A Lot Can Happen in 3 Seconds

What is it about the Swedish crime writers (Steig Larsson, Henning Mankell and now with their novel Three Seconds the duo of Roslund & Hellstrom) that we in the United States find so fascinating? Is it that we think that the crimes and moral dilemmas about which they write could not happen here...or precisely because we are afraid that they do happen here? I think it is the latter.

Having read the Larsson trilogy and some of Mankell I felt I would be remiss not to add Three Seconds. Prison, drugs and police informants: there you have it. A volatile mix. This is very definitely a stay-up-late, get-up-early, take-the-phone-off-the-hook kind of book. I still have difficulty with the Swedish place and street names but it didn't seem so bad this time. Maybe I'm just getting used to it.

The drug of choice in this case is amphetamines. If you want to know how to manufacture it, how to smuggle it between countries, how to cut it and how to get it inside a prison, this is the book for you. It is all here...in detail. Not always a pleasant read but informative to those of us in our cocoons. And do you really know what your spouse/partner does at the so-called office or when she/he is supposed to be at home with the sick children?

Several times in the book the line "It takes a criminal to play a criminal" is repeated. Perhaps we will now have to extend that to say "It takes a criminal to write about a criminal." One of the co-authors Borge Hellstrom is described as an ex-criminal. Teaming up with journalist Anders Roslund seems like a good decision on his part. In this book they have raised some troubling questions: about the use of criminal informants to investigate other crimes, about the access to drugs in the prison system, about the manipulation of data by the police and higher authorities. Do the same things happen here? Should we care?

Enough of a Good Thing

When I first read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (see my blog of November 19, 2008), I thought that I was ahead of the curve. It wasn’t quite so well known at that time. But when The Girl Who Played with Fire came out this summer, I had to wait several months to get a copy from my local library.

I’m not sure it was worth the wait. It has the expected healthy doses of body piercings, sex, beatings, motorcycle chases, and an outsized human “freak”. You do find out more about the personal family background of our Girl heroine Lisbeth Salender (no wonder she is so reserved around people).

But I didn’t really “learn” anything this time. The journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s involvement starts out with a planned expose of sex trafficking but we never really get the details of the trade. This book is pure plot: no character development (unless you count the unacknowledged developing romance between Salender and Mikael Blomkvist), no beautiful language, no thoughtful reflections or philosophy, no history. With all of the wonderful books out there to read and because I am a slow reader, the only reason that I can justify (to myself) reading a thriller is that it comes with something else. There’s a little bit of the art and strategy of boxing; some mathematics in the introductions to the Parts of the book. There is some behind-the-scenes duplicity by the Swedish government with regard to a Russian defector. Maybe that is based on fact or intended to be a cautionary tale. But none of these, alone or in combination, is enough to satisfy my requirement.

But that is just me. If you are at a time and place in which to lose yourself in a book for that purpose alone, then this is a good choice. The author does try to fill the reader in on some of the details of the prior book, but I would highly recommend reading them in order (Tattoo first, then Fire). There will be a third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, but I am content to wait.

No More Lost Weekends

I've got to stop reading like this! When I first started training to run a marathon I had to do a lot of miles on a treadmill. I quickly figured out that it would be a lot less boring if I were listening to an audio book which I started to do. And then I figured out that the best kind of book for that situation (at least for me) was a mystery book. I had to pay close attention so that I wouldn't miss any details or plot twists thereby distracting myself from any pain or boredom. The "unintended consequence" was that I actually started to look forward to my workouts on the treadmill to continue with the story. But for any one session I was always limited by what my lungs and legs would withstand.

So when we started this blog I thought that I would continue to read some mysteries. But without the imposed physical limitations of the treadmill I find myself lost for days at a time with these books. The latest culprit was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: 465 pages in less than 48 hours. This has to stop! There's laundry to do, cooking, bills to pay,...

This would make a great episode of "Cold Case". Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist recently convicted of libel, is hired by a wealthy industrialist to look again into the still-unsolved mystery of the disappearance of his beloved granddaughter forty years earlier. The girl of the book's title is the assistant that Blomkvist hires in his search. The book is set in Sweden, the author's home country, and was originally written in Swedish. The translation has kept many original Swedish words and place names, which can take some getting used to. It's not so hard to figure out in context that "tunnelbana" is the Swedish metro system or that the Konsum store is the equivalent of our Safeway, but there were many other words that I just passed over. There are four generations of the subject family involved and fortunately the author has included a diagram of the family tree. If all of that sounds negative, it isn't meant to be. This is a great read if you want to be distracted and have the time - or the self-discipline to take it in pieces. It has left me wondering why I even bother with the firewall on my computer.

This was the author's first novel. Unfortunately he died of a heart attack at age 50 just after submitting the manuscripts for this and two other novels.