My pleasure reading has often been made more pleasurable by selecting books set in places I have visited for more than the old “if it’s Tuesday it’s Belgium” regimen. This preference clearly accounts for my love of stories set in the American Southwest and the cities and byways of the British Isles.
Let me now ask
you to focus on a more unusual area by encouraging you to sample some of the
work of a Scotsman by the name of Torquil MacLeod who
writes Nordic Noir mysteries about a female detective working out of Malmo,
Sweden. The series is available on Kindle at minimal cost.
MacLeod was
born in Edinburgh and spent 36 years as an advertising copywriter before his
eldest son moved to Skane (far southern Sweden). Soon he was visiting his son
and his family more often and started writing a mystery series that is centered
in the Swedish city of Malmo, but skitters off to various places in England,
Finland, Prague, and Berlin when the necessities of plot point to additional travel.
My Malmo
experience is slight. I have seen it only through a train window while
traveling from Copenhagen to Stockholm. The city was once a major ferry port as
the narrow gap there between Denmark and Sweden had required a short sea voyage
for hundreds of years. Now it is one end point of a seven-mile-long engineering
miracle called the Oresend Bridge and Tunnel. It is the longest road/rail bridge in Europe
and enables direct vehicle and train traffic from Scandinavia to anywhere in
Europe.
Few tourists
stop in Malmo today, but my memory of crossing that bridge when I saw it was
the main city featured in Mr. MacLeod’s detective series was intriguing enough
to get me to put down .99 to get a copy of Murder in Malmo on my Kindle.
There are now several books in the series and they are all fun to read. The
chief character is a perfect new age Nordic Noir heroine--Inspector Anita Sundstrom.
She is a divorcee who was unlucky in love the first time around and now finds
herself reluctant to commit even while falling for new partners. She is a
complex figure who is good at her job, but finds her overweight boss a trial
and some of her team members less than competent. She has a college age son who
seems to be frittering his life away in the early books but later finds love
with a young Iraqui woman who is the sister of one of her co-workers.
MacLeod
gives his detective an English birth and then a move to Sweden. The Swedish
police then send her back to Britain for a training year with the London
constabulary. This background and her mastery of both languages makes for plots
that often utilize connections and characters in both countries.
Sundstrom’s
team includes a young Muslim detective and her own son has a relationship with
the sister of that young man. This allows MacLeod to mine the holes in the
Nordic socialist heaven—many of which center on the recent immigration of dark-skinned
peoples into the blond fair-faced Scandinavian populace.
The plot In Murder in Malmo centers on Inspector Sundstrom
encountering a long-time female antagonist who has just been appointed to head
up a cold case unit. The chosen case just happens to be one of Sundstrom’s
first cases and was never satisfactorily solved. As she works on a modern
murder, she is also pulled backward in time and a rethinking the old case. This
gives you two mysteries (one old and one new) that seem totally disconnected at
first but then begin to merge. It is a device MacLeod and several other mystery
writers seem inclined to use.
Along the
way there is still plenty of the dark violence the “noir” genre promises. The
murders pile up and innocents suffer.
Detective Sundstrom slugs it out and bears the scars. She does not shy away
from drawing and using her weapon.
MacLeod’s attention to local and historic detail is also
impressive. He seems to have absorbed every street, every building, every park
in his locations whether they be in Berlin, Malmo, London, or other small towns
in the Swedish countryside. I am
reminded of how Anita and her British lover travel to Berlin to piece together
an old occurrence and link it to how the cold and controlling environment of old
Communist East Berlin architecture has been put to modern use yet somehow still
exudes the very stench of its totalitarian past.
In thinking
about similarities to other mystery series, I note that Inspector Sundstrom
resembles DI Hillary Greene in Faith Martin’s books about an Oxford based
female detective. Her DI Greene also has a sharp investigative mind, a cadre of
disparate teammates, and a bad divorce in her past. You can get her first book
titled Murder on the Oxford Canal for free if you have Kindle Unlimited.
Neither of these series are as complicated, as lush in description, or as
psychologically deep as Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache, but they offer plenty
of satisfaction for idol hour reads. s
And a little plug for Penny's latest book that I have just finished and will be writing about shortly.
