Two channels and a few hours

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were pioneers of the Scandinavian mystery. Writing between 1965 and 1975 they produced ten novels featuring Martin Beck, a police detective in Stockholm, Sweden. I was living in Stockholm at the time these were written and read at least three or four of them then. Over the years I have come across another two or three and read them. For some reason, I thought I had read them all. But recently in a used book store, while waiting for one of the kids, I found Murder at the Savoy by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, previously unknown to me. The Beck series is not particularly high literature, but it is set in a city I knew well and of which I have fond memories.

The book I found is the 1972 Bantam paperback edition (originally published in 1970 in Sweden). The cover and pages are yellowed and brittle, the spine cracked in two places. In fact, gingerly as I held the book, the cover became separated in the reading of it. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were both Marxists, (yes that long ago) and it shows in the text. There is a very jaundiced view of capitalists, the aristocracy, the government, the security forces and the police. Not dissimilar to a later writer, Henning Mankell whom I also enjoy.

But oddly, in both cases, their Marxism shows up in their books, not so much as a commitment to a (failed) ideology but rather in the form of a deep aversion to crony capitalism, rent seeking businesses and regulatory capture of the government bureaucracy. I think those concerns tend to transcend political doctrine.

So reading this book some forty years after it was published, how does it bear up? Not too badly, though I recollect enjoying others in the series more.

An observation of city life. The detective is reviewing a long list of crimes that have been committed over the weekend.

In almost all the cases, alcohol or drugs were of decisive importance. It may have been partly due to the heat, but more basic was the system itself, the relentless logic of the big city, which wore down the weak-willed and the maladjusted and drove them to senseless actions.

At some time in the past, I have commented on Clay Sharkey's speculation that drugs and alcohol are the coping mechanism people resort to during periods of rapid change.

There is this chillingly prescient passage.

He didn't have the vaguest idea of how to organize the search for Viktor Palmgren's killer. Assassinations hardly ever occurred in Sweden - he couldn't remember any political murder occurring in modern times. He wished that the information he had to go on wasn't so vague and that he knew a little better where to start looking.

Innocuous save with the knowledge of hindsight. Sixteen years after this was written, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme was assassinated walking home with his wife from a movie. The assassin was never caught and Palme's murder remains a mystery.

There are a couple of passages which are striking for their contrast between the characterization of the city by Sjöwall and Wahlöö and the city that I remember. As a young adolescent riding public transportation between school and the suburbs, you couldn't help but be aware of the drunks and the drug addicts and the petty crime. Sjöwall and Wahlöö paint a much darker picture of the city than I recall though.

Finally there was this little line which might go unnoticed by anyone not having lived in Sweden at that time. Detective Beck has returned to his hotel room in the early evening, at loose ends.

Martin Beck turned on the bedside lamp and glanced at the TV set. He had no desire to turn it on and, besides, the programs were probably all over by now.

In that period of time, 1970-75, there were two TV channels, both government owned. There were plenty of Bulgarian and Polish cartoons, some British dramas and lots of black and white movies from 1915-1930s from America. I am the only person in my generation of whom I am aware here in Atlanta, with a wide viewing knowledge of Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton (one of my favorites), Harold Lloyd and others.

I recollect both channels being broadcast only in black and white. They were imaginatively, and as befitting a government enterprise, called Channel One and Channel Two. I remember practicing my Swedish by watching the subtitles scrolling by on English language shows.

The significance of the quoted passage is that, even with only two channels, they broadcast only a few hours. Basically from about 3 in the afternoon to somewhere around 9pm or a little later (if the final show was a movie).

Today, you check into a modern hotel and you have 30-50-100 channels with 24 hour content from all over the world. Back then, two channels a few hours.