22
Also by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
It’s dark and snow whirls from the rooftops in a Sweden where everything is perfect. As white as a thick layer of fresh snow on forest and land.
The snow-covered landscape here is an amazing sight, but we Swedish have always been a curious and strangely suspicious people. We want to know what’s hiding under the snow. We need to find out what’s underneath society’s pristine surface.
This need was probably the starting point for the Swedish crime fiction tradition; it all began with a healthy distrust. Because people here have always known that the brightness of summer is followed by winter, that the light is followed by the terrible darkness. And nothing is as it seems – the ice on the lake looks inviting but might be treacherous.
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were both Marxists and they began writing crime novels because they had a burning desire to investigate and influence society. When they debuted in 1965 with Roseanna, the status of Swedish crime fiction was no higher than that of the comic strip.
The crime novel was clever, a bit academic and almost always bone-dry. It had been heavily influenced by British detective stories and their aristocratic heroes – gentlemen who solved puzzles with ice-cold logic.
Sjowall and Wahloo tore down the old curtains in the windows and invited in the dirty contemporary. Their style was closer to the American tradition, but they filled their stories with warnings of society’s dangerous conservatism, political corruption and human greed. In this way, they allied themselves with the people, the common man.
And – perhaps the most brilliant thing about their entire project – they were using a commercial genre to expose society’s hypocrisy and injustice. No one had done anything like this before and their tone had a rawness that made us gasp.
Sjowall and Wahloo made crime fiction a permanent part of our daily lives. It was a great and much needed change, and their novels became almost a movement.
But they might not have changed society as much as they changed the Swedish crime writing tradition. Even now, every Swedish crime writer has to pass Sjowall and Wahloo. They stand like two sentries guarding the genre.
But with a new tradition comes new rules and prohibitions, and the crime novel was soon formularized again. In the decades after Sjowall and Wahloo, a number of imitations had become trapped in that cage. The subversive social criticism sounded more and more mechanical and turned into a kind of alibi. Crime novels were suddenly expected to apologize for the entertaining side of the genre.
We grew up with Sjowall and Wahloo – they were powerful parents. But Lars Kepler is a wayward child, and he had to rebel, to break out and escape from the cage, along with his big brother Stieg Larsson.
Sjowall and Wahloo did not apologize and neither do we. We just love exciting thrillers. We want to combine the old tradition with a filmic pace. For us, this genre presents an opportunity to examine our own fears, to face them and weave them into great stories.
What a writing process is actually like in practice is always difficult to explain. We learn that Sjowall and Wahloo wrote alternate chapters. For them, it was the most creative method, pushing each other forward. Our method is completely different. We write like two people playing the piano together, four-handed. We don’t even write alternate sentences; we do everything together, like one person.
Writing is a way to discuss mankind, our shortcomings and our innate heroism, and for us, the crime genre is an optimistic genre. Only here can you make the world as it should be for a few wonderful hours – the violence ends and the perpetrators are stopped.
Sjowall and Wahloo books were a part of our childhood summers. We would both run to the library for these desirable books and read them during the long, bright summer nights. They were a leap into a whole new world. From childhood stories and into a raw, realistic tradition.
It is no coincidence that their books are mostly set in the summer. The world is bright and beautiful just like Swedish society, but we know that heavy darkness is approaching at a tremendous pace, just as we all know that violence is hiding under the surface.
So many years have passed since first reading their books but it’s a pleasure to meet them again. The storytelling is effective; the suspense is still there. Of course some things have dated; it is not entirely possible to ignore the simplistic rhetoric and the problematic portrayals of women. But on the whole, this dual authorship is unique.
In Cop Killer we find a motive that is as timeless as it is familiar: Death and the Maiden. The book begins with a woman waiting for a bus when a car stops and offers her a ride. As a reader, you know that she shouldn’t step into the car. As it’s Sjowall and Wahloo, the woman is neither young, nor a virgin, but is promiscuous. Her murder is woven together with the manhunt for a young man who steals the wrong car. Sjowall and Wahloo manage to do it again. They knock the world out faster than anyone can pronounce their names.
Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril
a.k.a. Lars Kepler
She reached the bus stop well ahead of the bus, which would not be along for half an hour yet. Thirty minutes of a person's life is not an especially long time. Besides, she was used to waiting and was always early. She thought about what she would make for dinner, and a little about what she looked like – her usual idle thoughts.
By the time the bus came, she would no longer have any thoughts at all. She had only twenty-seven minutes left to live.
It was a pretty day, clear and gusty, with a touch of early autumn chill in the wind, but her hair was too well lacquered to be affected by the weather.
What did she look like?
Standing
