What I Am Reading: "Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme" by Jan Bondeson
A subgenre that I see bubble up to the occasional book listicle is Scandinavian Noir, most prominently popularized by the whole “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” series. I’ve considered checking out this genre a couple of times, but have always put it off. I think that there is no need to dream up fictional crimes when there are so many real crimes that are even more interesting.
An article in the Guardian gave me a real life example of Scandinavian Noir a couple of months ago, and introduced me to a mystery I had previously been unfamiliar with. The article was about the assassination of Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Palme was shot at close range while walking home from the movie theater one night in February of 1986, and his attacker ran up a nearby stairway to another street and disappeared into the night.
Jan Bondeson, who is apparently a British MD and writer, has a good chronology of the botched initial police response, the subsequent botched police investigation, and the resulting conspiracy theories and obsessive speculation. He continuously makes comparisons to the Kennedy assassination in order to understand the impact of this unsolved killing on the Swedish psyche; but I was hoping he would go into greater detail on the cultural affects than he did. That being said, he has some illuminating asides about the allegedly stultifying culture of the hegemonic Social Democratic party that Palme belonged to, and the effects this had on Sweden’s economy and culture. Palme’s own policies and integrity come in for praise, but the dreary cronyist bureaucracy may have played a role in the systemic police incompetence.
Where he is strong is on the progression of suspects, not only in the targets of the investigators but in the eyes of the general public. One major suspect was found to be the subject of an overzealous investigation, and another was acquitted in a trial. It is frustrating to read about multiple rounds of investigative incompetence and cascading failures, but throughout it all it was surprisingly easy to keep tabs on the rotating and recurring cast of witnesses and suspects. Especially unimpressive is Palme’s wife Lisbet, who does not cooperate closely with the investigation and does not perform well at the trial of the (likely innocent) accused. The author’s own theory, put forward unobtrusively in a chapter at the end, is that Palme was murdered as a result of his interference in an arms deal between a Swedish company and the Indian government.
I think crime stories are most interesting when they show a culture in situ, or otherwise encapsulate a historical epoch. Sweden in the ‘80s may not be history’s most fascinating or relevant time or place, but it does have the Palme assassination to throw it into harsh relief. It might be the ultimate Scandinavian Noir story; and in fact the late poster boy of the genre, Stieg Larsson, was involved in it. There is a book coming out later this year about the novelist and journalist’s personal investigation of the case, and I might check that out. I haven’t read any of the books in his series, but he seems like an interesting character, almost a noirish figure himself. I wouldn’t expect the book (or any book) to suddenly solve the mystery, but it is interesting to read of the affects on Swedish culture.