Can Scandinavian Crime Fiction Help Us Understand Who is
Screwing Us?

Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?

by Deborah Orr

The Guardian (UK)
February 24, 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/24/can-scandinavian-crime-fiction-teach-socialism

Who killed Nanna Birk Larsen? The question grips the
relatively small, but avid, band of people who are following
The Killing, a Danish crime series being screened on BBC4.
The Killing throws up plenty of other questions, too. One
even feels a strange tug of interest in Copenhagen's local
political scene because the abduction, rape, torture and
murder of a 19-year-old student seems inextricably linked to
a number of people fighting a city election. Alliances
between various political parties ebb and flow, as the turns
of the plot hurl suspicion at different candidates.

One of the many things The Killing asks is this: are
political coalitions really healthy?

It is no doubt coincidence that the query is so particularly
pertinent in Britain right now. But there is a definite
reason why a slice of Scandinavian crime fiction should be
actively concerned with framing socio-political debate. It
is part of what is expected of the genre in this part of the
world, and has been since Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö started
publishing what came to be known as the Martin Beck series,
in 1965.

The couple, former journalists, conceived 10 crime novels
that would provide a deliberate critique of what they viewed
as the degeneration of Sweden. Marxists themselves, they
intended to use the crime genre to illustrate the advantages
of socialistic approaches to social problems. That sounds
unbearably didactic and worthy. But the tremendous thing is
that the books work first and foremost as crime fiction. In
fact, they are reckoned by the cognoscenti to be among the
finest and most influential crime novels ever written.

Essentially, the pair challenged the convention of the lone
genius private detective, replacing him with a group of
police officers, led by the low-key Beck, who depended on
each other to solve cases - and also, as a matter of course,
put up with, or worked round, colleagues who were not so
gifted. Maverick individualism was out, patient and humane
people management was in. Thus, the ever-shifting group
ploughed through many and varied crime scenes - crime scenes
that usually in some way or other questioned the permissive
values espoused by the liberal left so successfully at that
time.

It seems to me that in the pages of these Swedish police
procedurals, all those years ago, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were
examining contradictions that the British left even now
refuses properly to acknowledge. The socialist left and the
liberal left have little in common, with Blairism a shining
example of how difficult it is to "triangulate" them. Hard
work and compromise is needed before social freedom and
state welfare can be shackled together. Even then, perhaps,
the resulting beast is an impossible chimera.

Is it too much to speculate that the current huge vogue for
Scandinavian crime fiction is somehow a tacit
acknowledgement of the need to have this debate, and the
fear of what conclusions it might draw? Henning Mankell, in
his Wallander series, now televised in two versions in
Britain, makes no bones about the fact that he is continuing
in the Martin Beck tradition. Stieg Larsson, who meant his
phenomenally successful Millennium trilogy to be a 10-part
work when he first started writing it, has succeeded in
igniting exactly the sort of debate, among feminists anyway,
that Sjöwall and Wahlöö expected.

Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo, with 5m sales worldwide and
film deals in the works, similarly uses sexual crime as an
expression of the extremes of discord among men and women.
This "metaphor" is somewhat unanswerable, on the face of it.
But the details are quite controversial. The women who are
killed in his novel The Snowman, for example, stand accused
of denying men their paternal roles, and messing up their
children in the process. Discuss that thesis in sexually and
politically mixed company, and passions can run high quite
fast.

Nesbo is not a reactionary, despite the "traditional family
values" cast that can be placed on his bestselling novel's
storyline. Like his peers and predecessors, he deals with
problems inherent in social democracy, problems that are not
that usefully divided between "left" and "right".

It is often said now that the two opposing terms have become
"meaningless", since both left and right contain a range of
values from libertarian to authoritarian. In truth, the
political tension is between freedom and regulation, often
between whether the social realm should be regulated in
order to benefit the economic realm, or the other way round.
Social democracy, if it is about anything, surely, is about
constantly striving to get that tricky balance right.

The British are used to believing that the Scandinavians,
especially the Swedes, have social democracy cracked, while
Britain is far from being a socially democratic country. The
truth, however, is much more nuanced. Britain shares many of
the values and difficulties of the Scandinavian states, and
of other European states that Britain tends to view as being
much more socially democratic than we are.

That was emphasised in a depressing report yesterday from
risk analyst Maplecroft, which ranked Britain the 10th most
likely country of 163 to undergo another economic crisis.
Sweden is fourth, and Japan is the only non-European country
to make it into the top 10, at nine. The shared challenges
are "ageing populations, substantial levels of debt and high
public spending on health and pensions".

Each of these, of course, is already high on the national
agenda, the subject of raucous, sometimes hysterical debate.
The logical solution - if there is a solution at all - is
for everyone to live very healthy and disciplined lives,
expecting to look after more vulnerable members of the
family whenever necessary, and seeking only specialist or
temporary help from a well-ordered state as a last resort.
It is a vision that unites authoritarian left and right, but
scares the bejesus out of free-marketeers and social
liberals. All of these groups, however, can probably find
something compelling in a chunk of Scandinavian crime
fiction, which possibly owes its great popularity to its
ability to offer sensationalist escape, but of a kind that
is grounded all too recognisably in the real world.

[Deborah Orr is one of Britain's leading social and
political commentators. She has a weekly column in G2, the
Guardian's features section.]

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