(Superintendent Larsson, with a quick glance, threw the ball over to Ahlberg, sat down, and demonstratively took a cigar out of his breast pocket.)
ANSWER: No.
QUESTION: Is it possible that she is from this city or somewhere around here?
ANSWER: It doesn’t seem likely.
QUESTION: Why not?
ANSWER: If that were the case we would have been able to identify her.
QUESTION: Is that your only reason for suspecting that she comes from another part of the country?
(Ahlberg looked dismally at the Chief of Police who was devoting all his attention to his
cigar.)
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: Has the search of the bottom near the breakwater produced any results?
ANSWER: We have found a number of things.
QUESTION: Do these things have anything to do with the crime?
ANSWER: That is not easy to answer.
QUESTION: How old was she?
ANSWER: Presumably between twenty-five and thirty.
QUESTION: Exactly how long had she been dead when she was found?
ANSWER: That isn’t easy to answer, either. Between three and four days.
QUESTION: The information that has been given to the public is very vague. Isn’t it possible to tell us something more exact, information which really says something?
ANSWER: That’s what we are trying to do here. We have also retouched a picture of her face which you are welcome to, if you want to have it.
(Ahlberg reached for a group of papers on the desk and started to hand them out. The air in the room was heavy and humid.)
QUESTION: Did she have any particular marks on her body?
ANSWER: Not as far as we know.
QUESTION: What does that mean?
ANSWER: Simply, that she had no marks at all.
QUESTION: Has a dental examination given any special clues?
ANSWER: She had good teeth.
(A long and pressing pause followed. Martin Beck noted that the reporter in front of him was still doodling with the star he had drawn.)
QUESTION: Is it possible that the body was thrown into the water at some other place and that it was brought to the breakwater by the current?
ANSWER: It doesn’t seem likely.
QUESTION: Have you learned anything by knocking on doors?
ANSWER: We are still working on that.
QUESTION: To sum up, isn’t it true that the police have a complete mystery on their hands?
It was the Public Prosecutor that answered:
‘Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning.’
With that, the press conference ended.
On the way out, one of the older reporters stopped Martin Beck, laid his hand on his arm and said: ‘Don’t you know anything at all?’ Martin Beck shook his head.
(from Roseanna, Ch 5)
"city": In Swedish there is only one term, "stad", for anything bigger than a village. Motala in the novel has a population of 27,000 (and it isn't much more populous today), much smaller than Linköping or Norrköping. Nevertheless it's regarded as an important regional centre, so perhaps "city" is defensible.
Ten novels of thirty chapters each, centred on detective Martin Beck ... Sjöwall and Wahlöö, already experienced writers, needed money to support their growing family, but they had higher ambitions too, a radical critique of modern Swedish society from a Marxist perspective. (They didn't make a lot of money, but they sold a lot of books; Martin Beck has become a regular TV and movie detective in Sweden, played by various actors over the years.)
The thirty-chapter format, the authors writing alternate chapters, was both realist (the toil of police procedurals, not the dazzling logic of a Christie sleuth) and modernist, something cubist about it, a refracted and many-angled portrait of society. It tends to brilliant set-pieces, for instance in Roseanna the press conference in which there's nothing to say (Ch 5), the interview transcripts with e.g. Mulvaney (Ch 12), the conversation with the deaf retired colonel and the blaring TV (Ch 17), the stop-start film-show of the trip (Ch 19). Sometimes lucid, more often deflating, sometimes hilarious and usually sad, these set-pieces inch the case forward while constantly enlarging and challenging our understanding of what's real, who someone is, what life consists of...
*
Quotations from Lois Roth's English translation of Roseanna. (1968, I think.)
Ch 1 (p. 2) "The vessel was called The Pig ..." This is the bucket dredger that pulls up the body of a woman from the bottom of the lock. Lois Roth evidently didn't want to bog down the English version of Roseanna, and her text is actually even tauter than the original Swedish text. There, for instance, it's explained that the vessel's real name is Gripen (The Griffin) but is inevitably nicknamed Grisen (The Pig). We're also told that the useful engineer who knows about such things is known as Slamsnuskaren ("the sludge nutter", roughly speaking) by his mates.
Ch 2 , p. 6. A tiny bit of missing dialogue in the car: "Ugly bruises." "Yes." "You'll keep me informed" etc.
Ch 3, p. 11 . "'Yes, no. Yes, no. What's the difference?' Martin Beck thought to himself."
(His wife has asked him if he's taking his pistol.) Actually, what Martin Beck is internally reciting is a Swedish equivalent of "eeny meeny miney mo": "Essike, dessike, lonton, tonton, semelimaka, kuckelikaka, ärtan, pärtan.. " That's what gives him the faint amusement that his wife picks up on.
Ch 8. The telephone conversation between Kafka and Martin Beck is in English in the original text. (Hence Martin Beck is immediately shown reporting the key information to Kollberg, in Swedish: in the English translation it might strike a very attentive reader as a bit repetitious.)
Ch 14 (p. 98) "Sundyberg" is an error for Sundbyberg, which like Hagalund is a northern suburb of Stockholm.
Ch 14.(p. 99) "That boat, the Kalajoki. It's just leaving Holmsund. It's tied up at Söderhamn for the night ...." This ought to say something like "It is going to be tying up at Söderhamn for the night...." The distance from Holmsund to Söderhamn is no less than 400km. Given that it's already early afternoon when this conversation takes place, I should think the boat wouldn't reach Söderhamn until pretty late at night. Meanwhile Ahlberg and one of his men drive all the way from Motala to Söderhamn (also about 400km), arrest the seaman Eriksson, and then immediately drive all the way back to Motala. By 7 am the next day Ahlberg has already interviewed the suspect. You might wonder why Ahlberg needs to go all the way to Söderhamn himself. Or why they don't send someone from Stockholm, which would be a significantly shorter journey? The upshot is that the next morning Martin Beck has to travel to Motala to interview Eriksson, and he spends three days there. Why arrange it that way -- I mean, from the authors' point of view? I think, simply to bring Martin Beck (and consequently, us), back to Motala for a third time, and perhaps particularly because the visit is disappointing; nothing happens in Motala, and the interview is a washout. The novel is telling us that location isn't important, that holidaymakers travel right across Sweden (and in fact the whole novel turns on this) but we the readers aren't being invited to take a holiday. Remember that brief anomalous moment, in Ch 5, when Martin Beck is beside the canal and "He drank in the cool, clear odour of wild flowers and wet grass. It reminded him of his childhood, but that was before tobacco smoke, petrol odours and mucus had robbed his sense of their sharpness. Nowadays it wasn't often he had this pleasure." Nor will we: as the novel takes us through seven months of investigation, seven months of autumn and winter.
Ch 29, p. 233.
'In August was the jackal born,
The rains fell in September.
"Now such a fearful flood as this,"
Says he, "I can't remember!"
Kollberg's quotation comes from Rudyard Kipling's remarkable story "The Undertakers" in The Second Jungle Book. He quotes it in Swedish:
Augustifödd schakalen såg
septemberregn i dalen.
Nej, maken till sån syndaflod
knappt jag minnes, skrek schakalen.
In Swedish, as in English, Kipling's epigram gained a certain currency as a comment on people who make strong assertions based on minimal experience. Presumably, in this case, Stenström's assertion that "You can take anyone with that" (Kollberg's paratrooper move).
*
The voyage of the Diana
Swedish readers would have taken it all for granted. The route is a longstanding popular tourist experience, crossing Sweden between Stockholm and Gothenburg along the “blå band” waterway that includes the Göta and Trollhätte canals as well as areas of open water. The Diana is a real boat and is still plying the same route today.
The trip takes six days (with numerous sightseeing stops). From Stockholm the boat goes west into Mälaren, then south to Södertälje and out into the Baltic around Trosa, going south past Oxelösund (this is when they ran into fog), threading through lots of islands, then turning into a narrow inlet past Stegeborg (where the engine broke), reaching the start of the canal at Mem, then Söderköping (where the engine was repaired), then the lakes of Asplången, Roxen, Boren and so to Borenshult (Motala) where, four days later, the body is found. The route continues into the massive lakes Vättern and (via Hajstorp) Vänern, exiting the latter at Trollhättan and so down to Gothenburg and the west coast on the Trollhätte canal / Göta river.
Roseanna
At the deepest level, the novel is about judgment of its title character. For the first seven chapters she has no name, is only a corpse. An individual body, young, vigorous, not classically shapely, strangled and brutally violated. This extended prelude makes us think about her in depth, with nothing to go on but her body. A human being, a bare forked animal.
Then we finally receive a relative flood of information about the librarian from Lincoln, Nebraska ("I would even venture to say that we know all the important factors about her," says Kollberg.) She's sexually active and takes the initiative; she wants regular sex but doesn't want a relationship. It stirs potential judgments, for example from the girl friend ("friend"?) who calls her "cheap trash ... a bitch on heat" (Ch 13) and isn't surprised she came to a bad end. And of course from the man who feels called upon to punish girls who are "disgusting" (Ch 30). Even her ex-boyfriend, the engineer Edgar M. Mulvaney, confesses "[F]irst I thought that she was just an ordinary, cheap tramp although she had not given that impression at all in the beginning. Then I thought that she was a nymphomaniac. One idea was crazier than the other. Now, here, especially since she is dead, it seems absurd that I ever could have thought either of those things" (Ch 12).
Then Mulvaney fell in love with her.
M. You have to understand that Roseanna was the most upright person I have ever met. She liked me a lot and above all, she liked to sleep with me. But she didn't want to live with me. She never made any secret of that. Both she and I knew precisely why we would meet. (Ch 12)
Kollberg only means that we know everything about her salient to the investigation. We don't really know so very much about her: what, for example, was she writing during her solitary evenings?
She is certainly unusual in her solitariness. As early as Ch 4, Martin Beck theorizes about the unknown victim:
She was young and he was sure that she had been pretty. She must have had someone who loved her. Someone close to her who was wondering what had happened to her. She must have had friends, colleagues, parents, maybe sisters and brothers. No human being, particularly a young, attractive woman, is so alone that there is no-one to miss her when she disappears.
Even in those days, when people travelling abroad would not be expected to make regular contact with loved ones at home, it's unexpected that Roseanna is so little missed for so long; it will be three months before Martin Beck learns her name. In fact both her parents were dead, she had moved from Colorado to Nebraska, she had apparently no really close friends, or at any rate her independent spirit resisted being watched over.
The novel never glances at the reader, the police themselves never discuss the case from this point of view, but the question is insistent: do you, the reader, also have some prejudices? Do you really accept the range of variety in human beings, especially women? Is it OK with you, her being Roseanna?
Interesting article (in Swedish) about the novel's cultural context, and about Tore Sjöberg's 1967 movie Roseanna, a glamorous romp that utterly traduced the spirit of the novel, though Sjöwall and Wahlöö themselves contributed to the screenplay: they really needed the money.
Watch the trailer, though, it's great.
*
In 2014 there was a BBC radio dramatisation of Roseanna and several other books in the series. To me it seems to lose much of the subtlety of the original (for instance, the police are made to voice conventional social judgments of the murder victim in exactly the way that the novel avoids). I dare say I'd be just as disappointed with the Swedish TV adaptations.
"Someone once said that our country is a small but hungry capitalist state. This judgement is correct ..." (The defence lawyer Braxén in The Terrorists, Ch 24).
So I've also read the final novel in the series, Terroristerna (The Terrorists) (1975). I was in Spain, not far from where they wrote it, which was in a rented bungalow in Malaga. Per Wahlöö did most of the writing, and Sjöwall tidied it up. He was terribly ill (he died of a morphine overdose soon afterwards). I think this background shows through. The social critiques are fierce, sometimes with the lucid encapsulation of a last testament; some of the writing, for instance about the ways of the murdered porn king Walter Petrus, couldn't be more concise and conclusive. But there are shortcomings too. ULAG, the novel's terrorist organisation, doesn't make much sense; and maybe that's why its agents aren't credible characters, they're just instruments (of the organisation, sure, but also of the novel). Some of the assaults on everything Swedish, no matter how trivial (the weather, the airport, Malmö), feel like reheated patter from other and lesser writers. A killer who quotes Elmer Diktonius ... ; that's a weary mainstream recipe for spicing things up with a bit of second-hand culture. The Terrorists is maybe a good place too to reflect on the limitations of this social analysis, for instance when it came to media and technology, never mind postcolonial exploitation or environmental ruin. Easy to say from half a century later, maybe.
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