Roseanna: A Martin Beck Mystery / by Maj Sjowell

Though modern times have seen the emergence and continuing wave of crime fiction from Scandinavia, it wasn't long ago that few would have lent scant appraisal to a detective novel originating from countries like Sweden, Norway or Denmark. Now it's almost the other way around. Highlighted by the mammoth

success of Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy, "Nordic Noir" has gained a prominent place in mystery circles, new titles and authors seeming to emerge every year with intriguing plots and characters moored in the generally cold and dark atmosphere of the region. But before the Millenium Trilogy, or any of the other notable works, there was the husband and wife writing team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Their Martin Beck mysteries burst onto the scene in 1965 with Roseanna and continued the series until 1975 when Wahloo died. The Laughing Policeman even won an Edgar in 1970. Roseanna is a book tinged with intrigue, fascination and suspense, subtly doing what so many other mystery authors have tried and failed at over the years to accomplish: describe people and society tangled up in hostilities which inevitably lead to violence, crime and punishment.

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One summer in the lakes region of Sweden, a young woman is dredged up in a canal, dead and presumably murdered. An autopsy confirms that she was also molested. Nothing is known about her origin and with no one coming forward with any information, the case soon grows cold. Detective Martin Beck of the country's Special Homicide Commission is about to shelve it when, through a near accident, it's discovered that the girl is an American tourist named Roseanna McGraw. With aid from Interpol, Beck and his subordinates are able to trace the girl back to her permanent residence in Lincoln, Nebraska where she worked as a librarian. Having no way to conduct an investigation overseas, the Swedes rely on American Detective Lieutenant Kafka to interview McGraw's friends and neighbors, soon learning that the girl was something of a free-spirited libertine who'd been traveling across Europe alone following a falling out with her roommate. She had been aboard a Swedish canal cruise ship at the time of her death.

The new information leads Beck and his department to narrow the suspects down to passengers aboard the ship and finally to a man they think might have done it. But without any evidence they'll need to catch him in the act. Roseanna has been called one of the best police procedurals ever written with Martin Beck listed among the great fictional detectives of literary history. It's a very concise book with noticeably little extraneous material interfering with the plot. It's also pretty dark and graphic. Almost forecasting the thematic associations their successors would incorporate a generation later, the authors portray Sweden as a very sedated country on its surface, its citizens rather passive and reserved to a point. But beneath this somber veneer lies a world where the darkest human evils are capable of being unleashed and where crimes of the most heinous nature inevitably crop up. Beck himself is a character who mirrors this dichotomy. At once a tranquil family man whose henpecking wife never lets him alone, he's also a master investigator, methodical and meticulous until the moment of critical engagement when his skillful maneuvers extract the truth. (MYS SJOWALL)

The Stranger Beside Me / by Ann Rule

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American non-fiction author Ann Rule has made quite a career out of profiling true crime cases, illuminating the scene, the situation, the motives involved and, particularly, the intimate lives of the victims and villains. Yet a special twist is added to Rule's 1980 (and later 2000 reprint) book The Stranger Beside Me. Rule herself is, chillingly, one of the characters, having worked beside notorious serial killer Ted Bundy in a crisis center during her days as a Seattle policewomen, then considering him a "true gentleman" and "likeable co-worker". Only here does she reveal the shocking revelation of Bundy as not only a man she once referred to as "dear friend", but as a monster of unspeakable atrocities she herself can scarcely fathom.

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At first glance, no one would have taken Ted Bundy for a serial killer. His conventional, handsome visage, amiable demeanor and intelligent speech had everyone fooled, so much so that his killing spree ran into the dozens, covering 5 states prior to his initial apprehension. And even then, due to lazy police work, he managed to escape, committing at least three more grisly killings in Florida prior to his final capture, conviction and death sentence.

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A child born into rather unfortunate circumstances (the fact that his sister was actually his mother was hid from him until he was a teenager), Ted remained shy and introverted for most of his youth, never much of a troublemaker nor singled out by the institutional system as a potential problem for society. Through his stepfather's extensive collection of adult magazines, Ted had been exposed to assorted pornography, much of it particularly graphic, at an especially sensitive age, a symptom he would later attribute to sparking his acute interest in sexual violence. By his twenties, Ted had mastered a dual persona: well-mannered, socially-adept white collar professional vs. "the entity", his own term characterizing his pathologically motivated, sexually-driven need to kill. He effectively appropriated each in a more or less routine fashion, easily able to manipulate others (mostly women, all his victims were female) and conceal his motives and any criminal evidence after the fact. His first murder, an unidentified hitchhiker whose remains were never found, occurred in 1973 when Ted was 26. Successively in the years between 1974 and 1978, Bundy murdered over thirty women (the true count is still unknown), each killed in excessively brutal fashion, often bludgeoned to death, impaled, or otherwise sexually maimed.

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This book is actually two stories. One describes the gradual disintegration of a seemingly normal, affable, intelligent man into a sexual psychopath so evil, so preternatural in his vicious killings, that one wonders if he was human at all. The other story is that of Ann Rule herself, a decent, hard-working, middle-aged mother of four who meets and befriends a nice young man working beside her in a crisis clinic. The slow but inexorable realization on Rule's part that this man whom she'd accepted as a "dear friend" is in fact an unspeakably violent serial killer is almost painful to read, her new afterward penned in 2000 revealing that she still hasn't "recovered" and "moved on". Yet, all told, it makes for a great read for anyone interested in true crime.