BVLawson

Before Stieg Larsson, before Jo Nesbø or Henning Mankell, Scandinavian crime fiction was dominated by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, journalists and common-law married writing partners from Sweden. In the 1960s, the couple set about to write 10 books in 10 years, each 30 chapters long, which they plotted and researched together, then wrote alternate chapters. Because they intended the books as a critique of capitalist society, all the books in their original editions were given the subtitle "Report of a Crime" as a politically double-entendre phrase.

According to Wahlöö, their intention was to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type." The books (all of which have been adapted for film or TV), follow the exploits of detectives from the special homicide commission of the national police, centered around the character of Superintendent Martin Beck of the Homicide Squad. About their main policeman, Ms. Sjöwall said, "We wanted a credible, trustworthy Swedish civil servant with empathy and real concern." The books really should be read in sequential order because the characters of Beck, his family, and Beck's police colleagues change throughout the series.

"The Laughing Policeman" was the only one in the series to win an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel, an honor bestowed in 1971. At the beginning of the book, police are off fighting peaceful Vietnam demonstrators and casually molest a girl demonstrator on her thirteenth birthday. Soon afterward, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin on a cold and rainy Stockholm night. Unfortunately for Beck, the two inept patrolmen who stumbled upon the crime scene destroyed much of any useful evidence. The frenzied press, fishing for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs the killer a madman.

With his usual dogged determination, Beck suspects the culprit isn't a madman, after all, upon discovering the apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of Beck′s best detectives, Ake Stenstrom. But far too many question remain: why was Stenstrom on that particular bus that night? Why was he sitting next to a young, female nurse? After Beck works with the murdered detective's girlfriend, he's able to piece together his activites right before his murder. Soon enough it becomes clear that Stenstrom was working off the books, and that the attack may be connected to an unsolved cold case.

The Beck novels are filled with brooding, multi-dimensional characters and the settings are equally gritty and dour, pointing out the dark underbelly of Swedish culture and clearly foreshadowing Larsson. There are also other parallels: Sjöwall/Wahlöö and Larsson wrote against the sub-class treatment of women in society, as well as the failings of the capitalistic system to protect its most vulnerable citizens.

Tragically, like Larsson, who died at age 50 of a heart attack, Wahlöö had an untimely death in 1975 from cancer at the age of 48. Also, since Sjöwall and Wahlöö never married and he never legally adopted her daughter, she hasn't earned any royalties from the books, in the same way Larsson's common-law partner of 30 years, Eva Gabrielsson, has been shut out of any money from Larsson's estate.

SHE SHALL HAVE MURDER, made into a movie on British television in 1950, introduces Jane Hamish, a pretty young executive in the law firm Daniel Playfair and Son, and Dagobert Brown, Jane's lover and a researcher/writer who is so absorbed in the thriller he and Jane are concocting around the law firm's staff, that he is astonished when the wrong victim dies. Said victim is Mrs. Robjohn, the least favorite client of the firm, thanks to her frequent calls, letters and visits and unwavering paranoid belief that the mysterious "they" are out to get her.

SHE SHALL HAVE MURDER was labeled as "Detection with Wit" when first published in 1948, an apt description of the characters of Jane, always the common-sense, down-to-earth narrator, and her other half Dagobert, whose eccentricities and passing fads often leave Jane alternatively delighted and driven to despair ("Dagobert is my hero, but he persistently refuses to behave like one.") One of Dagobert's primary pursuits is amateur sleuthing that he puts to good use as he resorts to disguises, charm and insightful detection as he tries to prove Mrs. Robjohn was murdered.

Jane makes a delightful narrator, as in this bit about her thoughts on her potential novel-writing career at the start of the story: "On the other hand, thrillers have nowadays become an accepted art-form; bishops and minor poets read practically nothing else, and the New Statesman reviews them....The beginning of a book is always the tricky part. It should arrest. A shot should ring out in the night, or if you prefer, a rod should cough or a Roscoe belch forth destruction. Personally, I like to meet my corpse on page one, and I like him (or her) to be very dead."

In Peter Walker's foreword to the Black Dagger edition of SHE SHALL HAVE MURDER, he notes that the novel is a time capsule of post-World War II life, with utility clothing, conscription, rationing, listening to the wireless, putting lavender in the clothes closet, feeding gas meters with shillings and girls who resemble Rita Hayworth. But the writing sparkles over 60 years later and is far from dated in its ability to entertain.

Henry Slesar (1927-2002) was a prolific short-story writer before turning his hand to novels, beginning with "The Grey Flannel Shroud," an effort that turned out to be as successful as his many other endeavors, receiving the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1960. Slesar was an experienced ad man, credited with being the brains behind McGraw-Hill's extremely popular "The Man in the Chair" advertising campaign, as well as coining the phrase "coffee break." Thus it's no surprise that advertising is at the heart of the plot in The Grey Flannel Shroud.

In the novel, Dave Robbins is a a handsome young account manager at a small Madison Avenue agency who is put in charge of the prestigious Burke Baby Food account. He'd only gotten the job due to a colleague's heart attack and now he finds himself fending off the unwelcome attentions of an influential client and the scorn of the head of the Burke empire. Things take a turn for the bizzare when people connected to the Burke Baby account begin to die in strange ways. Dave soon worries he's next, a suspicion given weight by a near-fatal push off a train platform and poisoned medication.

Aided by a reporter friend/drinking buddy and Dave's clever and gutsy girlfriend, Janey Hagerty, an art director at the agency, Dave tries to navigate his complicated love life and the promising Burke account career-booster, while trying to figure out why the boss's confidential files include an unexplained and large payment to the mysterious "A.G." And why being put in charge of the Burke account may end up being the very last thing he ever does.

The Grey Flannel Shroud isn't heavy on the sleuthing, but if you're a fan of Mad Men, you'll see a lot of the essence of that era in the advertising world in this novel. There's plenty of character development and also whimsy--such as the chapter headings, all of which are taken from famous advertising campaigns.

Born in 1939, English author Michael Derek Allen had a career in education, first as a teacher and then as a university administrator at the University of Bath, and also served a brief stint working for the New York Herald Tribune. When he retired from all his various day jobs, he started his own small press, Kingsfield Publications, and turned his hand to writing novels full-time under the pen names Michael Bradford, Anne Moore and Patrick Read.

Allen has penned mostly standalone novels and short stories, but he did write three books in a series featuring his police detective Superintendent Ben Spence. The third and final book in that series was Spence at Marlby Manor, dating from 1982, in which wealthy Lady Dinnister of Marlby Manor begins to suffer from "accidents" she suspects are actually attempts on her life. When Lady Dinnister's companion Emily Fosdyke dies from arsenic poisoning, it's only natural she thinks she herself was the intended victim.

Detective Ben Spence agrees with the Lady of the Manor after interviewing a houseful of servants and family members that are all-too-eager to sell off Marlby Manor and inherit Lady Dinnister's considerable fortune. Chief among them is an artist son-in-law; a handsome but unmotivated grandson in love with a secretary neither Lady Dinnister nor Emily Fosdyke deemed good enough for him; and a selfish, greedy granddaughter and her husband who tend to live well beyond their means. But, as Spence and his assistant, Inspector Laruel, take a closer look, they uncover undercurrents of malevolence coming from an unexpected source.

Although "Publishers Weekly" was a little critical of the book's "awfully implausible murderer-catching traps to snare the culprit," the publication's reviewer ultimately deemed it "comfortable, mildly beguiling entertainment in the traditional style." It deviates a bit from the traditional police procedural into more of the classic whodunit format.

Patti Abbott has been a tremendous and tireless supporter of crime fiction for many years through her blog and in encouraging other writers. But Patti is also an amazing wordsmith in her own right, creating a variety of tightly-woven short-story gems that delve into the darkness of the soul in ways that are engrossing, compelling and will leave you thinking about them long after you've finished reading. Kudos to Snubnose Press for making this collection available!

John Reeves composed religious music, which is why it's not surprising the second book in his series with Inspector Andrew Coggin and Sergeant Fred Sump of the Metro Toronto Police was 1984's MURDER BEFORE MATINS, a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award.

The story is set in the cloistered world of Tathwell Abbey where the Prior is found murdered and suspicion falls on the entire order of Gilbertine nuns and monks who live in seclusion there. When Coggin, Sump and Constable Nancy Pringle are assigned to the case, they learn the victim was destined to be made Abbot and that even allegedly holy people are capable of dark ambition and violence.

In an interview from 1986 in Books in Canada, Reeves acknowledged that he lost his faith gradually, partly because of a "disillusionment with the institution of the Church." Even so, Murder Before Matins is a sympathetic portrayal of monastic life and includes a subplot of Constable Nancy Pringle's own struggles with her faith.

Reeves' mysteries are less about suspense typical of other police procedurals and more in the traditional puzzle-solving detective fiction (he even works in lists, diagrams, puns and one crossword puzzle in each novel). "Books in Canada" aptly wrote that "If Sherlock Holmas and Dr. Watson are respectively brilliant and dim, Andrew Coggin and Fred Sump shed light on crime about equally, less like a priest and acolyte than a happily married couple. Coggin is good at sifting details and making deductions; Sump is intuitive, disarming, a shrewd judge of character."

Angus MacVicar (1908-2001) was a Scottish author of crime thrillers, juvenile science fiction and nonfiction. His suspense novel THE SINGING SPIDER (From 1938) was set against the backdrop of Mussolini and impending war with Italy. It follows young Archie Campbell, an intelligent, scrupulously honest and brave young man who is offered a job as a secret agent by Sir Robert Vanburgh, the Secretary for Diplomatic Affairs and also a friend of Archie's dead father. Archie's job is to visit the quiet little fishing port of Bennachie in order to uncover the secret that was discovered by another murdered agent, known as D7—who was also Sir Robert's son.

Archie takes the job hoping to find redemption following a scandalous love affair that left him a broken man and a drunkard, and soon finds himself immersed in the picturesque village of Bennachie playing the not-too-far-off role of a recovering invalid. Archie tries to uncover the identity of the Singing Spider-—an Italian spy and master of disguise thought to be behind D7's murder—-with the help of an American Professor, a local rogue who's also seeking redemption, and a lovely young minister's daughter. But first Archie has to find out how the Singing Spider is tied to a puzzling phrase that translates as "The Pit of Baal" and the mysterious red lights at the Bennachie stone, an artifact the Professor believes dates back to the ancient Phoenicians.

It's definitely a novel of its time, thematically and stylistically, but there's a good rendering of the Scottish setting that was so similiar to areas MacVicar knew well, and to its characters. There's also a bit of naive sweetness to it that you don't often find in spy-themed suspense novels, no doubt a nod to the author's Presbyterian roots and his young-adult writings. It's definitely a G- or PG+ type of plot. The Singing Spider was made into a radio program for BBC Scotland in 1950, although I doubt any traces of it exist. As a matter of fact, there is very little about the author of this book on the Web, and unless you can find his works at your local library, you may find it difficult to get your hands on them.

Josephine Bell was also a physician, so not surprisingly, her novels often feature a strong medical component, not the least of which were two of her doctor-protagonists. She also featured poison and other unusual methods of murder prominently in her plots. Bell and her family were experienced sailors, and the author drew upon this knowledge, too, using many vivid passages in her books that relate to the water and to various nautical details.

Water is certainly at THE PORT OF LONDON MURDERS from 1938, specifically as the title suggests, the port area of London's River Thames. It's a tough neighborhood, but the death of one Mary Holland is still a bit of a shock, even though it appears at first to be a suicide by Lysol poisoning. Tell-tale needle marks on the victim's arm lead Detective Sergeant Chandler to suspect murder tied into a drug ring—which seems even more chillingly apparent when Chandler disappears shortly after he starts to investigate, right before he's due to testify at the inquest. It's up to Inspector Mitchell of Scotland Yard to unravel the layers of deception and addiction that are exploiting rich and poor alike in a way that hasn't changed much in the seventy years since the book was written.

Bell is particularly good with settings, even the squalid ones that pop up in the novel, no doubt witnessed first-hand in her role as a physician who saw people from every walk of life. Her take on the state of medicine in her day was often somewhat bleak, as in this passage from the book—again, as true today as it was in 1938:

"For the great majority of these cases, too poor to have a doctor of their own, there was little he could do...Dr. Freeman could encourage them with a bottle of medicine and help them with a pint of milk a day, but it was not in his power nor that of anyone else to effect a lasting cure of their complaints. There were others, too, not old, but equally hopeless, who attended the dispensary as regular visitors; those struck down in youth or middle age by tuberculosis, rheumatism, heart trouble, and a number of more rare diseases. They had come to the end of their resources, their insurances, and their capacity for earning. The hospitals could do nothing more for them, but they still lived, in the worse possible surroundings, and the Public Assistance saw to it that they did not die too soon."

Personal disclosure: I have a story in this anthology, but do check out all the other fine tales from the other 19 authors.

Gwen Moffat, born in Brighton, Sussex in 1924, became the first professional female mountain guide in the UK. Her travels in the field provided settings for her crime novels set in the Alps, the U.S. Rockies, and the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides. Moffat's first-hand experiences with mountain climbing are at put to obvious use in her novel "Miss Pink at the Edge of the World."

On a Scottish stack (i.e., a column of rock isolated from a shore by the action of waves) called the Old Man of Scamadale, two climbers die rather mysteriously. One of them, Trevor Stark, is a famous and much-hated TV celebrity who was scouting the area for a program, complete with boats and helicopters, against the wishes of the local laird (landowner) who avoided publicity and wanted to keep tourists away. The local police believe the deaths were accidents until the laird and his fellow climbers convince the police the two men were murdered—-and promptly become the prime suspects since they alone had the expertise to pull off the crime.

Miss Pink, a middle aged writer-magistrate-sleuth and a woman of "imposing presence" feels drawn to the case and the plight of the falsely-accused men. She uses her keen skills of observation and perceptions of human nature to get to the bottom of the rock-climber mystery, putting her own life in danger in the process.

Miss Pink is a fun character, and Moffat does a good job with descriptions of the solitary and atmospheric landscapes ("There were skerries and rocky islands, and in that brilliant but silent world the seascape had an air of unreality. It was like the coastline of Valhalla").

Gwendoline Butler (b. 1922) had limited success as a writer before she began a police procedural series featuring a young Scotland Yard Inspector, John Coffin, penning eight Coffin novels between 1956 and 1962. When Butler's husband took a job teaching in St. Andrews, Scotland, the author decided she wanted a change from Coffin and found her inspiration one day when she saw a young red-haired Scottish policewoman. She later asked the local police chief about the young officer and was told she was a recent graduate on a rapid promotion track. Thus was born the character of Detective Charmian Daniels of the fictional Deerham Hill CID and, as some have given credit to the author (written under her pen name of Jennie Melville), the birth also of the woman's police procedural.

In Butler's A Different Kind of Summer, dating from 1967, the fifth outing for Detective Daniels, Daniels is still a sergeant when an unidentified body arrives on a train into town in a coffin minus head or hands. It's up to Daniels to figure out which of many missing women this could be, including an increasing number of young girls vanishing in London. As she gets deeper into the case, she tries to stay objective and focused even as she starts receiving menacing phone calls and has to deal with a new young assistant, Christine Quinn, and a hysterical troublemaker who claims she's lost her sister.

Butler has a low-key writing style, blending social commentary with quirky characters, detailed plotting and thoughtful writing for the most part, although in general, it's her novels with Inspector John Coffin where she's had her greatest success. One wonders if writing from a woman's point of view was too close to home to provide the inspirational distance required or if perhaps the fact the author's brother was Warden of the Toynbee Settlement in London gave her more of a first-hand experience with male protagonists. In either case, with Butler's Daniels or Butler's Coffin, there's a lot of good material there, enough to show that grouping her with the "Four Great Founding Mothers" isn't that much of a stretch. If you're a fan of the "Golden Age" of detective fiction, then you'll enjoy this series.

Ursula Reilly Curtiss, born in 1923, came into the world with fairly impressive crime-fiction genes. Her mother, Helen Reilly, her sister, Mary McMullen, and her brother, James Kieran, all wrote mysteries. Her first book, "Voice Out of Darkness," won the Red Badge Award for the best new mystery of 1948.

Rather than penning police procedurals like her mother, Curtiss focused on the type of story where an innocent bystander gets pulled reluctantly into becoming an amateur sleuth — against a backdrop of seeming domestic calm, with layers of evil hiding behind family secrets and familiar faces. Her protagonists were usually female, except for works like 1951's "The Noonday Devil," where the main character is a man who learns his brother's death as a Japanese POW was carefully planned by a fellow prisoner.

"Voice Out of Darkness" falls into the female-protagonist camp, where we find that thirteen years prior to the events of the book, Katy Meredith lost her foster-sister, Monica, in a skating accident. Although Katy tried to save Monica, Monica's last words were "Katy pushed me." Katy thought she'd escaped both her home town and the horrors of Monica's death by moving to New York, until she starts receiving threatening notes in the mail. At first she wonders if someone else near the ice that day overheard Monica's words and is trying to blackmail her, but when Katy returns to her childhood home, she finds evidence of a calculating killer whose sights are now set on her.

Curtiss has moments of crisp observations in her writing, but her strengths are in her characterizations, setting and pacing. The novel is a quick read, which helps make the slight thinness and predictability of the plot (at least by 21st-century eyes looking backward), not much of a distraction.

Rex Stout is best known for his iconic Nero Wolfe character, but he also created the female detective Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner, who came to being in the standalone novel "The Hand in the Glove" in 1937, one of the very first female private eyes.

Although Stout only gave Bonner one solo outing, she also guest-starred in some of the Nero Wolfe stories, one of the few women Wolfe tolerated perhaps because she herself claimed to have been "inoculated against" men, even her suitor, the newspaperman Len Chisholm. Although The Hand in the Glove is a contemporary of the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin titles, it was written in the third person narrative, not Archie's sarcastic first-person. Even so, it still has some of the hallmark wit that graces the Wolfe/Goodwin novels.

In the book, a religious charlatan has charmed the wife of wealthy industrialist, P.L. Storrs, who decides he needs a private investigator to look into the man and hires Bonner, even though he doesn't approve of female detectives. But when she arrives at Storrs' country estate, she instead finds the body of her client and a garden party filled with a bouquet of suspects.

Bonner isn't quite the fully realized, tough-as-nails P.I. of the 21st century, sending out mixed messages about her ability to do the job as a woman, perhaps mirroring the changing-but-still-traditional views of women in Stout's day. Bonner begins the novel as part of a two-woman firm, Bonner and Raffray, although the Raffray half soon dissolves, Bonner being disgusted about Raffray's submissiveness to her fiancée.

Yet, Bonner concedes she herself decided to be a detective on flimsy grounds, adding, "I made a long list of all the activities I might undertake on my own. They all seemed monotonous or distasteful except two or three, and I flipped a coin to decide between detective and landscape design." Although she's a smart cookie and solves the crimes where the male detectives in the case don't, she's also squeamish about seeing corpses and faints after she shoots a criminal.

British author Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) took jobs in domestic service, unusual for a middle-class woman at that time. She said it was to "observe the peculiarities of the class structure of our society," and those experiences later found their way into her later writing. Much later, in her sixties, she began to take long walks at night by herself over the back streets of London, partly for research and partly to prove a point. Her conclusion was that to make the dark streets lose their terror, "We don’t need more policemen on the beat. We need more grandmothers."

Fremlin's first mystery novel was THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN, which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1958 and established her style of mystery/horror set mostly around the lives of married women in the 1950s. Some feel that THE LONG SHADOW was an equally fine work, and H.R.F. Keating even included it in his 1987 listing of the 100 best crime and mystery books.

It's the story of the Imogen Barnicott, third wife of a celebrated, cruel and egocentric professor, who, despite her unhappy marriage, had never plotted her husband's murder--yet after his supposedly accidental death, she receives a mysterious phone call accusing her of that very thing. Add to that strange happenings like new messages left lying around in his handwriting, work on an unfinished manuscript of his that continues to be written, and shadowy figures seen in the house, and Imogen not only begins to doubt her husband is dead at all, she begins to believe she just might take his place.

Fremlin's character observations manage to be cutting and yet have a touch of dark humor. Her books are filled with astute perceptions that no doubt bear the imprint of her first-hand research into human behavior. THE LONG SHADOW, THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN, and her other fiction certainly deserves a closer look.

The plot of Los Alamos hinges on a fictional protagonist, civilian intelligence liaison Michael Connolly, brought in to investigate the murder of a Los Alamos security officer, his face bashed in and his pants pulled down. Connolly is asked to discover whether the crime is more than the violent sex crime it appears to be, even while those associated with the project--paranoid over security leaks and the specter of Communists everywhere--would prefer it be just that. Nice and tidy. Of course it isn't nice and tidy, and Connolly's dogged determination to pursue the truth to the bitter end, no matter how bitter it turns out to be, carries him through acts of betrayal from all sides and his own growing interest and eventual affair with the wife of one of the Los Alamos scientists.

The setting, in both New Mexico and Los Alamos, is very detailed and well researched. The most enjoyable aspect in many ways is the interaction between Connolly as a fictional character with the real-life Oppenheimer and General Groves, woven together neatly within the framework of the events leading up to the Trinity test in the desert on that fateful day on July 16, 1945.

To be honest, the plot is fairly easy to figure out, at times almost taking a back seat to the setting. Some readers might quibble with the love interest feeling a bit unnecessary, and a few of the local characters lean a tad toward the cliched. The more restless and impatient readers may get a bit bogged down in Kanon's occasionally dense prose (not I, though), but he has some nice evocations of the tug-of-war of emotions that existed between the project's scientists and their almost abstract view of the war and the ultimate horror of the project's true purpose.