Ever since Stieg Larsson let loose the avenging angel Lisbeth Salander, Sweden has been painted in the darkest shades of noir in fiction in spite of that country having one of the lowest crime rates in the world. With his first novel in the Detective Varg series, described in the blurb as “Scandi blanc,” Alexander McCall Smith sets the record straight with panache. In The Department of Sensitive Crimes , it is summer in Malmo: in the intoxicating white heat of sunshine, teenagers are drowning in love, a woman is conducting a steamy extra-marital affair on a nudist beach, and the detective, Ulf Varg — middle-aged, dumped by his wife for a hypnotist — is himself on the verge of falling hook, line and all for his married colleague Anna.
If you thought his name, meaning ‘wolf’, is menacing, note the surname. As characters repeatedly point out (to his slight irritation), the name translates as Wolf Wolf: this wolf is not even one in a lamb’s clothing, he is a lamb. Investigator though he is, he is more intent on forgiveness than on punishment, as one would expect from a true-blue McCall Smith gentleman.
A time of innocence
And the Department of Sensitive Crimes, which he heads, is just that: the crimes he and his team have to deal with here involve a man knifed on the back of his knee; lying, two-timing, hormone-fuelled young girls; and a cuckolded husband who turns werewolf at night.
Such “fancy” cases also mean that Ulf and Anna have a lot of time to spend chatting on metaphysical and physical matters in cafés while their colleague, Erik, dreams of retirement when he can give himself over to his only passion, fishing. “There was a widespread belief in the police force that those in special offices — such as the Department of Sensitive Crimes — occupied virtual sinecures, with very little to do.”
This Malmo could have been Isabel Dalhousie’s Edinburgh or Mma Ramotswe’s Gaborone: largely made up of law-abiding citizens, affording its citizens the old-fashioned indulgence of leisure, in the throes of change but always having small mercies from another, slower-paced world to fall back upon, like Ulf’s Saab (a brand of car officially declared dead in 2016). While getting a lift in Ulf’s Saab to shop for broccoli and free-range eggs, Anna says, ‘“Being in your car is like being in the old Sweden... A return to a time of innocence. Everybody wants that, don’t they?’’’
The “return” Anna refers to happens only in the mind, of course, and McCall Smith is one writer who has been advocating the very real possibility of that return, book after book. And this in spite of the constant presence of Herr Freud in all his fiction. But the mind’s dark crevices in McCall Smith are just nooks, not an abyss, and as such, can be left behind with an effort of will, or perhaps with Prozac (as happens with Ulf’s lip-reading deaf dog, Martin, who is up on his legs, literally, after downing a few vet anti-depressants). So with crime, which, in its real, gritty sense, necessitating severe punishment, doesn’t exist in McCall Smith’s detective novels.
Excessive goodness
The disappearances or cheatings that Mme Ramotswe or Isabel Dalhousie probe turn out to be some trivial matter, easily set right, or something to be lived with. In one of the books in the Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, when Mma Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s assistant, is asked about what the agency does, she replies astutely, “Most of the time we are just helping people to find out things they already know.” If Jane Austen had written detective fiction (and she almost does), she would perhaps have produced novels of the McCall Smith kind, but with added pungency.
This applies too to The Department of Sensitive Crimes, where a judge cries in sympathy at the trial of a midget (there is urgent discussion among the investigators about the political incorrectness of the word); the loquacious policeman, Blomquist, delivers meandering lectures on sunscreen and Vitamin D; and Ulf muses, “What was the point of being an agent of the state’s vengeance if one could not show mercy?”
One of the fallouts of the excessive goodness of the characters is that they are almost sexless. Blomquist cannot understand exactly what the lady and her lover where doing on the nudist beach that made Ulf sure that they are lovers; Ulf loves Anna because they have reached the stage where one can complete the other’s sentences — desire does not seem to be a driving force. McCall Smith will surely come up some little surprises as the characters develop in later books of the series, but I doubt whether they will do something totally unexpected.
After gorging on McCall Smith’s books, I have reached the stage where the sweetness and light tire me a bit. And yet their humour will induce a chuckle. Like when the mighty commissioner of police here concludes gravely, “Cats are psychopaths at heart” after describing his wife’s “antisocial cat” who “takes a swipe at you from under a chair as you walk past.”
The Department of Sensitive Crimes; Alexander McCall Smith, Hachette, ₹699
anusua.m@thehindu.co.in
