Swedish Cops: From Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Stieg Larsson

Swedish Cops

Swedish Cops:

From Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Stieg Larsson

by Michael Tapper

First published in the UK in 2014 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2014 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos

Cover image: © TT News Agency/PA

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ISBN 978-1-78320-188-4

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-279-9

ePub ISBN 978-1-78320-280-5

Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1     The Crime Genre

Origins

Crime and the Law

Chapter 2     Enter the Police

A Genre is Born

The Police and the Welfare State

Backlash

Dirty Harry

Crime and Civilization

Crime Dystopia: The Psychopath and the Serial Killer

Chapter 3     Crime Scene: Sweden

A Beginning

Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and the Nation

Crime and Nationality

The Young Savages of the Asphalt Jungles

The Hoodlum Film

The Politics of Crime

From Punishment to Reform and Back Again

Moral Panics and Crime Journalism

Print the Faction!

Chapter 4     The 1960s and 1970s: Sjöwall and Wahlöö

Liberal–Conservative Criticism of the Welfare State

Criticism from within the Labour Movement

New Left Criticism of the Welfare State

Eco-humanist or Green Criticism of the Welfare State

Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall before Sjöwall and Wahlöö

The Story of a Crime: Sjöwall and Wahlöö from Freud to Marx

The Film Adaptations

Chapter 5     The 1980s: Leif G.W. Persson and Jan Guillou

Leif G.W. Persson

Jan Guillou

Chapter 6     The 1990s: Henning Mankell and Håkan Nesser

Henning Mankell

Håkan Nesser and the Eurocop from Neverland

Chapter 7     Millennium Cops

Crime and Punishment in the Age of the War on Terror

Son of Dirty Harry: Beck and the Iconic Rise of Gunvald Larsson

Roslund and Hellström

Stieg Larsson

Leif G.W. Persson: Downfall of the Welfare State

Chapter 8     Into the Twilight

Cops and the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft Dichotomy

The Vigilante Cop and Right-wing Extremism

The Vigilante Cop and Fascism

The Challenge of Evil

References

Index: Names

Index: Titles of Works

Acknowledgements

‘An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making’ is the familiar tagline for Jurassic Park, and looking back on the work on this book I know the feeling. I would like to express my deepest gratitude for the advice and input of history professor Ulf Zander and film studies professor Erik Hedling, both at Lund University, Sweden.

My family deserves a standing ovation for putting up with several years of hard work and for keeping my spirits up when they have been close to rock-bottom. I also want to extend my gratitude to secondhand bookshops around the world for providing me with a library that has shrunk the interior space of my house considerably. A warm osu to my fellow members of IF Lund’s Karate Kyokushinkai, for all the friendship and bruises that kept my energy level high throughout this work. Invaluable professional help in the translation and editing process was provided by Paul Norlen; without him I could not possibly have made it.

My deepest gratitude goes to the Swedish Crime Writer’s Academy, who in 2011 awarded me with the Golden Crowbar for best specialist literature. I am especially grateful, since I shared the limelight that year with one of my favourite authors in the genre: Arne Dahl (awarded for best Swedish crime novel: Viskleken/Chinese Whispers, 2011). For a generous grant to do the English edition I thank the Swedish Writers’ Union. Finally, I would like to send many warm thoughts to Tim Elameer and the staff at Intellect for handling my book with professional skill.

This book is dedicated to Marita, my wife and partner in crime.

Preface

Swedish Cops: From Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Stieg Larsson is the edited, revised and updated English edition of my dissertation ‘Snuten i skymningslandet: Svenska polisberättelser i roman och film 1965–2010’/‘The Cop in the Twilight Land: Swedish Police Narratives in Novels and Films 1965–2010’, published in its original Swedish edition (864pp.) by Nordic Academic Press in Lund 2011.

The editing process has been considerable, removing chapters on authors (Olov Svedelid) and film series (Johan Falk), restructuring the other chapters and trimming the reception sections considerably. After reading John-Henri Holmberg’s 2010 and 2011 essays about the disastrous translation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, and talking with my invaluable aid in translating the book, Paul Norlen, I decided not to use the current English translations of the novels treated in this book. Instead, I stuck with the Swedish editions and, if necessary, translated quotations myself with the help of Paul Norlen.

All titles of books, films, articles, etc. are written like this: Original title/English title (author year), when first mentioned in the book. If the title is available in English translation, then the English title is subsequently used; if not, the original title is used. Please, note that the reviews are listed in a separate section at the end of the list of references.

[…]

It seems like the 1950s literature has avoided modern collectivism, avoided the special kind of civilization that the 1950s created and that points straight in the direction of the 1960s and 1970s. You can see that in the choice of motifs and settings. We have had vivid portraits of humans in sparsely populated Norrland, in industrial communities and rural societies, just as we have had of people in the world of childhood. We have been treated with sharp allegories and romances in pure pink. We would do away with very little of it. But it seems that the authors come to a halt at the three-room apartments of our suburbs, they step aside from the grocery stores, the subway trains and buses, and they hesitate in front of modern office buildings and service industries. That is the world in which more and more people will live. It does not take much wit to realize that it is a life many find to be one of discomfort, crowding and loneliness.

[…]

We can map the modern consumer preferences and housing conditions of collective man, his affiliations to various groups and opinions. It is correct and necessary. We also, and most of all, need a portrait of his humanity.

[…]

Thomas Hardy once wrote that ‘literature is the written revolt against accepted things’. And Artur Lundkvist can complete with: ‘The moral duty above all is a general discontent.’ Revolt and discontent have always been the driving forces towards a better society.

Excerpt from Olof Palme’s contribution to ‘Politiker och författare’/‘Politicians and Authors’ in Bonniers Litterära Magasin (BLM), 1960, 3.¹

Note

1. Palme 1960: 232–33.

Introduction

Adazzling yellow field of rape rises toward a deep-blue sky. On the soundtrack muted minor chords make a stark contrast to the bright idyllic summer landscape, as a dark-skinned girl in a dress, plastic bucket in one hand, walks resolutely out into the field. Detective Inspector Wallander arrives at the scene and goes out to talk to the girl. He shows her his police badge while trying to take control of the situation with his calm, reassuring voice – but to no effect. The distraught girl pours the content of the can over herself and sets fire to it. Wallander freezes with fear in his eyes. Orange flames kiss the blue sky. Main titles. Yellow letters form the word ‘WALLANDER’ against a blue background, from which our tired, haggard hero with a three-day stubble looks at us, with melancholy in his eyes. On the soundtrack, Emily Barker sings ‘Nostalgia’.

Powerful as David Lynch’s allusion to Norman Rockwell in the opening of Blue Velvet (1986), the overture to the British-Swedish production of Wallander in 2008 summarizes the theme of a paradise lapsed into a nightmare. However, in this case the implied criticism is not of civilization in general or just any western world country. The colour palette stresses the blue-and-yellow symbolism taken from the Swedish flag so hard that this could only be about Sweden as heaven and hell. Barker’s song diagnoses the condition of both Wallander and the country: nostalgia. The melancholic lamentation for the loss of a Golden Age, the post-war welfare state and its promises that has become a keyword in commentary and analysis of Swedish crime fiction in print, film and TV. Also, it is faction – a crossroads of a carefully constructed mix of fact, fiction and myth – and it has gained international popularity as well as seeping into the Swedish self-image.

Since the international success story of Swedish crime started with Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s groundbreaking ten novels from 1965–1975 under the subheading The Story of a Crime, the Swedish crime genre has become a success story both as entertainment and as ideology production. However, it does not exist in isolation. The crime genre in literature, comics, film and TV is a global cultural phenomenon and industry, with a broad popular resonance among people from all classes and cultures, and Swedish crime fiction is a popular brand within the genre. Just enter ‘Swedish crime fiction’ or ‘Schwedenkrimi’ on the Internet and look at the number of hits. In 2011 The New York Times reported that Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy had sold more than 17 million copies in the United States alone, and that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) was the first novel ever to sell more than 1 million copies in a digital edition (Bosman, 2011).

A popular genre with the ambition to challenge readers’ views on society and politics, Swedish crime fiction in the police fiction tradition of Sjöwall and Wahlöö goes back to the heyday of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. Their novels transformed the image of the Swedish welfare state from a utopia to a dystopia – a tendency that the rise of new conservatism in the 1980s and onwards reinforced. In a time of intense social debate, they released clear-cut statements on their conscious use of the crime genre as an instrument for their political beliefs (Wahlöö [1966] 2008; Sjöwall and Wahlöö [1967] 1978). They soon had many followers, not only in Sweden. In retrospect, their point of view was not that original, since the crime genre never has been simply about what is legal or not in a society. At its heart, crime fiction is about moral philosophy, ethics and norms. Particularly in police fiction, both the real and symbolic conflict between law and crime have the protagonists representing ideological hegemony struggling with moral and political deviants.

This book aims to analyse the political crime fiction tradition of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, focusing on the bestselling and most influential police narratives in novels and films during 1965–2012. Since the narrative of the Swedish dystopia has been constructed as a part of, and not separate from, an international discourse on crime fiction, we have to begin with the big picture: the historical origins of the genre, and the rise of the Swedish crime genre in the late twentieth century.

In the Year 1965

The 1960s was a turbulent decade. Still, some years have been more privileged than others in history. Traditionally, the symbolic year par preference is 1968, hammered into our minds by numerous novels, films and TV specials as the ‘year of revolution’. In his 2002 book 1968, Swedish history professor Kjell Östberg (2002) underlines this point in the subtitle När allt var i rörelse/When Everything Was in Motion. However, in this context 1965 is the year of importance: the starting point of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s revision of the Swedish crime genre. It was year one after the period that some have called ‘the long 1950s’, and others ‘the first Cold War’: the years from 1946–64 (Booker 2002). For Swedish scholars of history this period was associated with ‘the realization of Folkhemmet [The People’s Home], a domestic policy based on consensus and economic stability with a strong Social Democratic Party in the lead’ (Cronqvist 2004: 14). It was a time of intense ideological debate and re-evaluation without which the Swedish police novel would be unthinkable.

Of course, there are no razor-sharp boundaries between historical periods, as the ‘realization of Folkhemmet’ continued well after 1964. The Social Democratic Party had its historically second-best election results in 1968, when the party won an outright majority of seats in parliament. The years of record economic growth in the 1960s did not end until the oil crisis in 1973, and until the late 1970s domestic policy was firmly planted in the social liberal mainstream where virtually all Swedish parties coincided. However, in general, the description is correct save for the fact that there was never any consensus about the social-democratic programme for an equal society. Rather, it was under attack since day one.

Moreover, from 1965 new ideas from a wide ideological spectrum, including from within the Social Democratic Party, challenged the modern Swedish welfare state. Notably in the context of this book, 1965 was the year in crime policy when social democratic jurist and cabinet minister Karl Schlyter’s long struggle for reforms became the foundation for the new criminal code, and nationalization of the police force transformed the organization. Schlyter’s work to abandon the prison system had been under attack since the 1930s, and has been countered since the late 1970s.

Perhaps the 1960s is most remembered for its heated cultural and political debate. The cultural-radical tendency peaked in 1963–66, with trolöshetsdebatten (‘the faithless debate’), in which a group of intellectuals – authors Lars Gyllensten, P.O. Enquist and others – declared themselves in opposition to any traditional norm or belief. The peace and anti-nuclear movements were in transition, soon to be the basis of a new anti-war movement, now against the Vietnam War. The new movement, De Förenade FNL-grupperna (DFFG, the United NLF Groups) was borne in 1965 out of demonstrations in response to the increased US military offensive.

Around DFFG and the democratic-socialist journal Zenith, a youthful and anti-authoritarian New Left rose. A few years later, centralist Marxist-Leninist parties dominated the scene. Overall, this was a period of breaking away from conformity and old school norms, pithily summed up in the title (as well as by the content) of Danish author Leif Panduro’s best-selling novel Kick Me in the Traditions/Rend mig i traditionerne (1958). Informality in clothing and social interaction, individual liberation, youth rebellion, new subcultures, new cultural movements outside of official institutions, to name but a few tendencies, reacted against old social, cultural and political hierarchies.

‘Sexual liberation’ was a prestigious term in the media. Debates were numerous, as were the books on the subject, such as Sexualdebatten i TV/The Sex Debate on TV (Hjelm 1962) and De erotiska minoriteterna/The Erotic Minorities (Ullerstam 1964). Abortion was a controversial issue that forced the government to set up an abortion commission in 1965. Although delayed until 1971, the commission’s report became the basis for new, significantly more liberal legislation in 1974. On 1 July 1963, the Swedish Film Censorship Board (Statens Biografbyrå) received new guidelines for its work. From then onwards, an additional statutory paragraph hindered it from cutting films that had been recognized as artistically important work or could be expected to get such recognition. Three days later Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence/Tystnaden (1963) confronted the board, which released it without cuts for an adult audience. It ‘broke the sex barrier’, to quote press headlines. An editorial in the leading tabloid newspaper Expressen dated 3 November stated that this case ought to be the end of the institution of censorship as such (Donner and Nordin, 1977).

The pornography law was also under investigation by a commission, which led to legalization in 1971; in practice, by 1965 the law was being ignored already. New men’s magazines FiB-aktuellt and Lektyr competed in presenting the most provocative pin-up photos. Publisher Curt H:son (pen name for for Kurt Hugo Nilsson) sold his even more daring magazines Piff and Raff at newsstands, and 1965 became the year when Berth Milton, Sr., founded his business empire around the hardcore pornography magazine Private. In the bookshops, recognized Swedish authors got into the pornography genre with the anthology Kärlek I/Love I (Anderberg [ed.] 1965), followed by many sequels during the decade.

Many changes in post-war Sweden are, of course, largely the same as in the western world in general. The fast-growing metropolises around the world bred alienation and paranoia that matched anxieties about international conflict. ‘Fear of crime’ became a new media concept in the United States in 1965, as urban criminality focused mainly on narcotics and young delinquents from ethnic minorities was targeted as a political problem of importance (Lee 2007: 51). Soon this fear would spread to other nations.

Amphetamines came to Sweden as prescription drugs in 1938. Abuse of these substances soon followed, and restrictions were placed on these medications in 1944. The use of opiates and cocaine dates back to the nineteenth century, but the first narcotics-related legislation was not passed until 1930. Narcotics crime became so widespread in the 1950s that the Stockholm police force had to organize a special section. By 1959, several drugs were classified as narcotics, and in 1963 the police made their first big crackdown on an illegal drug factory. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s drug abuse grew rapidly, especially with the introduction of cannabis, hashish and LSD in 1965 (Friberg 1970: 49–64).

The new wave of drugs followed in the footsteps of the Mod subculture that became notorious after the youth riots in Stockholm in August 1965. They were replaced in 1967 by the hippie movement as the public face of youth rebellion and delinquency (Nilmander and Ahlborn 1998). From 1965 to 1967 the National Board of Health and Welfare experimented with legal prescription of narcotics – primarily the dominant drug amphetamine – but the results were depressing. It led to an even wider spread of narcotics, hence a dramatic increase in addicts. Authorities called off the initiative, and tougher legislation followed during 1968 to 1972. However, heroin was largely absent from Sweden until the mid-1970s. By the late 1980s, the use of narcotics seemed to be in decline, but drug use increased again in the aftermath of the 1990s financial crisis. In the period from 1970 to 2000, the numbers of drug addicts and abusers in correctional care increased from 20 per cent to more than 50 per cent (Tham 2003: 7–12).

Of significance to this book, 1965 was the initial year of the largest building project ever done in Sweden, aiming to create a million new homes in ten years. ‘Miljonprogrammet’ (‘The Million Programme’) was a Swedish form of urban renewal, which meant the razing of old city centres and replacing them with new ones in a high modernist style. However, primarily it meant the construction of large-scale suburban areas with centres of their own. In retrospect, architecture columnist Olle Bengtzon wrote in Expressen that this much-criticized programme started under pressure from mass migration into the cities, resulting in a housing shortage that instigated a parliamentary bidding-war. All parties claimed that they were the ones who wanted to build the most (Bengtzon 1996: 67–75). The Swedish modernist-functionalist visionaries in the construction industry of the 1930s and 1940s had been replaced by technicians and economists in the mid-1960s. Much of what could not be mass-produced was lost already at the drawing board, and the rest in the building process:

The architect Sonja Vidén has pointed out that more than one-third of the houses in Miljonprogrammet were of small size – bungalows, atrium houses and semi-detached houses – built in small and big groupings. Also, there was much variation in sizes and looks in the larger buildings (Vidén 1996: 54). These facts were rarely mentioned in the debate. Instead, the outrage against the project featured the same few big areas labelled repeatedly as a ‘new slum’, ‘suburban ghettoes’ and ‘concrete bunkers’. In the course of a few years, the image of Miljonprogrammet transformed from the future dream of replacing lice and tuberculosis-infested working-class homes with light, space, air and green pastures into a horrifying illustration of modernity at its worst.

Although there was no lack of comparisons to similar projects in both the East and the West, Miljonprogrammet became a key symbol for the transformation of the image of Sweden from model country to cautionary example: Hammarkullen in Gothenburg, Tensta in Stockholm, Rosengård in Malmö, and especially the new Sergel Square with its busy drug trade in the middle of the capital. Ironically, the last place was literally at the doorstep of the building used as provisional quarters by the Swedish parliament at that time.

The Battle for Reality

Swedish Cops is a political and cultural history of the economically dominant and culturally trendsetting Swedish police narratives in literature and film in the period 1965–2012. In his book Slaget om verkligheten/The Battle for Reality (2002), Swedish philosophy professor Bengt Kristensson Uggla (2002: 12) claims that we live in a time of dislocation from power over decisions via the privilege to write the agenda to taking control of reality and how we perceive it. Aided by various maps, he demonstrates how the shape of the world could be redrawn in accordance with different perceptions of reality. In parallel, the Sjöwall and Wahlöö tradition in literature and film has contributed to redrawing the social and political map of Sweden from model country to dystopia.

This process has been part of a more general ideological tendency in the western world. Therefore, this study includes not only some of the best-selling and trend-setting novels and films, but also considers their critical reception. Here I will show how Swedish crime authors kept up with the signs of the times, and how they influenced the reception of their own work. Changes in ideological tides is one key element in the reception, but also sales figures. Author Jan Guillou is a particularly interesting case in this respect.

I was born in 1959. In the 1970s, I was an active member of the Social Democratic Party’s youth organization, DFFG and the alternative music movement. Consequently, I have had first-hand experience of the political debate during most of the period portrayed here. That includes the reception of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels within the social democratic movement, the Marxist-Leninist left of Stalinists and Maoists, and the more loosely-knit leftist movements that became the foundation of the Green Party. At the end of this period, I also step into the text myself as a film critic reviewing some of the titles included in the text. In considering my own reviews, I have made an effort not to make my voice a privileged one. Rather, I step back to include them in the overall picture of reception. The focus is on the big picture, not the details.

In his groundbreaking study Spaghetti Westerns ([1981] 1998), Christopher Frayling showed that a genre perceived for a long time as essentially American was, to a large extent, a European construction drawing on storytelling traditions from the Bible and medieval tales (Frayling, chapter 4). One can go back even further, since the idea of a West (Europe) as civilization in opposition to an East (Asia) as Barbary has been around since the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. From that moment, a whole set of ethnic and racial stereotypes were born that the Romans later adopted, and that were used during the Crusades and in the extermination politics of Nazi Germany (Davis [1996] 1997: 103; Holland [2005] 2006: xvii–xx). The viability of these representations – implied in the narratives of the ‘War on Terror’ – was compressed in the film 300 (Snyder 2006), in which hyper-masculine Spartan heroes fought androgynous and monstrous Persians at the gates of Europe.

The film was a continuation of the ideas that the European colonial powers adapted to their brutal race politics all over the globe: for example, in the genocide of the native population of the New World. Literature professor Richard Slotkin has mapped the American history of ideas in his trilogy starting with Regeneration through Violence (1973) and completed in Gunfighter Nation (1993). In the last volume, he analyses how the myth lives on in the police genre of the twentieth century. Here, Barbary also threatens civilization from within (Slotkin 1973, 1986, 1993). Influenced by their colleague, Robert P. Winston and Nancy C. Mellerski write that crime fiction calls for violent action against enemies both outside and within society: ‘the Third World, the poor, foreigners, women, workers, and those who generally fail to conform’ (1992: 1).

Kristensson Uggla writes that currents of ideas have flowed not only from Europe to the United States, but also from the New World to the Old. Swedes from Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) to Olof Palme (1927–1986) ‘have gone to America and regardless of them being amazed or horrified with what they have seen they have brought Sweden’s future back home’ (Kristensson Uggla 2002: 35). Similarly, Swedish cultural expressions both Left and Right in the twentieth century have been inspired by the United States, regardless of anti-American sentiments. Both the leftist movements and the modern Swedish police procedural in literature and film are prominent examples in this regard. They converge in the novels by Sjöwall and Wahlöö.

In addition, the film debates – from the moral outrage that laid the foundation for the Swedish Film Censorship Board in 1911 to the video nasty outrage in the 1980s – are connected to other moral panics (jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, comic books). They impose a notion of a morally and aesthetically sound national culture versus ambiguous and popular foreign influences (O’Dell 1997: 20). However, these attempts to uphold a hegemony have been constantly undermined by cultural expressions outside of the institutions, from cultural avant-gardes to rock ‘n’ roll subcultures. Ethnologist Tom O’Dell concluded in his dissertation titled ‘Culture Unbound’ that Sweden always has been part of a transnational context (1997: 10).

Psychologist Rolf Granér demonstrates in his dissertation ‘Patrullerande polisers yrkeskultur’/‘The Culture of Patrolling Police Officers’ (2004) that O’Dell’s idea of Sweden as firmly anchored within a transnational culture is also applicable to study of the police force. Conservative notions and ideas of the police as the line of defence against anarchic criminality and a camaraderie based on racism and sexism are the same in Great Britain, Sweden, the United States and other countries (Granér 2004: 9). Consequently, I will stress the genre in relation to the history of ideas in general, and especially to relevant fields of study such as sociology, criminology and journalism.

All of the authors included here – including the film-makers and their scriptwriters – are white middle-class men producing narratives focusing on white middle-class men as the point of reference for normality and civilization. They are all connected to the Sjöwall and Wahlöö tradition, and to the turbulent political era of the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, younger authors, notably Arne Dahl and all of his best-selling female colleagues (Åsa Larsson, Mari Jungstedt, Camilla Läckberg et al.) are excluded – not because they are less interesting, but because they have a different background with another political and cultural context to the authors in the Sjöwall and Wahlöö tradition. Also, I wanted to show how the Sjöwall and Wahlöö line of police procedurals continued some fundamental aspects of the conservative crime genre tradition: that of whiteness, masculinity and nation. Despite having a radically different social and political agenda, the social-liberal and socialist police procedural were essentially reproducing the dramaturgical pattern of white male heroes defending the realm against Barbary. These policemen, with an equal emphasis on ‘police’ and ‘men’, represent the nation, body and soul, while their colleagues of the female sex and other ethnic groups only represent themselves.

Chapter 1

The Crime Genre

At the centre of modern crime fiction stands an investigating agent – an amateur detective, a professional but private investigator, a single lone policeman, a police force acting together.

(Knight 1980: 8)

Stephen Knight’s definition is certainly correct about the main characters, but in the genesis of the crime genre, crime itself was not a given. Many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, such as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), were about mysteries rather than crimes per se. ‘Mystery story’ was the preferred genre label in Arthur Conan Doyle’s time, defined in Encyclopaedia Britannica as ‘an ages-old popular genre of tales dealing with the unknown’, and with roots back to the Gothic novel and divided into ‘tales of the supernatural and riddle stories’. Mary Beth Haralovich (1979: 53) suggests that mystery was synonymous with the crime genre in general, but Mark Jancovich (2005: 35) claims that mystery and other genre labels are not solidified conventions, but constantly changing.

In his classic study Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, John G. Cawelti uses ‘mystery’ for narratives about ‘the investigation of hidden secrets’ ending in ‘a desirable and rational solution’, thus becoming a ‘moral fantasy’ (Cawelti 1977: 42–44) He also includes supernatural stories without a rational solution: i.e., the Gothic novel. Viktor Shklovsky ([1925] 1995: 193) wrote that the crime riddle that the detective solved explained the supernatural; however, there is no problem of taxonomy until the twentieth century. Many Gothic and mystery stories actually have a kind of detective, such as Abraham Van Helsing in the novel Dracula (Stoker 1897).

The crime genre was born in the inter-war years when mystery sprouted new genres: the film company Universal established the genre concept of horror with Frankenstein (Whale 1931) and Dracula (Browning 1931), pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories introduced the concept of science fiction, and realism became a prominent feature in hard-boiled crime stories (Kinnard 1995: 1; Newman 1996: 12–13; Skal 1990: 110–51; 1993: 144). During the Cold War years, spy narratives with professional intelligence agents separated and became a genre of its own; and then there were the metagenres and subgenres.

With Alfred Hitchcock’s films as his prime example, Martin Rubin (1999: 6) defines the thriller as a metagenre of suspense not unlike Tom Gunning’s concept of the silent film era’s ‘cinema of attractions’ (Gunning, 1986: 63–70). However, in Crime Movies, Carlos Clarens ([1980] 1997: 12–13) wants a clear delineation between the thriller and crime films. He regards the thriller as a genre taking place in a closed, private world of esoteric crimes, revenge and vigilante justice, with characters (the killers and their victims) that only represent themselves and their own interests. In crime films proper about detectives and police officers, the main characters are professionals that symbolically come to represent the philosophical clash of crime and the law. Making a claim for the police procedural as a separate genre, George N. Dove (1982: 51) elaborates on Clarens’ definition when arguing that the police have a privileged authority to enter people’s homes, make arrests, interrogate suspects and access confidential documents: that makes them even better suited to represent society and the law.

Then again, Thomas Leitch (2002: 1–17) asks in his introductory chapter to Crime Films, is it meaningful to discuss whether the crime genre is unified or divided into many subgenres? Considering that Julian Symons ([1974] 1975), Stephen Knight (2004) and John Scaggs (2005) equate the crime genre with stories about detectives and police officers, leaving out significant crime narratives involving gangsters or courtroom dramas, we need to know what we are talking about. On the one hand, looking at the gangster narrative for example, it marginalizes the force of the law to the gangster’s physical battles against rivals, and moral battles against conscientious relatives, priests and childhood friends. On the other hand, the courtroom drama is all about a moral and ideological conflict between the crime and the law, but the dramaturgy and iconography clearly distinguish it as a genre in its own right.

Leitch wants the crime genres to be one, but his taxonomy does not make a good case for ‘a coherent larger project’ (2002: 11). Rather, a flourishing diversity with some interconnections comes to mind. It would be more rewarding, then, to map the genre historically, and see how the various branches become separate. In that respect, there is a clear continuity between the detective and police narratives in their dramaturgy about crime, investigation and solution, and their literal and symbolic confrontation between crime and the law. As the guardians of civilization, they originate at the same time as the Western genre and action adventures with colonial heroes. While the heroes of the Western and colonial adventures fight barbarism at the outer frontiers, the detective and the police fights it from within.

Origins

Like John Scaggs (2005: 7–13), you could trace the roots of the crime genre back to Sophocles and Oedipus Rex, or to texts in the Bible or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but none of them originated a narrative tradition that make up a genre. A better case could be made for the popular true crime stories of The Newgate Calendar (Anon 1750–1850), and, as an influence on Edgar Allan Poe, William Goodwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794 [1998]) is mentioned often as an early example of the genre. The latter even has an amateur detective working for justice against all odds, but yet again, they did not inspire any followers.

The best candidate for the trendsetter that launched the crime genre seems to be the first chief of the French secret police, La Sûreté Nationale, Eugène François Vidocq and his Les Vrai Mémoirs de Vidocq/The True Memoirs of Vidocq (1828–29) (Knight 2004: 23–24; Morton 2005; Scaggs 2005: 17). In 1812 Vidocq developed the investigation techniques of Napoleon Bonaparte’s groundbreaking police organization, and in 1833 he founded an equally innovative private detective bureau. Not only did Vidocq’s partly true and partly tall tales influence Poe’s short stories written in 1841–45 about Paris detective C. Auguste Dupin, but his detective bureau sparked the imagination of an even more famous detective: Allen Pinkerton. When this Scottish immigrant to the United States opened his Pinkerton National Detective Agency in 1850, the organization, surveillance and investigation techniques, and even the aggressive spinning of Pinkerton’s legend, owed much to Vidocq. Together they stand as the pioneers of modern police work – collecting evidence, photographing victims and suspected perpetrators, interrogating witnesses – soon to be emulated by newly-founded national police forces worldwide.

In the first Dupin story, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (Poe [1841] 1988:75–102), there is a sign of a genre in the making: intertextuality. Quite simply, Poe measures his hero Dupin against Vidocq and finds the former far superior. More than 45 years later, Arthur Conan Doyle repeats the stunt in A Study in Scarlet ([1887] 1989:11–63), allowing Sherlock Holmes not only to dismiss Dupin, but also crime novelist Émile Gaboriau’s detective hero Lecoq – an obvious Vidocq clone with a large fan following. From the Vidocq tradition, we have two basic crime genre ingredients. One is about criminal geniuses, from Vautrin in La Comedie humaine/The Human Comedy (Balzac 1830–47) to the film serial Fantômas (Feuillade 1913–14), James Bond villains such as Dr No and Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter. The other is the police hero from Vidocq and Lecoq to Stanislas-Andrée Steema’s Wens, George Simenon’s Jules Maigret and Ed McBain’s Steve Carella.

In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the amateur detective was the preferred hero. Sherlock Holmes is a lone, intuitive and analytical genius who, rather than relying on muscle power to enforce the law, uses his rationality and artistic sensibilities when investigating crime with scientific methods. His arch-enemy is the criminal genius Professor James Moriarty – a ‘Napoleon of crime’ – while Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade is used mostly as a belittled and even ridiculous minor character. The Holmes tales set the pattern for the new genre: the detective puzzle. This would soon marinate in clichés such as LSP (Least Suspected Person) and the ‘locked room mystery’. This detachment from real crime, making the murder mystery into an intellectual game mainly set among the idle rich, was challenged in its inter-war heyday by the realist street tales of former Pinkerton detective Dashiell Hammett, introducing his professional detective, the Continental Op, in the two-fisted novel Red Harvest (Hammett 1929).

In his classic essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ ([1944] 1984), Raymond Chandler bantered about the limitations of the so-called soft-boiled British detective stories – many of them written by best-selling women authors such as Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie (see also Horsley 2005: 67). Chandler rejected the detective puzzle, and championed the hard-boiled masculine detective who was a descendant of the vigilantes of the American past, from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales (1823–41), to the gunslingers of Western mythology (Horsley 2005: 66–86; Knight, 2004: 110–13; Scaggs 2005: 55–84). This hero walked ‘down these mean streets’ but was ‘not himself mean’ and ‘neither tarnished nor afraid’. He was a ‘complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man’. In short, he was ‘a man of honor’ working in a twilight zone between crime and law (Chandler [1944] 1984: 191).

Crime and the Law

According to Stephen Knight, the purpose of early tales of crime such as The Newgate Calendar was to reaffirm the social status quo under the threat from crime. Still, the perpetrator is not portrayed as evil or Other, but as one of us gone astray: ‘ordinary people who reject roles society and their family offer them’ (Knight 2004: 11). In many cases, their Christian consciences are awakened and they give themselves up voluntarily; otherwise they are apprehended by chance, for example, caught in the act or by someone recognizing them in the streets. No clear agent of the law actively seeking out and arresting criminals is visible in these stories, except in serious cases such as murder. Then a prominent citizen or a nobleman could take the lead in hunting down the killer. Sometimes the hunted was a prominent citizen or nobleman himself. They had means to escape justice by going into exile, to return when pardoned. The only unpardonable crime of the upper class was one that threatened their class, such as treason.

We can look to the two versions of Caleb Williams to give us an insight into a time of juridical and moral change in views of crime and punishment. The title character is from the lower classes, working for the wealthy Ferdinando Falkland who murdered his neighbour and got away with it, despite Williams’ efforts to bring him to justice. In the original manuscript, Williams goes to prison, but tries yet again after his sentence is served to inform on Falkland, only to be thrown into prison again. The published version, released in the aftermath of the French Revolution, tells us that Williams is reconciled with his master, comes to admire his ideals and is devastated when he dies soon after. His deepest regret is his neglect of loyalty to Falkland and to the social order that he represents (Goodwin [1794] 1998: 327–34).

The novel is a perfect example of a conflict between the old feudalism’s superior need for protecting the social order, and the Enlightenment’s call for the rights of the individual. In the published version, it is clearly God, not Man, who has the right to administer punishment for our sins, whereas in the original ending the full title Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams becomes an ironic comment on the old social order. The author’s interest in the psychology of crime also makes it a forerunner of the twentieth-century thriller. For John Scaggs, both versions are problematic for the modern-day conservative crime fiction narrative, since they represent ‘ultimate rejection of the possibility of restoring the social order through the one-on-one conflicts between men that is structurally fundamental to much detective fiction’ (Scaggs 2005: 15).

However, at the formative time of the crime fiction genre, it developed under the influence of the Gothic novel, in which there is a mythical gap between the normality of society and the threat from dark forces of chaos. In parallel to Robin Wood’s (2003:

71) defining character of the horror genre, normality in crime fiction is threatened by the Other – perhaps not an outright monster but a criminal, perhaps of the atavist type. Like all conservative genres, normality equals the patriarchal society represented by the monogamous heterosexual couple, nuclear family and institutions of bourgeois society: the police, military, church and political and juridical institutions. The monster or criminal might have cunning, calculating intellect, but is driven mainly by uncontrollable brutal and insane impulses, not reason, and they are all deviants: by sexual desire (homosexuals, nymphomaniacs), gender (women), ethnicity (non-Europeans), class (working class, the ‘lumpen proletariat’), ideology (anarchists, communists) or religion (Muslim terrorists).

The crime genre was the answer to the bourgeois revolution’s Enlightenment ideals: scientific methods in combination with logical methods of analysis triumph over the threat from irrational and destructive forces. All the flaws and vices of Caleb Williams – curiosity, subjectivism, arrogance, lonely endurance – now become the virtues of the bourgeois detective, according to Stephen Knight: ‘the figure that Goodwin presents as misguided and destructive would emerge as a culture-hero bringing comfort and a sense of security to millions of individuals’. (1980: 28). In the luxurious surroundings of the detective puzzle, the mere disclosure of the culprit is enough to close the case, thus restoring bourgeois order. However, when confronting the hardened and violent criminals at the frontiers of civilization, physical violence is required. In his study of the Western narrative in Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin points out the analogy between the dangerous tasks of James Fenimore Cooper’s wilderness hero Hawkeye, and the way in which Pinkerton writes about his agents’ work among criminals and communists:

[W]hen the corruption of civilization replaces wilderness as the scene of the drama, and the ‘urban savage’ replaces the Noble Red Man, Hawkeye is transformed from a saintly ‘man who knows Indians’ to a figure whose consciousness is ‘darkened’ by knowledge of criminality.

(Slotkin 1993: 139)

Pinkerton himself often stressed the parallels between Fenimore Cooper’s savages and the enemies of society that they were set against, be they anarchists, union people, strikers or common criminals. When Pinkterton agent James MacParlan infiltrates the Molly Maguires – an underground organization of Irish immigrants working in the coal-mining districts – it becomes a spiritual struggle in which MacParlan, like the Indian captives in Western narratives, risks losing his Protestant English soul, ‘having merged his individuality in the criminal tribe’ (Slotkin 1993: 142). Here, a colonial ideology based on race fuses with a moral dualism into a narrative that would flourish in the colonial era, from Sax Rohmer’s illustration of the ‘yellow peril’ in his Fu Manchu tales, to James Bond.

From the beginning, the bourgeois colonial or detective hero is an exceptional and even eccentric person, setting themselves apart from the very normality that they are set to defend. Poe’s Dupin and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes are described as alienated intellectuals, cut off from the lives of others, looking at the world with cool detachment. This outsider – prefiguring the existential anti-hero of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus – shares the physical and spiritual world of their savage antagonists in order to fight them, constantly at the risk of losing their mind and soul or even ‘going native’: crossing the frontier lines to become one of the enemy.

To ensure the detective’s connection to society and its law, order, morality and common sense, a go-between is often required. On the one hand, this go-between is the one who acknowledges the detective’s special status, exceptional qualities and need to use extreme methods in order to achieve a higher good: the preservation of society and, ultimately, civilization itself. On the other hand, he is the one who intervenes when the detective himself stray from the straight and narrow path. Dr Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories became the model of this type of character, and a ‘Watson’ has subsequently become an established crime fiction term for characters of a similar narrative function.

Social, economic or psychological reasons for crime are rarely of any importance in a detective puzzle. Rather, the criminal comes from the same educated class as the detective, and the crime is explained mainly as the result of moral corruption (greed) or simply evil impulses. Sometimes there is an implied criticism of decadent aristocracy – for example, John Clay in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Red-Headed League’ (Doyle [1891] 1989:132–146) – which, like Dracula, echoes the nineteenth-century class war. A controversial case is Agatha Christie’s novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Christie 1926), in which the confident narrator turns out to be the killer himself. Using psychoanalytical terms, Stephen Knight (1980: 112) regards this as a challenge to the struggle between the superego/detective and the id/criminal. It also could be seen an ideological challenge undermining the stability of the bourgeois universe.

The hard-boiled world of Hammett and Chandler is always unstable, oozing with cynicism and uncontrollable desires and impulses. Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe are alienated outsiders, and they look with disgust on the civilization that they are defending. However, this does not trigger any social or political reflections. Instead, Marlowe’s universe is one of solipsism, his cases starting out as professional but often turning personal, and so his moral code and vigilante justice is a continuation of the Western hero (Slotkin 1993: 218). Since there is no ‘Watson’ connecting him to society’s normality, and family is not an option in this world of femmes fatales, it is necessary to demonstrate in word or action his position on the right side of the law. As Sam Spade argues in his final speech to Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon: ‘Don’t be so sure I am as crooked as I’m supposed to be. That kind of reputation might be good business – bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy’ (Hammett [1930] 1972: 227–28).

Spade’s moral ambiguity is revealed as a masquerade of an entrepreneur of the law, but during the Cold War, the hard-boiled detective lost what little they had left of their soul to the moral wilderness. In his 1972 essay, Paul Schrader ([1972] 2003: 237–39) analyses film noir as consisting of three historical phases. The Second World War and the early postwar period until 1946 is characterized by private detectives in theatrical ‘more talk than action’ films made in a studio setting: The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), The Glass Key (Heisler 1942) and The Big Sleep (Hawks 1946). Then came the post-war realism of 1945–49 when productions such as The Naked City (Dassin 1948) and Call Northside 777 (Hathaway 1948) moved out into city streets, featuring police and journalist heroes. This phase also spread to other countries such as Japan (Nora inu/Stray Dog, Kurosawa, 1949) and France (Quai des Orfèvres, Clouzot, 1947). The third and final phase in 1949–55 was ‘a period of psychotic action and suicidal impulses’ when everyone – detectives, cops, crooks and just about everyone else – showed signs of mental disturbance and moral depravity. The borderline between hero and villain in films such as The Big Heat (Lang 1953) or Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich 1955) is non-existent, sometimes even making the hero into the bigger threat to society than the criminal.

During the same time, the Western genre – always at the heart of American mythology – broke away from its traditional ethos and strayed into the same darkness as film noir. In his classic study Sixguns and Society, Will Wright (1975: 29–123) shows how the Western evolves from the idealism and progressive enlightenment of My Darling Clementine (Ford 1946) to the bitter vengeance in Winchester ’73 (Mann 1950), and finally collapses into the nihilism and brutality of The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah 1969). Even though the Western faded out in the 1970s, the underlying ideological structures continued in science fiction and crime films (Slotkin 1993: 633). They carried on the mythology of heroes fighting against barbarism and other threats to civilization on new frontiers. While Star Trek (TV series 1966–69, film series 1979–) patrolled the frontiers of outer space, a new hero came into popularity, fighting the frontiers within civilization itself: the police officer.

Chapter 2

Enter the Police

Vidocq and his early followers in fiction, such as Émile Gabouriau’s Lecoq, Georges Simenon’s Maigret and Ngai Marsh’s hero Roderick Alleyn, were all police officers, but only technically. In practice, they acted just like the lone puzzle detective. Forensic techniques and other procedurals were largely absent, and most of the other police officers behaved as they used to in the genre: like flabbergasted and sometimes corrupt idiots (Dove 1982: 3; Panek 2003: 20–21). In crime films, the police were even more marginalized. Inspector Lohmann in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and James Cagney’s machine-gun-wielding FBI officer in G’ Men (Keighley 1935) are two rare examples of out-and-out police heroes before the Second World War (Clarens [1980] 1997: 116–27; Doherty 1999: 338).

Why did it take so long for the police to step up into the league of crime-fighting heroes? After all, a century passed from the foundation of the institution until the police procedural became a genre in its own right. According to Nicole Rafter (2000: 71), there were two reasons: good guys were not entertaining; and the police had low status among film-goers and people in general. Considering Frank Capra’s popular films about idealist heroes and classic white-hat Western stars such as Tom Mix, we can safely dismiss the first reason. However, the low status of the police was certainly a decisive reason for the delay.

The sociologist Robert Reiner (1985) has written about the historical evolution of the modern British police force. In 1829, Conservative interior minister Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police, loosely based on the Thames River Police founded in 1798. The new police force quickly became known as ‘Bobby’s boys’ (‘Bobbies’) and had a military-style organization, uniforms and ranking. Its appearance was seen as a deterrent for criminals while reassuring the law-abiding citizen that British police were working out in the open and not, like Vidocq’s plain-clothesmen, in a cloak-and-dagger fashion. The special branch of crime investigators in plain clothes founded in 1842 consisted of just