New Tricks Swedish style

Yesterday I finished reading the final volume of the Millennium Trilogy: The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. In some ways it was a gothick version of the BBC police series New Tricks, as both involve old codgers returning to active operations. With one difference: the BBC series is basically a comedy, Larsson’s is a nightmare. The BBC has three pensioners - played by Dennis Waterman, James Bolam and Alun Armstrong - recruited to a newly established section devoted to investigating cold cases. Larsson has just two geriatrics - Gullberg and Clinton - but they make Bolam et al seem positively sprightly. Gullberg is 78 and suffering from terminal bowel and bladder cancer, Clinton spends alternate days on dialysis. Unlike their English counterparts, they have returned to a long-established, sinister and highly secret organisation within Sapö, the Swedish security police, known to the very few who are aware of its existence as The Section. And they have returned not to right past injustices but to prevent those formerly committed by The Section being uncovered -  and to perpetrate fresh ones. Unlike the redoubtable Amanda Holman, their boss, Wadensjöö, is only nominally in control.

  Larsson’s novels have several irritating features. The main character, Blomkvist, like his creator  is an investigative journalist. A great deal of time is spent on telling the reader what a wonderful job his magazine is doing rather than simply letting him discover this for himself. Every other page tells us how Blomkvist is irresistibly attractive to women and is a wonderful shag. Unless Paul Newman was using ‘Larsson’ as a pen-name, the author’s wish-fulfilment is a fantasy too far. The prose is often leaden, not helped, one suspects, by an American translator whose grasp of English grammar is less than perfect.

  Yet none of this really matters. After around fifty pages of the reader’s feeling rather distanced by the author’s thinly-disguised self-congratulation the magic kicks in as the plot goes up a gear and one is completely swallowed by the story. Not great literature to feed the soul, but very effective entertainment.

   Unlike Kate Atkinson. Her plots grip, but she also leaves you feeling that you’ve gained fresh insights into human nature. Her characters have real inner lives and her portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s in Started Early, Took my Dog  was a frighteningly convincing forecast of a condition I’ve, statistically, a good chance of experiencing first-hand in the fairly near future. I’ve now read all four of her tales featuring Jackson Brodie and they just get better and better. I’m sorry that Larsson won’t be writing any more books; I’d be devastated if Atkinson’s came to an end.