GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.92 by 2,292 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: Smooth.
A painter arranges for an elaborate posthumous deception/joke with his own work(s) without reckoning on the avarice of some later intermediaries. When the deaths begin, Albert Campion is there, but for once his motor-mouth is throttled; a mercy that is.
There is a marvellous characterisation of the villain with an ingenious plot to match the painter’s set-up. Though I did wonder why the young artist’s works were disappearing and I don’t know that was ever explained.
The best episode is the luxury dinner at which Campion is to be murdered! He knows it, the villain knows it, readers know it, but needs must.
IMDb meta-data is twenty episodes of 60m, each rated 7.9 by 6,067
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Cogent.
In a contemporary Sweden android Hubots are the norm for simple repetitive jobs, companions for the elderly, and counter staff to deal with the idiocracy. The Hubots are very, and I mean very, life-like but their programming is limited, however, there are hackers who for a price can breach those limits. Got it? Even the Asimov Laws can be hacked down!
(Think of this marketing pitch: Get your own Hubot look-alike and program it to attend budget meetings with the dean, insufferable training courses on nuclear waste disposal and playground safety for professors, and Department boards dominated by the least productive individuals. Where do I get mine?!)
Some people ignore the Hubots, others object to them, and still others find them threatening, while most happily benefit from the services they provide without a second thought. In this world we meet several individuals and families who cope with and react in different ways to the Hubots they encounter. A warehouse store-man fears losing his job to a doll, an estranged wife finds a Hubot a better companion than her alcoholic and volatile husband, a career woman finds a Hubot has unlimited energy and patience in dealing with her children, a teenage boy wonders if the Hubot maid is fully functional, an elderly man finds the Hubot carer assigned to him is a nag about diet and medication and with which he cannot bargain, a pensioner grows so emotionally dependent on his old model Hubot that when it breaks down he grieves without end, a pastor sees them as another example of God’s children but her flock does not…. While others despise these PacMen and Women.
We also meet, and we meet them first, a band of ferrel Hubots with their leader Leo, who judging by his Hollywood shadow, is a human. We also encounter two police officers who specialise in recovering erratic Hubots, tracking down ferrel ones, and arresting illegal hackers who re-program legal Hubots to satisfy paying customers in a thriving blackmarket. There is not much of a problem and the police work is slow and methodical.
Juice break at the warehouse.
The Real Humans are a loose group of anti-Hubots who stick decals on windows, shout slogans, wear red hats (oops just made that up!), and some arm themselves with rocket launchers and automatic rifles against the day when….? Well, who knows, but it is always comforting to have a bazooka under the bed in case agents of the deep state come to haul one back to the looney bin.
And all is not what it at first seemed to be.
It is uncompromising in presentation, so pay attention. Unlike painfully didactic Yankee television designed for the attention-deficit audience of Pox News, there are no internal summaries when one character explains to another what is happening, nor any labels of time and place, or title cards to focus, or recaps with each new episode. Nor is there any of the sanctimonious preaching so predictable on Brit TV. Little is explained as the narrative unfolds, but it seems that in due course all questions will be answered for those with the eyes to see.
I have seen the ten episodes of season one but cannot lay hands on the next ten from season two with English subtitles. Little help, please.
GoodReads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.88 by 98 litizens.
Genre: suspense.
Verdict: Nifty.
Set-up: Second-time Australian genre author goes to Malta to get away from it all and finish, well, start that second book, ostensibly planning to stay with his Maltese in-laws, but once there he has no wish to find the relatives of his seven-year estranged wife. In the Mediterranean heat and glare, he heads for hills to a remote village where he finds a farm house to rent that is dirt cheap but with most mod cons. Excellent.
The locals treat him with a friendly respect, some of whom have relatives in Australia, but he is nonetheless an object of curiosity for them. The more so when they realise he is living in that house. (Move over Stephen King….) There is a reason why no else wants to live in it.
He begins to piece together what did and what might have happened years ago, and uses it as the plot for the second novel, but as he does so…. Well, is it imagination or reality? A retired local doctor trembles whenever asked about the previous owners of the house. Protagonist hears stories of a lost boy, and sets out to put it altogether on paper, if not in flesh.
Much to his own surprise he attracts a local squeeze and things seem to be going right. He pounds the keyboard most nights as the story of the lost boy takes shape. Squeeze enthusiastically assists in tracking down details while Doctor reluctantly pitches in. Even the local plumber adds some intel about how the drain pipes in the village work.
There is a resolution and a happy ending despite all the foreboding as he excavates drains, pipes, memories, cellars, wells, and much of the land of the house looking for clues, and irritates and alienates the neighbours by persisting in nosing around. It gets worse before it gets better.
Writer’s integration into village life is well told, and the locale is a major feature. I chose it for that locale as change from the run of Nordic reading I have been doing. Plus who does not like Maltesers. He finds villagers speak three kinds of English, depending on age. The oldest speak a slangy tar speech from the days when they learned from British sailors. Then the post-war generation speaks a stilted school-book English, correct but devoid of idioms. Finally, the youngsters have a Euro-English derived from MTV and the like.
Roseann Dingli
The author has several other titles that seem to be similar.
GoodReads meta-data is 548 pages, rated 3.96 by 1,923 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Superb.
While recovering from a heart attack, retired head of the National Crime Command in Sweden, one Lars Johanssen takes an interest in a cold case. It is a tired cliché brought to life by a master story teller. Lars spends most of the pages lying on the sofa at home as he recruits the home help, his brother’s factotum, his wife (and her brother), and another retired curmudgeon to scratch the itch.
Whenever his officers used complain at the impossible missions he assigned them, he always said, ‘Make the most of what you have.’ Now his physiotherapist says exactly that to him as he comes to terms with his new limitations, a dead right arm, poor coordination, recurrent headaches, and dizzy episodes. He didn’t realise how irritating and annoying that remark was until someone else said it to him!
His wife is a bank director and she can ferret out financial information from rabbit holes and her brother is a retired tax accountant who understands it. Curmudgeon has access to the police warehouse where the paper files from the case are stored through a nephew in uniform. (Good thing, too, that the paper is there because a computer disk crack destroyed the digital files, which to cut costs were not backed-up.) The home help is whip smart, and the factotum is a body builder who learned to survive the hard way. As Lars says, it is one of the best investigative teams he ever had, apart from the lack of badges and uniforms.
While the statute of limitations has expired on the cold case, surely the perpetrator did not stop at one. But who is he? Yes, it had to be a he. (Figure it out.)
It all turns on a fibre that should not have been there. But the puzzle has many pieces.
Along the way, Lars learns to accept his frailty and comes to like the home help despite the tattoos and studs, and swallows his ingrained hatred of Russians (the body builder). He still has time and room to grow, if reluctantly. Pia, his wife, quietly observes his changes.
I got to know and like Lars in Death of Pilgrim, reviewed elsewhere on this blog, and went looking for other books featuring his investigations. Solid gold, this one. (Regrettably I did not like the second one I read, Falling Freely, as If in a Dream (2007), finding it disjointed and indulgent.)
Leif Persson
A couple of niggles. I cannot quite see how the original investigation did not turn up the nephew-in-law. I also wondered early on why the father’s paramour from the hospital was not interrogated either in the original investigation or much sooner by Lars. See, I was paying attention.
IMDb meta-data is 13 minutes, rated 7.3 by 164 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Satisfying.
Nigel is a grumpy old man and content to remain that. My audience identification was immediate. The usual tropes follow but they are so well done that it works. His closed shell opens a crack, and the patient robot enters…slowly. Maybe I am a sucker for this motif since I liked Robot & Frank (2012), too, when so many did not. Though Robot in Robot & Frank did conspire in a bank robbery. It must the Isaac Asimov effect.
Another short winner from DUST with the ever versatile Timothy Spall as the reclusive Nigel. It can be found on You Tube.
GoodReads meta-data is 368 pages rated 3.62 by 584 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Brrrr.
Detective Agnes Luthi transfers from financial crimes where she read spreadsheets to homicide in a career move up the pay-grade and at the end of the very day she gets the promotion prepares to drive home near Geneva (Switzerland, not Nebraska) when the winter storm of the century sets in. Just before she gets going a call comes in from Otranto Manor near Lac Leman. A corpse has been found and, as the phone masts go dark, she is the only investigator that the dispatcher can contact. With a big swallow off she goes on her first murder investigation on day one, alone in a white-out blizzard. She has not even yet met your new boss who is now incommunicado.
The weather sweeps in at 100 kilometres an hour closing roads, bringing down power lines, drivers abandon cars on the highway, trucks have jackknifed across traffic lanes, Luthi creeps along, missing the exit, and gingerly working her way back. The Manor is down the steep slope on the lake shore and in this weather it is virtually inaccessible, but needs must, and by baby steps and grasping branches and a few falls, Luthi makes her way down, even as the weather increases in intensity. The wind howls, trees crack and fall, sheets of water lifted by the wind off the lake freeze in the air and strike like shrapnel, flashlight beams are blinding in the swirls of snow, it is only by dumb luck that she comes upon the body where she finds the local plod who arrived before the worst of the storm set in, but his falls en route have deprived him of his torch (lost) and cell phone (crushed). The flares he set out to mark the spot are either blown out or away by the winds. Everything is getting brittle in the Arctic temperature driven by Antarctic winds, including bones.
Plod is totally preoccupied by his wife whom he was told just before his phone perished had gone into premature labour with their first child. He is frantic to turn the investigation over to the homicide squad, having done his job with the flares, and go to the hospital. But there is no squad only Luthi who will not release him, and in any event, he cannot now ascend the slope in the dark night of this perfect storm.
The blizzard is a magnificent character in the early going. There is no need for the characters to go on about being cold, the reader feels it through the prose. But it is soon superseded by the Manor itself, a millennium old castle (aka Old Dark House) with secret passages, hidden stairways, rooms concealed in the fifteen-foot thick walls, a dungeon, and in this storm none of the mod cons like electricity, gas, or telephone work. It is cold, dark, and silent.
What follows is a police procedural as the members of the resident Addams Family are questioned and efforts are made in the isolated circumstances to examine the crime scene and the corpse. As if.
I did think Luthi constant self-absorption with her own personal situation was egotistical and less justified than Plod’s worry about his wife. Her problems are in the past. Why do krimi writers add backstory problems, isn’t a solo murder investigation in the situation hard enough? Indeed this preoccupation is compounded throughout so as to lead to reader indigestion from over plotting. I’ll say that again: it is over plotted. There are so many plot lines that I got confused trying to keep track of them.
But the locale, the situation, the Old Dark House, the cast of characters are well drawn, and maybe the overlarding can be calmed in the next outing, for I assume this is the start of series.
The only other Swiss krimis I recall are the 1970s grim psychological tales of Friedrich Dürrenmatt usually involving unindicted war criminals and the fascist wanna be Friedrich Glauser’s 1930s books set in xenophobic Alpine villages.
IMDb meta-data is 3 hours and 53 minutes in four episodes, rated 7.0 by 866 cinematizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: A slow burn.
One of the most thoroughly investigated murders in history occurred at 11:20 pm on downtown street in Stockholm on the night of 28 February 1968. While leaving a movie theatre with his wife, Olof Palme, incumbent prime minister of Sweden, was shot dead.
In this film a senior police officer nearing retirement agrees with a cabinet minister in his last term to review the case decades later, and so begins the research into the files, parking tickets, the few photographs before smart phones, the endless and contradictory witness statements, thought experiments to re-act the crime, timing of comings and goings, sifting the thousands of reports seeking the reward, sorting out the reliable from the unreliable, testing witness chains, and the growing feeling that someone has obstructed the effort when…. (where did parking ticket receipt go?)
Layered over all that is another investigation into neo-Nazi influence in the police and security services though it evaporates from the story. It is complicated, and yet it is also simple: Someone pulled the trigger.
It is full of references to unnatural practices with reindeers and Lapplanders to give it Swedish authenticity. Viewer discretion is advised.
In one marvellous scene a disagreeable police officer whose alcoholism has seen him relegated to manage a warehouse of lost property until he can be retired, realises the best place to hide something is….right there in the lion’s den. But will anyone listen to this slovenly sodden man? That is capped by the last lingering camera shot at the end. Stay with it. There is no padding in this production: every word, every look, every shot integrates into the story.
Detectives at work detecting.
By the way, ‘Pilgrim’ was a Security Service codename for Palme.
In all it is brilliantly produced, directed, and acted, but sometimes hard to follow with the cross-cut timelines, and cryptic dialogue. Miss a title card with the date, and you are lost. Still such an uncompromising approach made this viewer pay attention.
For those who must know, the solution is banal. No vast conspiracy. Just one angry man who latched onto a chance opportunity, and had the means to do so.
By following a piece of string, I have been reading a lot about Sweden lately and was reminded that I had seen this series, so I went looking for it, thinking I could watch it again and get more out of it now that I know some of the context from the reading. I did and I did.
Sherlock and the Time Machine (2020) by C.J. Luton
GoodReads meta-data is pages (not stated) rated 4.22 by 9 litizens.
Genre: Sherlockiana.
Verdict: intriguing, but….
It starts as charming pastiche when a young and uncertain H.G. Wells (who surely was never uncertain) with an even younger Albert Einstein in tow arrive at 221B Baker Street with the news that ‘The Time Machine’ (1895) was fact not fiction. Einstein explains the space-time continuum with a rubber band and a handkerchief (but not to me).
A theme used by another writer.
There follows one of the most convoluted plots I have ever encountered. I got lost, stayed lost, and gave up hope, and after Wells and Einstein dropped out of the frame all too soon, I also lost a great deal of interest. In the end, either I did not get the resolution or there wasn’t one. Yes, I know the villain was thwarted and slain but what his purpose was and what did the time machine have to do with any of it? Unknown to this reader.
Whatever the point was it escaped this reader.
On some websites it is listed as the second and in others the fourth in a series.
The Life and Death of Olof Palme: A Biography (2015) by Pelle Neroth.
GoodReads meta-data is 181 pages (it seemed like a lot more), rated 3.30 by ten litizens.
Genre: Biography (ostensibly).
Verdict: Bah!
Olof Palme (1927-1986) was bigger than life, or so it seemed at times. He was here; he was there; he was everywhere promoting this cause and that. It seemed to me that his talkfests were in fact productive in the long run, and that is why I wanted to read about him. What motivated him to start the marathons and what kept him running? I am still wondering after reading this, the second book I have been through about him.
While there is some information about Palme’s background as a child of privilege, as an army officer, as a Labor party apparatchik, as a minister, and prime minister, there is very little about the man inside. If there are letters he wrote to friends, personal acquaintances who knew him, insightful associates, they are absent from these pages which increasingly became a chronicle of his public life taken from his official calendar, punctuated by rambling asides about the Cold War, environmentalism, Swedish class structure, or sonar technology as the context, and then – inevitably – the assassination where the Bermuda Triangle of speculations continue unencumbered with either rhyme or reason in a cocktail of stupidity, credulity, and worse. Idiocy is not confined to MAGAites.
Some obvious points are elided. Swedish prosperity from 1945 was founded on neutrality in World War II which meant it did not have to rebuild after the war, unlike most of the rest of Europe, and also its role in administering the millions of the Marshall Plan. This prosperity paid for much that followed until the rest of the Europe caught up. By the way, Count Bernadotte whom Napoleon put on the Swedish throne established Swedish neutrality in the early 19th Century. Until then Sweden had long been a major aggressor in northern Europe.
The claim is made in this book that Sweden began to lag in science and technology because Palme governments had other priorities. The evidence for this slide is the decrease in the number of Nobel Prizes going to Swedes. ‘Oh dear, is there not an obvious explanation?’ The process of Nobel Prize selection has become less parochial and more systematic, international, and transparent and that led to a wider distribution of prizes than Swedes awarding Swedes. See Burton Feldman, The Nobel Prize (2001), discussed elsewhere on this blog. To wit, there was a time when I had the word ‘Dean’ in my title, when I got a letter from Stockholm every year inviting me to nominate someone for the Nobel Prize in Economics. The net was cast very widely.
On the subject of Nobel Prizes my question is why Palme did not get a Peace Prize for endless good works in the Middle East and Africa? When I think of some Peace Prize winners, well, not naming any names, ahem, but Palme was far more significant than some named Al or that one-term senator from Illinois.
What with all the rather confused asides I never had a feeling for whom his constituents were, or even how many elections and votes the Social Democratic party won with him leading it. Nor is there any effort to show him on the campaign trail. Did he meet-and-greet? Remember names? Did his speeches register with auditors? Was his electoral appeal generational? Gendered? Could he laugh at himself?
I did learn a few things. The Sweden Palme was born into was a conservative, religious, rigid society with sharp class distinctions underscored by the use of language in ways unfathomable to me. Think of the sclerotic Ingmar Bergman movies of the 1950s. Palme was born to the haute mercantile class and related to other members of the second-tier elite, like Max von Sydow and Raul Wallenberg. His paternal grandmother was a Baroness who spoke German. The first tier, by the way, were those with inherited wealth from the residual aristocracy. There were many more tiers in a finely calibrated social structure that had the rigidity of an Indian caste system.
He grew up in a multi-lingual environment, and spoke freely in German, Swedish, and English. But he was often cryptic, perhaps impatient, and that led to many misunderstandings. An example is his often quoted remark that his experiences in the United States as an exchange student for one year at Kenyon College in Ohio made him into a socialist. Most of the references to this remark have it that he was repelled by the poverty and racism he saw (and he was) on his many Greyhound bus travels before and after school, but in fact he meant that he was inspired by the can-do attitude he found into thinking great things could be accomplished by energy and perseverance in a rich society.
When his father died young, Olof had been sent to a boarding school (like Eton), where as a sickly weakling he was bullied but found the schoolwork easy. It is also said he failed to wash himself and continued that habit for years. My inference is that this ninety-pound weakling avoided the communal showers where he would have been tormented, but the author draws no such conclusion. The author peers down the psychology lens and supposes that much of Palme’s later reforming zeal was payback to the elite for these experiences, reducing the political to the personal. That elite would have included most of his friends and family.
He had a budding career as an army officer where he proved adept at intelligence work and kept a cool head under pressure. While still a reserve officer in the army he was the president of the Swedish National Union of (university) Students, an unpaid position, where he proved to be an adept organiser and motivating force. He concentrated on international cooperation especially with the emerging nations of the post-colonial world. How he could afford to work full time for nothing is not explained.
He came to the notice of the incumbent Social Democrat prime minister, Tage Erlander, who in 1953 hired him as an executive assistant, because his party needed a broader international outlook in the post-war world and more engagement with youth. This selection of an outsider irked many entrenched interests with the SD tent.
Erlander became a father figure for Palme who was his number one protégé. The Social Democratic party at the time was dominated by trade unionists and their aspiration was a comfortable living for their members in the existing social order. These were sewer socialists with no program of social change such as Palme later envisioned.
Palme resigned from the army and very much against the wishes of his family went into politics, winning election to parliament in 1957. His first major assignment in politics was to mastermind the switch from left-hand to right-hand driving in Sweden to align it with Norway, Finland, and Denmark with which it had land borders. That must have been an enormous challenge, but it is barely mentioned in these pages. Yet it would have brought him into contact with a broad cross section of the society, and given him a network for the future.
He married Lisbet from a similar social background who influenced him greatly with her work in child psychology, first as minister of education and then minister of communication, under her influence, he made children a priority. Opponents saw this as indoctrinating youth. Take that Sesame Street! (She was omitted from the Palme biography on Wikipedia when I looked. Figure that out.)
In the 18th Century warrior King Charles XII had made church attendance compulsory and put pastors on the government payroll, making them agents of the state. They visited homes twice a year for inspections, reporting findings up the line. The pastors were to make sure everything was done the right way at home. this intrusion became a state function in the 1930s with home visits by officials. (This Swedish practice is parodied in Kitchen Stories [2003], a Norwegian film.) The pressure for conformity backed by the fear of damnation explains much of the oppressive weight in Bergman films.
(Charles wanted healthy boys, and lots of them, for the endless wars he waged in Poland, Denmark, Russia, Ukraine, Moravia, Saxony, Lithuania, Crimea, and more. In the end he depopulated Sweden of men, that story is mentioned in my review of a biography of this dynamic but destructive king elsewhere on the blog.)
This preoccupation with national health and fitness followed the science in the late 1920s down the path of eugenics and then euthanasia, which continued far too long. Yes, the sanctified Social Democratic government of Sweden practiced forced sterilisation for generations. And dare it be said, murder of the unfit. It was Prime Minister Palme who put a stop to such practices. See New Mankind (2007), a Finnish movie about these activities in Sweden. It seems Sweden’s closest neighbours are least blinded by its halo, and its most severe critics.
‘Sanctified,’ I wrote above. The Anglo-American hagiography of Sweden was founded by Marquis Childs, a significant journalist of his time, with three books that set the mould for much of the perception of Sweden for the next several generations: Sweden: Where Capitalism is Controlled (1934), Sweden: The Middle Way (1936), and This is Democracy (1938). These texts became the old testament gospel of Sweden which has continued to this day. Reformer, idealists, dreamers, many of them thought Sweden was the pot of utopian gold at the end of rainbow. Pilgrimages to Stockholm to see this land of dreams has remained a coming of age ritual for many English-speaking intellectuals. Even in Australia of the 1980s this cult of Sweden was strong with Laurie Carmichael’s government sponsored report Australia Reconstructed (1987) based on the mirage of Sweden. Dig up a copy for amusing reading today. Hint the State Library lists in the online catalogue but the University of Sydney Library does not, despite the pontifications about it by members of that university.
Australia was not the only place where this sanctification occurred. Stateside, I once gave a conference paper on the superficial stupidity of worshipping the Swedish model as utopia, pulling my punches as usual, to a glacial reception of PhDs who visibly cringed at hearing criticisms of Swetopia. (Just coined that term – Swetopia.) It was a struggle to get that paper published, though persistence finally paid off, but I also remember well some of the inane comments of anonymous referees defending Swetopia, but I failed to keep the copies when I vacated my office in 2010.Tant pis!
Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia (2007) remains the best book I have read on Sweden because it is about his life day by day. Its most memorable take-away is that Swedes work hard and do so because no one owes them a living either as individuals or as a country. I was tempted to add a layer of Protestant Ethic to his explanation. He contrasted that to the England he had left, where work was to be avoided at all costs. This simple but fundamental insight is not to be found in the Swetopia hagiography like Australia Reconstructed (1987).
Count Bernadotte whom Napoleon put on the Swedish throne to get him out of the way, founded the Swedish foreign policy of neutrality as the best way to survive great politics and war.
Went I first visited Stockholm I made a pilgrimage to the site of Palme’s murder. (Saw a man urinating on the street mid-morning on the way, something I never saw in Italy.) On SBS a few years ago I saw a Swedish four-part series on the investigation into the Palme murder which I thought then was excellent: The Death of a Pilgrim (2013). Must have another look now that I know more of the time and place.
I had hoped to learn something of Palme’s biography from reading the book about his murder, but not so. Ergo I went back to this title, though I found the sample tabloid, but it is all there is. Fears confirmed.
Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme (2005) by Jan Bondeson.
GoodReads meta-data is 233 pages, rated 3.60 by 62 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction
Verdict: [Not what I was looking for and not much else.]
On 28 February 1986 Olof Palme (1927-1986), long-serving Prime Minister of Sweden was shot dead on the street in Stockholm at about 11:20 pm when he was walking home from a movie. Who dun it remains a mystery and with that why it was done. Into these voids much speculation has flowed.
Hedge: this is my only source though I did cast an eye over the entry for Palme on Wikipedia in the original search for a biography as explained below. Of course I remember him from the times as a lightening rod for many good causes and some not so good.
The author describes early police reaction as Keystone Kops: the panic line (+ 000, or 911) went unanswered, and the first person to call in the incident hung up before it was answered. When another caller got an answer, the officer taking call did not believe anyone would be shot on the street and regarded the call as a hoax. Only when two officers in a patrol car passing-by saw a small crowd gathering and stopped did police action, of a sort, start. Again their first reaction was that it was joke of some kind, nor did they recognise the fallen Prime Minister or his accompanying wife who, covered in his blood, stood stunned. These two hapless traffic cops seem to have had no training in management either crowds or crime scenes, and it got more chaotic as more officers and medics arrived.
The author describes all this in pitiless detail and more of the like was to follow, as no one seemed to have been in or taken charge of the investigation. Even when the realisation dawned that it was a shooting murder and then that the victim was the incumbent Prime Minister, the major crime or murder squads with their experienced detectives, forensic specialists, and equipment were not mobilised. Instead there was a stampede by senior police administrators for the glory of the case before world media, and the grandstanding started the very next day. Yes, there were press conferences, but no there was no management of the investigation. Indeed, in general one of the major faults the author finds is that the investigation was handled by administrators who themselves had no police experience.
The mass of witness statements collected, eventually, were contradictory and confused as any experienced officer (or reader of krimis) would expect, and the author narrates these on end, but never puts them in any discernible explanatory or analytical framework that I could fathom. The result is a confusing mass of detail with no contours which perhaps mimics the police approach.
The initial response of the grandstanders was to round up the usual suspects (druggies, pushers, violent criminals) and fit one of them to some of the eye witness descriptions (take your pick) of those around the time and place. When that failed the first grandstanders were pushed aside by the another lot who next went for foreigners (immigrants, refugees, or spies [Russian, American, South African, Iranian, Iraqi, Swedish, or in combination]). There followed a conspiracy theory focussed on a Bofors contract with India, implicating Indians, and a host of international arms traders. Then the police officers themselves became suspects as a way to explain the incompetence. There being no end to stupidity as we have seen in D.C., another school of thought was that his own immediate family murdered him, i.e., his wife and his son(s) either collectively or individually. Finally, well probably not ‘finally,’ there is also the belief that he arranged his own death as either suicide, or by cleverly swapping someone else so he could take off to a life of ease in one of the sunny but poor African countries he was always banging on about.
No doubt somewhere both Hillary Clinton and aliens have also been blamed. Check Pox News.
In each case vast time and money with attendant media irresponsibility went into the exercise to come up with nothing and the decades dragged by.
Because of the glory to be had in the case, the first officials to direct the investigation were managers who per the McKinsey testament had themselves no policing experience to influence, i.e., taint, their management activities. It is an article of faith in the Church of McKinsey, supported by faith alone and no evidence, that managers should not be contaminated with experience of what they manage. While that seems normal these days, and explains much incompetence, they must not have watched any krimis on TV either because they omitted the most basic procedures, like securing the crime scene, avoiding witness contamination, systematic finger printing, cross-referencing files, identikit pictures, and so on. (All these things were eventually done piecemeal after the fact.) These omissions were compounded by the desire to manage the investigation without assigning experienced homicide detectives in preference to officers personally dependent on and so loyal to the managers, including officers seconded from regional offices unfamiliar with Stockholm who were free of local prejudices, yes, but also unaware of the most basic geography of the city. The litany of blunders is Trump-like.
When the investigation proved intractable and the quotient of glory available evaporated these managers abandoned the project leaving no one in charge. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation has seen some or all of these behaviours by the McKinsey bots in our midst: The rush for CV glory; when things go wrong the flashing blame bat that strikes subordinates, the hasty departure before the trumpeted change fails, and so on. ‘Fail and Move up’ is surely a chapter title in the McKinsey manual.
If all one knows of Sweden is what we read in these pages, the real question is how such an unpopular, reviled, and despised man ever got to be PM. There are long roll calls of vitriol about Palme. It remains that the party he led won election after election, and when it lost it was by a hair. That electoral popularity might explain why he was feared by some, but this angle is not explored in these pages.
In these pages following the great tradition of blaming the victim much responsibility for everything is implicitly applied to Lisbet Palme, his wife, who was walking with him at the time of the murder. She went into hysteria and shock – who would not – but this obvious fact seemed to have escaped the notice of the on-site police officers (when they arrived) who said she was inconsistent and uncooperative. And in this case and all others that followed, cheque-book journalism ensured everything said under the veil of secrecy was broadcast within twenty-four hours.
After getting off on that note, she thereafter was reticent with the police – again who would not. Because the investigation was disorganised with even junior officers competing for glory, she was questioned repeatedly by different officers. In one notable instance four different sets of officers tried to interview her on the same day. And no they did not share their findings with each other, and in some cases no notes were taken in the name of secrecy, opening the door to wild speculation. It might be that she soon concluded the police were using her as a dupe – who would not – and she became ever less cooperative.
It is also pretty clear that some members of the Pox media did not want a resolution, but a continued melodrama with which to castigate authority. This is another angle omitted in this text. Rather like the 1970s murder of Australian journalists in East Timor which is periodically revived to boast circulation and hits, not to resolve the incident.
I wonder if any police investigation subjected to the same intense and enduring examination would prove to be similar? Mistakes are made, and concealed. Short cuts are taken and hidden. Officers are unfamiliar with or contemptuous of protocols. Equipment does not work. Analyst cannot use the expensive systems they have. And so on. I wondered that at the time of Chamberlain Trial(s). I did ask a judge of my acquaintance about this but he fobbed me off.
I also wondered what all those Swedes were doing on the sidewalks at near midnight in Stockholm on a cold winter night. There seemed to be many people dawdling about. Is that typical in sub-zero weather? Are those Nordics that tough?
Jan Bondeson
For film buffs try Death of Pilgrim (2013), a four-part series, for a gripping account of one of the (many) subsequent investigations into the original investigations.
While mentally in the Nordic world I went looking for a biography of Palme but after reading the Kindle sample of the only one on that source I decided against it – breathless, sensation-seeking, and superficial journalism it seemed to me – and opted for the above title, though I did not like its sample any better – it read like a failed thriller script – but it came from Cornell University Press and that bespoke quality, a rigorous editorial process that would prize order, facts, dispassion, and analysis. And the blurb on the Amazon Kindle entry said this book would lay to rest the innumerable conspiracy theories. That seemed promising. So I had hoped when I pressed on. As if!
