CRIME NOVELS AND STIEG LARSSON

In the guest house I keep some four hundred carefully selected crime novels from many countries: from Idrisson in Ireland to Tabucchi (Italo-Lusitanian), from Vladimir Volkoff (emigre Russian) to the great Nicholas Freeling (Dutch), Andrea Camilleri (Italian), Ian Rankin (a Scot) and John Le Carre (true Brit like his forebears Graham Greene and Eric Ambler), Ray Chandler (expat Brit in Hollywood), and, of course, the Pleiade edition of the priapic Georges Simenon. These are what the French call noirs, the Italians call gialli, and that we used to call plain 'mysteries' but now categorize as 'procedurals', 'psychological', 'historical', and whodunits, etc.. Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? asked Edmund Wilson about Mary Roberts Rhinehart. Answer, I do. And have written quite a few myself in my I.I. Magdalen persona. It strikes me that -- in the hands of a good writer -- such novels are the last reminder of the true narrative tradition in literature.

Americans rate highly in the international market, especially in Europe,where the brutish is highly esteemed, but apart from Chandler and Elmore Leonard (who started out re-inventing the language of crime) I stick with the avatars, the dirty or convoluted (Ellery Queen, Rhinehart) writers of the 'Thirties and 'Forties. The Scandinavians (Wastberg and Co.) have long been good at the task: their cops somewhat bumbling, their criminals at odds with their smug, suicidal cultures. Until he began to take himself seriously and fell off the roster by concentrating on political corectness, Henning Mankell, now vurtually unreadable, was a fine example. The few Japanese (Matsumoto) who get translated have been remarkable: an ant-like society seems especially troubled by murderers single, if not by murder collective.

Then along came Stieg Larsson, the bolshy Swede, whose Millennium trilogy has made him the world's second best-selling writer. The trilogy is a terrific read because his heroine, Lisbeth Salander is way off all charted behavior in the genre. Seemingly indestructible, she is a sexual fantasy of the author's, whose desirous panting (bisexuality, sado/masochism, bondage usw) is in tune with every kind of lefty 'cause' imaginable. Peep into his background, and the issue is clear: he and his lifelong, unmarried partner, were unsullied sixty-eighters with extreme views, to whom everything that Sweden's highly-structured, busybody and basically conservative socuety stood for was anathema. Unfortunately, Larsson, whose phenomenal success was accompanied by his untimely death at fifty, is pretty relentless in his espousal of the radical agenda. Besides the total flatness of his style (a business-like non-language that may be in part a reflection of his translator), his enormous skill in plotting is offset by the boring predictability of his social concerns, especially in the character of 'crusading' journalist Blomqvist, a man whose company at dinner I would do much to avoid. I can also do without husbands who encourage their wives to seek sexual partners elsewhere, hot scenes of torture, and a general encouragement to view as criminals not just those who commit murder but also those who guard society against such as 'fascists'. The tendency to preach within the crime genre should be eschewed.