Deaths in a cold climate (plus gloom and neurosis)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
By Stieg Larsson
Knopf, 465 pp., $24.95
The Pyramid and Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries
By Henning Mankell
New Press, 392 pp., $26.95
Stieg Larsson is a member of a club few want to join: writers who die before their novels makes it big - in his case before they're even published.
Not that Larsson was a nobody. He was a successful Swedish political journalist who also edited science fiction magazines. And on the side, he wrote three crime novels that became international bestsellers after he died of a heart attack four years ago.
The first, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," has just been published in the United States, and it is an exceptional effort for a first-time crime novelist. In fact, it's a fine effort for any crime novelist.
A 450-plus-page whodunit from a rookie normally would inspire suspicions that it might suffer from a lack of discipline. Quite the opposite here. This book is meticulously plotted, beautifully paced, and features a cast of two indelible sleuths and so many juicy suspects that the book's length becomes a plus - though the coda is too insistent on tying up the last loose end.
The story revolves around the disappearance of a young woman following a family get-together on an island. No body is ever found, and almost 40 years later, the patriarch of this dysfunctional family is determined to find out who killed her. He hires Carl Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative reporter who has just been convicted of libeling a business magnate.
Blomkvist is something of a babe magnet, but Larsson keeps even that aspect of his personality free of cliché. His relationships, even the unlikely one with his married partner, seem to grow organically out of the plot and the characterizations.
Though Blomkvist could hold down a mystery novel by himself, it's his partner who takes this novel to another level. A punk-rocker by night and brilliant computer hacker by day, Lisbeth Salander is nobody you want to mess around with. Originally hired to investigate Blomkvist, she inevitably hooks up with him and before too long, a series of ultraviolent, Leviticus-inspired rape-and-murder cases begin to fall into place.
Blomkvist and Salander are characters you want to spend time with, as their doubts and fears - as they say in Swedish, oy, have they got complexes - constantly joust with their talent and self-confidence. Larsson, meanwhile, deftly works in issues he was concerned about - right-wing extremism, violence against women, a docile Swedish business press - without letting the politics overpower the story.
Larsson has been compared with countryman Henning Mankell, but other than geography and leftist political bent, there's not that much that unites them. Mankell comes from a more existential, mood-oriented school; Larsson is more in league with the less literary crime writers whom Blomkvist is addicted to, such as Elizabeth George and Sara Paretsky.
Mankell's noir sensibility is on display in his just-released New Press collection of five short stories featuring his stand-in detective, Kurt Wallander. Some of these works were previously printed in newspapers; others were unpublished. All give a back story to Wallander's life before "Faceless Killers," the first of the eight Wallander novels, which begin when the detective is 42.
None of these stories offers any major revelations. We could have inferred how he met Mona, his ex-wife, and what his early days as a police officer would have been like. But they do shed light on what makes Wallander such a great detective as well as such a fine vehicle for Mankell to channel his political concerns and literary ambitions.
Mankell seems to need Wallander to give voice to his vision of a Sweden at the end of its rope. In his foreword to the book, Mankell attributes this darker vision to the downfall of the nation's welfare state.
There's a sense that Mankell lets Wallander lead him into areas where he might not otherwise go. Wallander's real-time aging - he handed the baton to his daughter in the first of the Linda Wallander mysteries - allows the reader to identify with the physical and psychological aches, pains, worries, and regrets that ageless detectives from Holmes onward never endure.
Wallander's murder investigations also give weight to Mankell's gloomy prose. The freezing Swedish winters are never far from the action, symbolizing the political ice age Mankell describes in the foreword. The entire nation seems afflicted with a pervasive spiritual malaise.
Finally, no crime writer balances genre conventions with personal concerns as well as Mankell. "The Pyramid," the title story, refers both to Wallander's father, drifting toward Alzheimer's, attempting to climb one of the great Egyptian pyramids, and Wallander's triangulating a number of deaths in his district.
Will we see more Linda Wallander books with her father in tow? Mankell may have gotten tired of him. But we sure haven't.
Ed Siegel is a freelance writer and can be reached at esiegel122@comcast.net. 