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Book Review: The Laughing Policeman

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
1970
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This book was an enjoyable combination of decent plot, good characters, and great style.

It is a murder mystery set in Stockholm. It sucks you in right away, starting with a pretty gripping description of the shooting of nine people on a double-decker bus late at night in a remote part of the city. Two less-than-enthusiastic patrolmen from the bordering suburb of Solna stumble across the bus first and trample all over the scene, eliminating many of the clues.

To make matters worse, one of the murdered passengers turns out to be an off-duty member of the homicide squad who had no discernable reason for being on that bus.

The case, naturally, becomes a red ball for the Stockholm P.D. and you spend the rest of the book watching the stressed-out detectives solve the crime.

It was neat to read a mystery set in Stockholm. I got to see not only the Swedish police but also a bit of Swedish culture from the inside. Stockholm becomes not an abstract, glamorous European destination but a big, real, gritty city. Northern and southern Swedish accents set peers apart and make them feel inferior. Americans start to look a little bit strange and foreign.

I liked that the team of Stockholm detectives is made up of distinctive, believable characters. You see the story from almost every detective’s point of view and you see how confused and frustrated they all are.

I also loved the writing style. The authors (a husband and wife team) use matter-of-fact, uncomplicated sentences that are just a little bit quirky. The book was originally written in Swedish but I don’t think it’s the translation to the English that makes the writing style so entertaining. This is the description of the patrol route the uninspired Solna patrolmen chose before they ran across the bus – a route designed to avoid running into anything that might actually require policing:

“It was a brilliantly thought-out course, leading through areas which were almost guaranteed empty of people. They met not a single car the whole way and saw only two living creatures, first a cat and then another cat.”

Often what the authors will do is start out with a really short sentence that has only basic information in it. Then they’ll repeat the sentence, making it a little bit longer by elaborating just a little bit. And then they’ll do that again… and again. Until after about five sentences, you have this really long sentence with all kinds of crazy detail in it that is a hundred times more informative than the original sentence. It’s like they’re reluctant to tell the story but can’t help letting it dribble out in spite of themselves.

There were, however, a couple things about the book that were annoying. For one thing, sometimes key pieces of information would be withheld from me and then would be revealed by the policeman I’d been following without me even knowing that he’d been doing any extra investigation. I don’t mind surprises but I like at least knowing that there’s something I don’t know. This felt like my characters were sneaking around behind my back.

And, frankly, the motives of the culprit, some of the victims, and the dead policeman’s girlfriend, all of which were key to the plot, seemed a bit dicey and unrealistic.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: A Cold Red Sunrise

Stuart M. Kaminsky
1989
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I really liked most of the characters and the setting of this book. But the main murder plot just wasn’t very gripping.

The story is set in the tiny town of Tumsk, Siberia. Police detective Rostnikov is sent from Moscow to investigate the murder of another detective who was killed while investigating the death of a little girl – the daughter of a dissident who is about to get deported to the west.

Rostnikov is extremely appealing; gruff and plainspoken. He is honest and works very hard but has run afoul of the KGB a couple times back in Moscow, so this is sort of a test for him. He has a very tall, unemotional, doggedly loyal assistant, Karpo, who is a little like Lurch from the Addams Family. The Party watchdogs are, of course, totally incompetent and full of bluster. I felt like all the townspeople were well-defined, down to the nervous old woman who serves the visiting policemen their food. The conversation was spare and direct.

Siberia itself also plays a great part in the book. Rostnikov is sent to Tumsk during the winter, so it is always ridiculously cold and the sun barely rises at all in the sky in the daytime. Snow is piled everywhere, several feet high. A snowplow (run by the Navy personnel manning the town’s weather station) clears the streets at 6:00 am every morning and serves as the town alarm clock. Most of the town’s residents are dissidents or skeptics or (like the incompetent Party watchdogs) rejects from Moscow of some kind. Everyone seems very much alone, isolated by the cold and the remote location.

The problem is that the murder story itself is a little simple and maybe a little tired. Rostnikov keeps all his information close to the vest, including from the reader, which is frustrating because you aren’t really able to make your own guesses (and thereby build up your suspense) from the evidence he uncovers. I do appreciate last-minute surprise revelations but in this book practically all the information you need comes out in the last ten pages.

It turned out that I did correctly guess who the murderer was, but mainly I just guessed that person because he/she seemed like the least likely suspect, and that’s who Agatha Christie teaches you to look out for. I still am not sure I really understand his/her motive.

Because of the plot issues, I was a bit surprised that this book won the Edgar. But the book did come out at the perfect time: the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was in its final crumble. Kaminsky’s detective and his assistant both have integrity and are just trying to do their jobs, and yet–or maybe because of that–they both end up struggling in their own ways against the oppressive system they live in. They are very sympathetic characters for the end of the Cold War.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Clash of the Titans

In 1980, a book named Titan won the Locus award for best novel. In 2007, another book named Titan won the Campbell award for best novel. Herewith, I give you a comparison of the two.

Novel	Titan	Titan
Author	John Varley	Ben Bova
Year Published	1979	2006
Award Won	Locus	Campbell
Stars	2	2
Plot Summary	Group of Earth scientists goes out to Saturn and gets swallowed up by giant alien orbital construct	Group of Earth scientists goes out to Saturn and gets swallowed up in convoluted melodrama
Ostensible reason for main characters visiting Saturn	Scientific exploration and research (investigating anomalies on Saturn’s moons)	Scientific research (mixed bag of atmospheric, ring, and moon investigation)
Intended duration of visit	Temporary	Permanent
Name of spaceship	Ringmaster	Goddard
Percent of book actually taking place on Titan	0%	20%
Snappy, male-sounding name of female spaceship captain main character	Cirocco Jones	Pancho Lane
Female main characters’ view of procreation	Determined to control their own procreation; three have to have an abortion to do so	Determined to get the right to have children in their space habitat; one has to run for chief administrator to do so
Forms of life discovered by humans	Centaurs; winged humanoids; killer mudfish; intelligent gas-filled blimps	Microbes in Titan’s methane seas; tiny creatures in Saturn’s ring ice
Irritating writing habits of author	Gratuitous use of palm-slapping, knuckle biting, and lip chewing	Silly regional accents; gratuitous use of dipping of the chin