Leif G W Persson

Continuing my mission of trawling through the Swedish canon of crime writing on my daily commute, I've just finished Leif G W Persson's "Mellan Sommarens Langtan och Vinterns Kold" - approximately "Between the longing of summer and the mid-winter cold", a story that starts with the apparent suicide of an American freelance journalist, but eventually tells the story about the murder of the Swedish prime minister. Persson, like his friend Jan Guillou, writes about real events and real people with a paper thin disguise which makes it amusing for the reader that is aware of the comings and goings in Swedish politics. This book paints a very bleak picture of the Swedish police, and especially its security forces. Persson is a professor in criminology and a renowned expert on crime and the police, which makes it even more disturbing. In Persson's Sweden, the police is rife with racism, misogyny and incompetence. The book mirrors the very real murder of prime minister Olof Palme, complete with the incomprehensible obsession with Kurdish separatists that followed, which any thinking individual found ludicrous at the time. In Persson's novel the prime minister was killed by a psychopath heading up the external operations of the secret police.

I imagine that Persson's description of the daily grind and jargon of the police is fairly authentic, but it left a bitter aftertaste. The bad and incompetent float to the top, and the capable people look for early retirement.

Same as everywhere else, I guess.