Roseanna - Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

They dredge Roseanna from the lake, naked and dead. The local police investigate, the murder squad from Stockholm become involved, and when they realise the dead woman is American, they get in touch with Detective Kafka stateside.

This was Sjowall and Wahloo's first collaboration, the first of their ten Martin Beck novels. In a sense it was their homage to Ed McBain, who to a great extent created the police procedural in the States; but Beck is really a unique creation, the Swedish precursor of the likes of Inspector Wexford, the ultra-realistic police procedural, the grind as well as the glamour.

It is the best of the Beck books I have read so far, mainly because it takes so many risks. I suppose they reasoned that Roseanna had to be a hit otherwise the other nine would never happen, therefore it had to stand out from the crowd. Which it certainly does. I have always been a fan of the interview typescript technique which features heavily here. But what really caught me was the progressive revelation of Roseanna as a healthy young woman living (and of course dying) on the eve of the Sixties Sexual Revolution. Indeed she dies because she is sexually liberated.

Ed McBain seems realistic because he is so fantastically stylised in his writing. Sjowall and Wahloo, in translation at any rate, are genuinely downbeat and quotidian. Their mastery is in the plotting and the gradual peeling back of the layers until the truth is revealed. As Henning Mankell puts it in his introduction to this 2006 reissue: "The book describes the fundamental virtue of the police: patience."

Nobody does it better than "the godparents of Scandinavian crime fiction" (Jo Nesbo). It may well be that Sjowall and Wahloo never did it better than in Roseanna.

One Step Behind - Henning Mankell

Considering his eminence and key role - second only, perhaps, to Stieg Larsson -  in the popularisation of Nordic crime thrillers, Mankell is oddly under-published in Britain. Consider, for example, the dreary cover and offensive bodytext typeface in this edition from Vintage. Those issues notwithstanding, One Step Behind is a reminder of just how great Mankell's Wallander novels are and how much he contributed to the genre.

The highly fallible lead detective - Wallander himself doesn't think he's fit to lead the investigation; the dense character backstories; the empathetic psychology of the killer, no matter how evil his or her actions... All of these Mankell  either brought to the table or developed from the great pioneers Sjowall and Wahloo, co-creators of the peerless Martin Beck.

Here, it seems, we have two mysteries - who killed and then resurrected a bunch of young party people, and the murder of Ystad detective Svedberg. It will come as no surprise that the cases turn out to be linked, but the perpetrator is very unusual if not unique. I certainly have never come across a fictional serial killer with this particular quirk - and I would have noticed, given that it is one I have thought about using in my own writing. It's a measure of how skilful Mankell's writing is that I didn't guess the twist until the second or third heavy hint.

A masterpiece of its type. Henning Mankell and Kurt Wallander at their mutual best.

In the Darkness - Karin Fossum

Karin Fossum is one of the leading lights of Nordic Noir. She has won all the prizes and is up there with Mankell and Nesbo in Scandinavia.  It is such a shame that she is so poorly published in English.  You never find her books in major bookshops and the product itself looks cheap and frankly manky.

In the Darkness dates from 1995 and is ostensibly an Inspector Sejer novel (her other protagonist Skarre hardly features).  In fact Sejer appears to do very little - until everything falls into place at the end and you realise just how clever a book this is.  The final twist came out of nowhere but, for me, was just perfect.  In many ways I was reminded of Nesbo's standalone novel Headhunters, which I've raved about before on this blog (I still haven't plucked up the courage to watch the movie for fear of disappointment).  It's no secret that Nesbo is a Fossum fan - the endorsement on the moon above is, for once, genuine.  Indeed he pays homage in Headhunters to one of the more startling moments here.  I won't go into detail, because the last thing I want to do is give any plot away, but toilets are involved.  Nesbo's cyclical structure, so different from the linear arrangement of the Hole novels, is surely also influenced by In the Darkness.

A magnificent achievement.  My interest in Nordic Noir, which was slipping a bit after a couple of imported duds on TV, is reinvigorated.

The Inspector and Silence - Hakan Nesser

This is marketed as Nordic Noir (see the essential comparison to Mankell and Larsson on the front cover).  Nesser is Swedish but his fictional world certainly isn't.  In fact, it isn't really anywhere other than Northern Europe, albeit the series detective, Inspector Van Veeteren, has a Dutch name as do most of the other characters and places.  But it's not Holland.  It's an imaginary amalgam.  And that makes it ever so slightly odd.

The story is a cracker.  Pubescent girls in a loony religious retreat are raped and murdered.  Obviously the pseudo Messiah in charge is suspect number one, but then---

Nesser is clearly highly intelligent - the pages crackle with it and you know that here is a writer who has long, meaningful conversations with his characters.  He handles story structure brilliantly, but this isn't really Noir, more a police procedural.  Even though this predates the Nordic boom (1997) and is well on in the series, Nesser manages to avoid cliche.   Instead of a drink problem, one of his secondary policemen has an artificial leg.  Far from dreading retirement, Van Veeteren can't wait for it.  Indeed, I understand the series continues with him as a private citizen.

OK, I figured out the killer by two-thirds of the way through, but it doesn't really matter because it isn't that kind of novel.  A discovery - I will definitely read more.

The Gallows Bird - Camilla Lackberg

Another crime novel that took a while to get going, albeit the first death is where it should be, on page one.  I suspect the problem is that The Gallows Bird (title utterly inexplicable) is the fourth is a series about Swedish cop Patrik Hedstrom and Lackberg assumes we are familiar with, and already care about, her continuing characters.  It is not a mistake that Mankell and Nesbo ever make.

The plotting is superb - let's be clear about that from the outset.  I would even go so far as to say masterful.  Linking so many crimes together and unravelling the tangled web so slowly is a hallmark of the very best crime writers.  Setting one murder in a reality TV show is a brainwave that has been waiting to find a home ever since Big Brother first polluted the airwaves but Lackberg is the first to my knowledge to seize the opportunity.  She clearly knows her subject.

There are nevertheless real problems with this book.  The dialogue - in this translation, anyway - is truly appalling, not that it matters when the plot gathers pace.  There is no sense of place - we always know where Wallander's Ystaad is and have a pretty good idea what it looks like, but I'm not even sure if Hedstrom's Tanumshede is on the coast or inland.  The reality TV show is called Sodding Tanum, which is an unnecessary distraction for British readers; I'm guessing that's not the original Swedish meaning. 

The ending, the cliffhanger for the continuing characters, is however very nearly as jaw-dropping as Wallander's fate in The Troubled Man.  It alone is sufficient for me to await the arrival of the 5th Hedstrom novel.  It's called Tyskungen.  An English version is given on Lackberg's website but it gives too much away and will hopefully be changed for the translation proper.

The website also contains helpful guidance (Crime School) for aspirant crime writers.  The section on the importance of dialogue suggests I am right about the poor quality, probably hurried translation of this book.

Note, according to the publisher's website, The Gallows Bird is now published under the title The Stranger, which strikes me as equally irrelevant.

The Troubled Man - Henning Mankell

I'd seen the TV dramatisations (English and both Swedish) but I had only read one of the Wallander books, the less-than-satisafactory The Pyramid.  Essentially, I concluded that Mankell was a pioneer of Nordic Noir, noteworthy but a little staid.  Then I laid hands on this, his latest and very definitely the last of Wallander.

This novel transcends genre.  A crime novel in which the crime is never fully solved, with an espionage background in which nothing is as it seems.  More than anything it is a novel of character, with the sixty-year-old Wallander running up against the dying of the light.

The story itself is nothing much but the character development is the work of a master.  And no author has ever disposed of the character who made him world-famous in so sudden, so devastating a manner.  Reichenbach Falls?  Pah - hooey!  Check out the last page of this beauty.