When the generic description “police procedural” attaches itself to a novel, Sweden is hardly the location that comes immediately to mind.
This, after all, is the country whose authorities still haven’t figured out who gunned down Prime Minister Olof Palme and his wife as they walked home from a movie on a wintry Saturday night in 1986. When Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was stabbed fatally in 2003 in the middle of a crowded Stockholm boutique, it took police a few weeks – and at least one false arrest – to apprehend a suspect who discarded his knife, a bloodstained cap and jacket at the crime scene in front of witnesses.
In other words, we’re not talking Scotland Yard here, not even the real one, let alone the nearly infallible juggernaut of detection imagined in so many mystery stories.
Location is one of the many gratifying surprises to be had from Kjell Eriksson’s “The Princess of Burundi,” which is set in the old university and cathedral city of Uppsala. Since his debut crime novel, “The Illuminated Path” in 1999, Eriksson has become a best-selling writer in Northern Europe, and this book, elegantly translated by Ebba Segerberg, is his first published in English.
Like any good story of crime and detection, this one begins with a murder – a small-time, semi-grifter and tropical-fish fancier whose beaten and mutilated body is found in the dump where the city deposits its snow. At the heart of the narrative is a pair of police officers, Ann Lindell and Ola Haver. She is a workaholic and single mother, wearily enduring maternity leave with a child whose father’s identity she refuses to disclose and whose birth has estranged her from her boyfriend.
Haver is unhappily married to Rebecka, whom he loves. She is a physician also on maternity leave and discontented, as their introductory scene deftly describes: “December. The time of darkness. For Rebecka – or so it seemed – the darkness was heavier than it had been in years. Haver couldn’t remember her ever having been so low. He had been watching her strained attempts to put on a good face, but under the frail exterior her seasonal depression, or whatever it was, tugged at the thin membrane of control stretched over her pressed features.”
There’s also a chillingly well-drawn psychotic – of a distinctly Swedish variety – who sends outraged letters to the local transit and housing authorities complaining about various meticulously documented inefficiencies, and sleeps with a mannequin he periodically subjects to humiliating punishments. He might, or might not, be the killer.
Eriksson’s plot is ingenious without being improbable, and his narrative manages to be exhilaratingly propulsive and rich in convincing psychological insight and engrossing details that suggest the fabric of daily life in the Swedes’ middle-class, resolutely egalitarian welfare state.
Thus the local police chief hands out assignments on the case over coffee and ginger cookies at a staff meeting: “Ottosson ended with some general remarks that no one paid any attention to, though they all waited politely until he was done. Framing these meetings in the right way was important to Ottosson. He wanted them to have a cozy, personable feel.” He also babysits Ann’s infant son when she joins the hunt for the killer.
Upon reading a newspaper account of the murder, Lindell, exhausted and conflicted by motherhood, feels a surge of energy: “The morning fatigue vanished. This was her job. Some got a kick out of the sports pages … some preferred the massive texts in the arts-and-culture section and others read the cartoons or the home-and-garden inserts.
“None of this interested Ann Lindell, but a murder in her own hometown made her heart beat faster. She was excited not by the violence itself or the fact that a person had been brutally slaughtered, but by the fact that it meant she had work to do.”
Strangely enough, it’s also the need for purpose in the midst of a routine and materially secure life that motivates the psycho who, as a narrative presence, stalks the story’s sense of the commonplace as chillingly as he does his intended victims.
Tomas Transtromer – Sweden’s finest contemporary poet and a working psychologist – long has mined the same secure, middle-class territory traversed in “The Princess of Burundi.” He once located his poems’ origins in the experience of passing notes to bored classmates during school lectures that “seemed more than usually trying.” Now, he writes, “The lesson of official life goes rumbling on. We send inspired notes to one another.” The way in which Eriksson simultaneously has acknowledged the reality of that first sentence, while fulfilling the writerly mandate of the second, makes this book very satisfying reading.
The Princess of Burundi
By Kjell Eriksson; translated by Ebba Segerberg
St. Martin’s Minotaur, 288 pages, $24
