven where Kepler’s third book is set.
HÅKAN NESSER Van Veeteren, the police inspector at the centre of ten Nesser books, is by no means Swedish, operating instead
in a vaguely Dutch setting. But Håkan Nesser also wrote Photo: Alexander Baxevanis five crime novels about Gunnar Barbarotti, who, despite his Italian-sounding name was Swedish and worked in the small town of Kymlinge in western Sweden. In addition, Nesser has written a number of freestanding crime novels that tend to place more emphasis on characterisation, settings and atmosphere than on traditional crime-solving. Nesser flits between the detective story and the ordinary novel, between Sweden and the outside world, and between the present and the past.
The 800 year old Cathedral in the city of Linköping where Kallentoft’s Malin Fors lives. JOHAN THEORIN The narrow limestone island of Öland has gone the same way as Gotland, and both the rugged old
fishing communities and today’s well-to-do tourist Photo: Lena Vasylenko spots appear in Johan Theorin’s novels. The books centre on former sea captain Gerlof Davidsson, who lives in an old-age home and has all the time in the world to reflect on children who disappear, terrible accidents and all the inexplicable things that happen, possibly rooted in Öland’s super- natural past. Johan Theorin has written four suggestive crime novels featuring the island’s varying seasons, and one about a fictitious mental hospital on Sweden’s west coast, “Saint Psycho’s”. The large islands of Gotland and Öland are worlds of their own in the Baltic Sea where the light, vegetation and history differ from the rest of the country.
HÅKAN Photo: Lena Vasylenko ÖSTLUNDH Another author to have plumped for Gotland as a setting is Håkan Östlundh, who has written six books about Visby police detective Fredrik Broman. They feature classic, unsentimental investigations of credible murders, where a car The summer paradise Öland shows a darker side in the books of Johan Theorin. box smells as vile as rotten seaweed, or where a young woman ponders whether to report her father for murder, or where two petty thieves suddenly find themselves in the clutches of hardened criminals. Gotland is both a cheerless winter wilderness and a sun-drenched summer paradise. MARI JUNGSTEDT Mari Jungstedt has produced eleven books about Inspector Knutas and his colleagues in the Visby police force in Gotland, Sweden’s foremost holiday island. Tourists flock there in the summer to enjoy the sandy beaches and ancient town walls, handicrafts and local delicacies. Jungstedt has murdered all over Gotland and often makes reference to its history, its adjoining island, Fårö, where Ingmar Bergman lived, and the political focal point of the Swedish summer, Almedal Week. She contrasts the teeming life of summer with the empty, abandoned island environments of autumn and winter. Photo: Lena Vasylenko
Raukarna: Along the coast of Gotland are jagged rocks (rauk) sculpted by nature, some with almost human expressions. LEIF G.W. PERSSON The autumn of 2013 saw the arrival of the tenth police novel from Sweden’s best-known criminologist, Leif G W Persson, who mixes a close familiarity with his subject with ironically humorous observation. His cast of police characters ranges from the masterly Inspector Lars Martin Johansson, a northerner who “can see round corners”, according to his admirers, to the corrupt and prejudiced Evert Bäckström. They usually operate from Stockholm’s central police station in Kungsholmen, but JENS Inspector Johansson’s favourite haunts are an Italian LAPIDUS bar and a hot-dog stand elsewhere in the city. The protagonists seldom leave Stockholm, but in “Linda, The 2006 publication of “Easy Money”, the first of three As in The Linda Murder”, Evert Bäckström makes life fast-moving thrillers, brought criminal lawyer Jens difficult for people in the southern town of Växjö. Lapidus immediate success as an author and marked a new direction for Swedish crime fiction. While James Ellroy and Dennis Lehane write in a similar vein, Lapidus is something new. The language is clipped, hip hop- oriented and full of slang expressions and mannerisms. The settings are the flashy nightclubs around Stureplan, but also drug-running locations around Stockholm. The dream of young men from the run-down suburban estates is to get rich quick but they are dragged ever Photo: Cecilia Larsson deeper into danger. Lapidus calls his trilogy “Stockholm noir” – and it grows increasingly black.
The stripped beauty of Skogskyrkogården (the Forest Cemetery) recalls the places where rites of ancient Scandinavians took place. ARNE DAHL Arne Dahl is the pseudonym of author Jan Arnald, who has written 10 books about the A Group, a talented group of unusual police investigators in Stockholm operating in traditional Stockholm environments: the old industrial zone at Sickla (now gone), the increasingly trendy streets of the Södermalm district, and luxury villas in wealthy suburbs such as Danderyd. But crime no longer recognises frontiers, and consequently Arne Dahl’s new series is Opcop, about a group of Europol officers in The Hague in Holland who work across Photo: Magnus Fröderbergx borders. The A Group favourites are still there, of course. So far, three Opcop books have appeared, with titles taken from old Swedish children’s games. Photo: Jason Wesley Upton Wesley Jason Photo:
Stockholm by night. The Stockholm metro. STIEG LARSSON The Millennium Trilogy scarcely needs any introduction: journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tough, asocial computer hacker Lisbeth Salander are world famous. Their creator, Stieg Larsson, died before
Photo: Richard Hemmer Photo: Richard the series was published and the trilogy achieved worldwide fame. It is an affectionate pastiche on the Swedish crime writing genre, represented by the whodunit, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, the police novel, “The Girl Who Played with Fire”, and the spy thriller, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”. Stieg Larsson carefully documents his Södermalm settings: the journalist’s coffee breaks at the Kaffebar in Hornsgatan, the editorial offices of the Millennium Stieg Larsson’s favorite café in Stockholm, Mellqvist Coffee Bar. journal in Götgatan, and Lisbeth Salander’s flats, the first in Lundagatan in the Högalid district and the second a luxury apartment overlooking Slussen.
KRISTINA OHLSSON For a crime writer, it is extremely useful to have worked both in the Swedish security service and as a counter-terrorism officer in the OSCE (Organisation For Security and Cooperation in Europe). Kristina Ohlsson made her debut with “Unwanted” (2009), a traditional police thriller in which a child disappears on a train journey between Södertälje and Stockholm. The cases dealt with by her protagonists, Inspector Alex Recht and investigative analyst Fredrika Bergman, become increasingly international in character. “Hostage” (2012) was about a terrorist threat against a plane flying from Stockholm to the United States, and in “Stars of David” (2013) children at a Jewish school in Stockholm are murdered.
Photo: Let Ideas Compete
Stockholm is a city of water and light built on islands connected by many bridges. LIZA MARKLUND With her debut novel, “The Bomber”, in 1998, Liza Marklund changed the Swedish crime writing map. The book was a major success. Marklund was awarded both the Swedish Crime Writer Academy’s prize for a first book and the new Poloni Prize designed to encourage women writers of crime fiction. Since then, restless tabloid reporter Annika Bengtzon has starred in a total of ten books – and she is an unusual protagonist. She leads an everyday brand of city life in her Stockholm flat, forever puzzling together bus times, press deadlines and parental obligations. The first books of the series in particular are set on the streets of the capital, where murder victims are discovered in a Jewish cemetery in the inner city, a woman is murdered in the central square, Sergels Torg, and Bengtzon meets a bomber at a fictitious Olympic stadium in southern Stockholm. Photo: Daniel Mott
Nighttime in one of Stockholm’s suburbs.
ANDERS BÖRGE ROSLUND AND HELLSTRÖM This crime writing duo first appeared in 2004 with “The Beast”, which dealt with paedophilia but also asked questions about the impact of individual acts on the community at large. In the six books they have produced so far, Roslund & Hellström scrutinise Sweden’s and especially Stockholm’s underworld, sometimes literally, as in “The Girl Beneath the Street”, in which homeless people live in city tunnels. “Two Soldiers” describes a fictitious Stockholm suburb built during the Social Democrats’s attempts to reduce the housing shortage by erecting numerous high-rise estates, which have since become ghettoes. KERSTIN EKMAN Nowadays, Kerstin Ekman doesn’t write crime novels, but both her first six books and her best-known work are murder stories. She made her debut in the 1950s
Photo: Rob de Wit during the golden age of Swedish crime writing with “30 meter mord”, which was widely acclaimed, as were her subsequent books. But the book selected a few years ago as the best Swedish crime novel ever written was “Blackwater”, a horribly suggestive story about a young woman and her daughter who arrive in a small village in the Jämtland forest region. An incredibly beautiful Swedish summer greets them, but the idyll is Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden has an eternal night in winter and midnight sun in summer. shattered by the discovery of two tourists murdered in their tent. Kerstin Ekman is one of Sweden’s foremost contemporary authors. ÅSA LARSSON The five crime novels that Åsa Larsson has produced
to date are all set in the snowy north of Sweden, Grant Photo: Peter around Kiruna in northern Lapland. There we meet edgy, temperamental lawyer Rebecka Martinsson, who has swapped her career-fixated Stockholm existence for life in the small village of Kurravaara and who joins Anna-Maria Mellan, a calm, self-possessed local police officer, in investigating murder cases. Clergymen are put to death, sects are exposed, murder victims are The snowmobile has become an essential means of transport found both on and under the ice, and in a small dog in the large snowy expanses of the north. kennel a boy who can no longer speak is hiding. The landscape is mortally cold and people live far apart, but it is strangely warm and secure in the kitchens where the dogs sleep in the heat from the stove.
MICHAEL HANS HJORTH AND ROSENFELDT Photo: Henrik Trygg Criminal psychologist Sebastian Bergman is one of the more unpleasant main characters in Swedish crime fiction. He is gifted but so unreliable that the head of the National Homicide Squad, Torkel Höglund, dares not give him any demanding assignments. Bergman is nevertheless drawn in when murders occur in the quiet town of Västerås (where a young boy disappears), when a woman is found dead in the Stockholm suburb of Tumba, and when two women hiking in the mountains find skeletons in a part of Jämtland that many Swedish holiday hikers are familiar with.
Lapland described by Åsa Larsson is a mixture of pervasive nature and indispensable technology.