It’s a Mystery: “The Devil’s lair never looks like you expect”
/Bad Blood
By Arne DahlPantheon Books, 2013In 2008, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo arrived on these shores from Sweden and began what turned into a global sensation with his Millennium trilogy. It was soon followed by The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010). Well into 2012 all three novels appeared on worldwide bestseller lists. It bears repeating that it is the drawing power of the punk hacker heroine, Lisbeth Salander, that made Larsson a household name. I was an early champion and called her “intriguing, mesmerizing, and addictive.” She remains one of the most original female characters of this or any other century.The Larsson phenomenon unleashed an influx of crime fiction from the Nordic countries that continues to this day—ranging from top notch to mediocre, with a plethora of the latter. But long before him, there was Henning Mankell, who has been described as the master of Swedish noir. Mankell’s finely wrought whodunits have sold millions of copies to date. He introduced his brooding, brilliant middle-aged copper Kurt Wallander in Faceless Killers (1997) and gave us Wallander’s swan song, The Troubled Man, in 2011. Aside: Mankell is going strong without Wallander. He has a much-touted novel just out, A Treacherous Paradise.Still, hands down, the grandmasters of Swedish detective fiction remain Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Beginning in 1965 with Roseanna, the writing duo introduced the world to the endearing, flawed Stockholm police Inspector Martin Beck, who has been called “a Scandinavian Maigret.” Over the next decade, they wrote a Beck book a year. This remarkable series concluded in 1975 with The Terrorists, completed a few weeks before Wahlöö died. Before Beck, the couple worked as journalists and had been active in left wing politics, a background they share with Mankell and Larsson. Mankell, a devoted fan, wrote an introduction to a new edition of Roseanna (2006), calling it “a modern classic.”Which brings me to one of Sweden’s latest entries into the crime novel arena, Arne Dahl, who is hailed in northern Europe as Henning Mankell’s successor. Bad Blood is the second in what Dahl calls his Intercrime series. The first was the excellent Misterioso (2011), in which he introduces Detective Paul Hjelm, part of a hand-picked Stockholm police unit—the A-Unit, five men and one woman. At their helm is Detective Jan-Olov Hultin, whose distinguished, controlled demeanor belies a vicious soccer player underneath. It’s a skill that must never be underestimated in running such a diverse, highly charged, law enforcement group. Doggedly the team follows one lead after another to ferret out the killer targeting Sweden’s high-profile business leaders. (His hits are dubbed the “Power Murders”.) They wind up navigating the murky underworlds of the Russian Mafia and the secretive members-only society of Sweden’s wealthiest denizens. They must also delve into one of the country’s most persistent ills: a deep-rooted xenophobia that affects both the police and the perpetrator. Like Mankell, Dahl uses the crime genre to raise questions of current importance in society, but in his own highly original way.Bad Blood begins in the autumn, which is apparently a time fraught with apprehension for many Swedes. This year the sense of foreboding is heightened by unending torrential rains of almost biblical proportions. The malaise at police headquarters on Kungsholmen in Stockholm is not just weather related. An uneventful year has passed since the “Power Murders” case. Paul Hjelm and his colleagues are going stir crazy on what he calls another “motionless morning”:
Because the investigation had been a success, the group was made permanent as a special unit within the National Criminal Police, an auxiliary resource for “violent crimes of an international character”…. And that was the problem. No other “violent crimes of an international character” had afflicted the country during the past year, so more and more internal criticism was being leveled against the existence of the A-Unit…the group was close to being history…. What the unit needed was a robust serial killer. Of a robust international character.
A specific and extremely unofficial American task force used it to get the Vietcong to talk without screaming. An utterly silent method of torture, tailor made for the jungle…. The method is based on a single special instrument: specially designed micromechanical pincers that, when closed, closely resemble a terrifying cannula. A big syringe. It’s driven into the throat from the side. With the help of small control wires, tiny claws unfurl inside the trachea and grip the vocal chords in a manner that makes it impossible for any sound to escape the lips of the victim…. Once the victim is silenced, you can then heap on conventional methods, best directed at fingernails and genitals, where small quiet motions incur the most pain. And then you just release the grip around the vocal cords a tiny bit so that something like a whisper can slip out. The victim can reveal his secret, quietly, quietly. For this purpose related pincers were developed, based on the same principles as the vocal cord pincers, but these other ones were aimed at the central ganglia in the neck which are tugged and pulled a little bit from the inside, at which point an appalling pain radiates up into the head and down through the body.
As the stunned team absorbs all this, Hultin has some cautionary words:
I would like you to think carefully about what we’re up against. It doesn’t resemble anything we’ve ever had to deal with in our whole lives…. It isn’t really possible to imagine such ice-cold indifference to other people’s lives and such twisted pleasure at their suffering. This is a seriously damaged person of the sort that the American system seems to produce on an assembly line, and that they would have been welcome to refrain from exporting. But now he’s here. And the only thing we can really do is to wait for him to start. It could be a long time; it could be tomorrow. But it will happen, and we have to be prepared.
The hunt is on and the squad members are galvanized, dividing the pursuit of any leads, however slim, according to their individual areas of expertise. Despite seemingly Herculean efforts, the body count begins to rise at an alarming rate. So does the suspense. Dahl skillfully uses alternating perspectives to tell the story. The events are seen through the eyes of the victims, the killer and the cops. And it is a wild and grisly journey to a conclusion which is as astounding as it is unsettling.Although Dahl uses Paul Hjelm as his scoutmaster, so to speak, he does not rely on one individual to grip the reader. He fleshes out each member of the crew with inventive, humorous, lifelike bits, a la Ed McBain. In fact, as in McBain’s 87th precinct novels, Dahl creates the squad room as an eclectic, often jocular ensemble with dialogue to match. The Martin Beck series was inspired by McBain. Arne Dahl’s novels conjure up Sjöwall and Wahlöö in the best of all possible ways.Bad Blood is a compellingly stylish thriller that is also a thought-provoking social satire. Dahl casts a disenchanted glance at a once comfortable country afflicted with general social unease and the deteriorating global state of affairs. Add him to your list of must-haves in crime fiction.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.
