Martin Beck Series

I’ve been meaning to blog about the Martin Beck Series since I started reading the first one last year. I blipped about it [Blipfoto.com/Bookrambler] by way of a ‘holding’ comment so apologies for cross-posting and repetition. I could blame eye problems and catching up at work but the fault lies squarely with not sticking to my self-imposed rule of writing up a review or comment straight after finishing a book. Anyhow, below is my attempt to write about the series but I’ve failed to give it the justice it deserves. I think, above all, what stands out the most are the characters. Grumpy, moody, miserable, childish, huffy, mannerly, naive, vulnerable, and utterly appealing, they’re all fixed in my memory as real as if I’d met each of them personally.

This series of crime books are police procedurals set in Sweden; a Decalogue of crime books by the Swedish writers, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Subtitled, The Story of a Crime, Sjöwall and Wahlöö set out to show that ‘under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer where poverty, criminality and brutality existed beneath the glossy surface.’ The characters develop from book to book, adopting new characteristics and habits, or deepening collegial relationships. These are tightly plotted police procedurals that follow the investigation from grisly discovery to final solution. Each one is completely different and yet the same. Each one follows the same characters uncovering secrets and following dead-ends, but each too uncovers another aspect of the characters, develops Beck’s personal life, and reveals how Swedish society is sliding away from the welfare ideal.

Each of the books is its own individual story but I probably wouldn’t have read beyond Roseanna if I hadn’t received the first three together from ‘InsideBooks’. Roseanna builds slowly, plodding procedurally from the discovery of a woman’s body to resolution of the crime. Looking back at the first in the series from where I am now with no. 7: The Abominable Man, it takes on a whole new aspect. The characters, the murder squad, their families and relationships are introduced but not fully formed. In fact, they’re not all there yet. It’s clear, though, that this isn’t just about Beck but about his team and the individual characters. Lennart Kollberg, Frederik Melander, Gunnar Ahlberg, Gunvald Larsson, Einar Ronn, and the comic double act of Kristiansson and Kvant, all play important individual and integral roles in various novels in the series. Some, like Beck and Kollberg feature in them all, while others, like Gunvald Larsson aren’t introduced until no. 3. Åke Stenström is an important character, both for his own sake and for introducing his wife to the group.

The setting plays a crucial role in each of the novels, while the period detailing enables Sjöwall and Wahlöö to inject cutting social commentary. For example, mention of a Vientamese tourist in Roseanna is a not too subtle reminder of international politics. Christmas, for the Marxist authors, is like the ‘Black Death’, the consumer ‘epidemic swept all before it and there was no escape. It ate its way into houses and flats, poisoning and breaking down everything and everyone in its path… The gigantic legalized confidence trick claimed victims everywhere’ (The Laughing Policeman, p. 119).

In discussing how they planned the series, Sjöwall and Wahlöö describe how they wrote the books one at a time, each writing a chapter after the other. Writing one book on your own is hard, so how much planning must have gone into deciding who would write which scene, what to leave out and what to add, when to change a character (as Beck does in no. 6, Murder at the Savoy) without alienating the reader? There’s also the stringent planning and organisation of material; sorting out the intricate details for ten interconnected books is a feat of great ingenuity. The Martin Beck series is, rightly, an acclaimed landmark in European crime fiction. Here’s a link to an interview with Maj Sjöwall inThe Observer, November 2009.

Originally published in Sweden in the 1960s and early 70s, the edition I’m reading through is reprinted by Harper Perennial (2006-07) from English translations (of mixed success, I hate to report), with an introduced to each provided by a contemporary crime writer, such as Colin Dexter, Val McDermid, and Henning Mankell, who introduces the first, Roseanna.

The whole series is highly recommended. I won’t review each book but give a mini introduction to whet your appetite:

Martin Beck Series, No 1: Roseanna (1965)

“On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from beautiful Lake Vatern”.

The first book of the series is slowly paced but skilfully plotted. The investigation into the brutal rape and murder of Roseanna McGraw stutters from dead-end to dead-end until a final flurry of activity in the closing chapters brings a resolution. In this first book we are introduced to Martin Beck and the team of detectives and to the Swedish landscape and society.

Martin Beck Series, No. 2, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966)

Beck travels to Prague to track down a missing journalist. Alone and abroad, he muses on his failing marriage. A moody, broody book that builds Beck’s character.

Martin Beck Series, No. 3, The Man on the Balcony (1967)

An uncomfortable and disconcerting read. Someone is attacking and killing young girls in Stockholm and leaving their bodies in “once-peaceful parks”. No. 3 is when the detective characters begin to gel as a team and Larsson is introduced to upset the balance.  Kristiansson and Kvant bring comic relief to a very dark tale.

Martin Beck Series, No. 4, The Laughing Policeman (1968)

Someone murders eight people on a Stockholm bus, including one of Beck’s team. For me, this is where the whole series begins to make sense. If you get this far, read the first one again. What strikes is Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s restraint. They hold back so much from the first three which makes the action of the fourth so affecting and effective. Brilliantly done. The Vietnam War looms again in anti-war protests while Beck’s character deepens at the same time as his relationship with Kollberg and Larsson intensifies.

Martin Beck Series, No. 5, The Fire Engine that Disappeared (1969)

Larsson takes centre stage as hero in a house-fire; there’s a double meaning to the Fire Engine and black-marketeering; social injustice and politicalisation of the police add to the mix to give one of the best plotted books of the series. The action moves from Stockholm to Malmö. Incisive social commentary cuts through the fiction:

“Students put on their white caps and trade union leaders get their red flags out from the moth-balls and try to remember the text of Sons of Labour. It will soon be May Day and time to pretend to be socialist for a short while again, and during the symbolic demonstration march even the police stand to attention when the brass bands play the Internationale. For the only tasks the police have are the redirection of traffic and ensuring that no-one spits on the American flag, or that no one who really wants to say anything has got in amongst the demonstrators.” (pp. 182-83)

 Martin Beck Series, No. 5, Murder at the Savoy (1970)

Again set between Stockholm and Malmö. The murder of a businessman during his after-dinner speech at an hotel takes Beck and Larsson into an investigation of seedy corruption. We learn more of Larsson’s background, while Beck lightens up. Kristiansson and Kvant are their usual bumbling inept selves – it’s their unprofessional actions that hinder the whole investigation.

 – I wrote about no. 6 in my Daily Reading Journal – start here http://bookrambler.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/day-2/

 So now you’re up to where I am – at No. 7, The Abominable Man (1971).

On Reviewing

 

 

Click the image to go to the Blipfoto entry for 15 Jan. 2010

Keeper: Living with Nancy – a journey into Alzheimer’s, by Andrea Gillies (Short Books, 2009) – update

[see HERE for earlier post when it won the inaugural Wellcome Trust Book Prize].

I first read Keeper in the summer. I loved it. It’s a serious book about important issues, written with warmth and compassion. Yet, it was an uphill struggle to find an editor who’d take a review or would mention the book. The main objection seemed to be the ’small publisher’. Really? Not the writing, the grammar, narrative, style, language, or ideas? 

Literature needs to be taken seriously. Not just posh literary writing for the élite but writing that creates an impact with the reader; that trickles out into society and begins to affect change. I don’t say this lightly, nor as a bookslut, but as someone who champions good writing. Independent publishers, or at least the smaller ones, shouldn’t have to fight to get their books reviewed in the mainstream press. It shouldn’t always be the same few who review books by ”big names’. I know that it’s interesting when ‘A’, who has published X number of successful books brings out another successful book, or even one that flops, but these aren’t the only books published. It seems that way, though, because these ‘big names’ always receive wide-spread attention. 

Keeper deserves attention. It deserves to be in every bookshop. It deserves to be sought after, talked about, discussed on the kind of telly most people watch, not just on the arts programmes. 

Here endeth today’s rant. 

I’ve posted an extract of the review from TLS on the review pages.

52 Books for 2010

A bit of promotion - -

but couldn’t resist this nifty widget culled from the Penguin website. I have been so giddy-headed by the amazonian warehousemen calling ’ “come buy, come buy” … Hawking their fruits along the glen’  that I’d forgotten you can buy books directly from the publisher.

On Reviewing

I’ve recently added two reviews - Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler and All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney – to the ‘Reviews’ pages, with links to their online posting in the literary ezine, The Literateur Magazine. Out of these contemporary studies of the modern male, I much preferred Tyler’s wry character-driven story of retired teacher Liam Pennywell’s attempts to reconnect with his family to McIlvanney’s  plot-driven exposé of Scottish religious and political tensions as seen through the eyes of Gerry Conway, a hard-nosed journalist with a soft-centre.

I have to admit my partiality to Tyler’s fiction. I’ve read and enjoyed almost all of her books. Although there are gaps, such as The Tin Can Tree, I’ve read everything from A Slipping Down Life (1969; reissued by Vintage, 1990) to Digging to America (2006) and consider her Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1998) one of the best books ever written.

This is McIlvanney’s fictional debut but not the first time I’ve come across his work. In my ‘other life’ as academic researcher I’ve read and disagreed with his monologue, Burns the Radical: Politics and Poetry in late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Tuckwell Press, 2002). In my ’good reads’ review I gave it 3 stars: “McIlvanney’s book is thoroughly researched and well-written. He offers a lively new interpretation of many of Burns’s poems, well-known and the lesser known ones. It’s hard to agree with his views on Scottish contractarianism but that aside it’s a good addition to Burns scholarship.” 

My disagreement, such as it is, is with McIlvanney’s view of presbyterianism, the Enlightenment and how they affected Scottish society and not on his writing style.

Do I still have this in mind, though, when reading his fiction?

I worry whether my preference for Tyler over McIlvanney is down to gender? Would a male reader find the same things to disagree with in both texts?

Enjoy, but approach the reviews with all the above in mind.

Vintage Hogg – old wine in old bottles?

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg,

Introduction, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Vintage Classics, 2009), 211pp, pbk,

ISBN 978-0-099-51904-1

Here’s Vintage Classic’s ‘modern’ spin on Confessions:

Robert is a difficult and disturbed young man. He comes from a troubled family background and turns to his Calvinist faith for solace but finds it hard to get along with other people, particularly his brother and his dissolute father. After he falls in with the mysterious and charming Gil-Martin his actions become more and more extreme. He convinces himself that he is one of the lucky few who have been chosen for heaven and therefore all his actions are automatically right and good … even murder.  [back-cover, 2009]

While it’s right that Hogg’s important nineteenth-century novel remains in print and available to a wide readership, Vintage Classics, in attempting to modernise Confessions for contemporary readers, does a disservice, both to Hogg’s novel and to his image as a professional writer. The dumbing-down continues inside where the new version gives scant attention to Hogg’s biography, disregards the authority of the original text and ignores current research.

James Hogg was born on 9 December 1770 in Ettrick Forest in Selkirk, Scotland. He taught himself how to read and write before being introduced to Walter Scott who helped him in his literary career. His first collection of poems, The Mountain Bard, was published in 1807 and this was followed by The Queen’s Wake in 1813. He went on to work for Blackwood’s Magazine and published his most famous work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, in 1824. James Hogg died on 21 November 1835.

Hogg was baptised not ‘born’ on 9 December 1770. His date of birth is unknown. He was born at Ettrick Hall Farm in the Ettrick Valley, within the ancient Ettrick Forest. His ‘first collection of poems’ was not The Mountain Bard (1807) but Scottish Pastorals (1801), which, as far as is known, Scott did not have a hand in. While Hogg did, in a sense, ‘work for Blackwood’s’, by contributing songs, poems and short stories, he published much more than the titles provided on the ‘Other Works by Hogg’ listing.

 The Mountain Bard

The Queen’s Wake

The Three Perils of Man

The Three Perils of Woman

The Shepherd’s Calendar

Songs by the Ettrick Shepherd

A Queer Book

Tales of the Wars of Montrose

The listing discounts a lot of Hogg’s writing and a lot of what went into shaping his craft. For example, in 1810-11 he edited and wrote the bulk of the material for the Spy, a weekly Edinburgh newspaper. In 1810 he published The Forest Minstrel, his first song collection. He published long narrative poems, Mador of the Moor (1814), Pilgrims of the Sun and Queen Hynde (1823), and a further novel: The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales (1818) as well as an earlier collection of short stories, Winter Evening Tales (1820; 1821). He also collected and edited an important song collection, Jacobite Relics (1818; 1821) and in his lifetime published numerous short stories, poems, songs and verse dramas.

            Knowledge of Hogg’s publications, especially of the Spy and Brownie of Bodsbeck, help to clarify and contextualise the issues raised in Confessions. For example, the fictional character of John Miller, ‘equipt with a grey plaid, and staff, like a Nithsdale Shepherd […] the son of a poor school-master in a remote part of the country; a good English and Latin scholar, yet uses the broadest dialect of the district’, and ‘the Spy’ are and are not aspects of Hogg himself. Through these figures Hogg comments on Edinburgh society at the same time as he was moving within those same genteel circles: doubling is at the heart of Hogg’s fiction, it isn’t something he adopted for Confessions. The Brownie of Bodsbeck is Hogg’s fictionalisation of the ‘Killing Times’, the period in the late 1680s when strict government repression met with dogged resistance among religious moderates and zealots. In The Brownie Hogg shows how the ‘rage of fanaticism of former days’ (Confessions, 2009, p. 78) affects ordinary Scottish people caught up between opposing sides. At a deeper level, he also comments on the nature of ‘truth’ in the way that he gives equal weight to both recorded documents and oral tales. Both, he seems to imply here as he does through the multiple narrative perspectives in Confessions, should be treated with circumspection:

‘ “Should the truth be tauld or no’ tauld? That’s the question. What’s truth? Ay, there comes the crank! nae man can tell tha’ – for what’s truth to ane is a lee to another […] Truth’s just as it is ta’en.” ’ (The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818), 2 vols, II, 235-36)

            Vintage Classics does not give editorial details about the text that was used in preparation of the new version (the manuscript has never been located). There is no bibliography and the front matter simply states that the book was ‘first published in 1824’. Now, to me, this implies that the text used is that of 1824 but comparison shows this is not the case. Integral to the text is a ‘Fac Simile’ of a manuscript page of the sinner’s memoirs taken from the ‘little book’ found in the suicide’s grave. In the 1824 version of Confessions, this page is printed before the title page and dedication to ‘the Hon. William Smith, Lord Provost of Glasgow’. Neither the facsimile nor the dedication are reprinted as part of the Vintage Classics version. At the end of the 1824 version of Confessions the ‘Editor’ notes ‘I have ordered the printer to procure a facsimile of it, to be bound in with the volume’ (Confessions, 2009, p. 210). Original readers would find the facsimile printed before the text in just the way the Editor claims so that, as well as providing ‘evidence’ of the pamphlet’s existence, it is part of Hogg’s strategy of authenticating both the Editor’s Narrative and the Sinner’s Narrative to reveal that no one has authority on the ‘truth’. Readers of the Vintage Classic edition find a note in parenthesis, ‘[v. Frontispiece]’ which indicates only that it might exist.

[image from scran website ]

There is evidence of editorial interference to the original text but nothing to indicate why it has been done. There are slight changes to the orthography, for example, in the addition or deletion of punctuation marks, as well as more significant changes to the text:

original 1824 -‘ “Then will you be so kind as come to the Grass Market and see me put down?” ’ (p.90)

VC, 2009 -‘ “Then will you be so kind as to come to the Grass Market and see me put down?” ’ (p. 51)

original 1824 -‘to his right leal and trust-worthy cousin’ (p. 274)

VC, 2009 -‘to his right trusty cousin’ (p. 149)]

The textual changes seem to follow those found in modern versions, such as the Campion Reprint of 1924, the Cresset Press of 1942, or the Penguin Modern Classics edited by John Carey in 1969 which all ‘tidied up’ Hogg’s original wording and which suggests that the text was set from one of these ‘derivatives’ and not the original 1824 text. A full discussion of modern versions and a listing of editorial changes can be found in P. D. Garside’s recent research edition (EUP, 2002, pp. 195-199)

            Confessions has enjoyed wonderfully insightful editors, both recently and in the past, yet Lucy Hughes-Hallett mentions only Andre Gide’s 1940 edition. She summarises significant debates and research on the novel but doesn’t offer a bibliography to connect her thinking with previous editors, like Peter Carey, Garside, Adrian Hunter (Broadview Press, 2001), or Karl Miller (Penguin Classics, 2006). While Hughes-Hallett makes the obvious connection between current ideologies, terrorism and fanaticism (as has been made since 1824) she offers no new observations on the text and in parts, is inaccurate. For example, to (wrongly) explain the origin of ‘predestination’ she falls into the trap of deciding that ‘the Scottish Covenanters … are the target of Hogg’s satire’ (p. xi), when this is both untrue and a simplification of a complex issue. A thorough discussion on religion and Confessions is found in Ian Campbell’s ‘Afterword’ in the EUP edition (pp. 177-194).

It’s interesting to compare Ian Rankin’s introduction to the new Canongate edition (2008) of Confessions (already discussed on the blog – click here). Rankin is a professional author who knows how to respect his readers and the text so that he manages to modernise Confessions without dumbing it down.