Liza Marklund - Studio Sex aka Studio 69 / Exposed

The fourth book in the Annika Bengtzon series, 2002

Copyright © 1999 by Liza Marklund

English translation copyright © 2002 by Kajsa von Hofsten

Sweden is an odd little country close to the north pole. There are fewer than nine million of my fellow Swedes. We experience one of the world's highest standards of living, we live longer than people anywhere else, and we enjoy the greatest gender equality of any country in the world. Nonetheless, our suicide rate is high, we're way up near the top in the taxpaying league table, and men still beat their women to death regularly.

This is the place where my novels are set. It's a society full of contradictions. It is strange and very ordinary at one and the same time. Since 1932, Sweden has been run almost continually by the Social Democratic Worker's Party. (The liberals and conservatives have ruled in short terms for a total of nine years over this period.) This has, not surprisingly, created some arrogance among the people in power. The Social Democrats started bending the rules early, and then making up their own.

One of the rule-bendings resulted in the illegal espionage organization called the IB. Party spies worked both inside and outside Sweden for decades. Tens of thousands of Swedes were registered and defined as "security risks," which meant they might lose their jobs and their elective offices. The crimes these "security risks" were alleged to have perpetrated included parking their car too close to the wrong political meeting.

The truth about the IB organization was revealed in May 1973 by two young reporters, Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt, who wrote for the small, alterantive magazine FiB. Both journalists were sentenced to a year in prison for the article, making them two of very few political prisoners in modern Swedish history. (Everything turned out fine for the journalists. Today, Peter Bratt is an investigative reporter at the biggest and most prestigious Swedish morning paper, Dagens Nyheter. Jan Guillou is the chairman of the Swedish Publishers Club, and also a bestselling author. Together we own one of Sweden's biggest publishing houses, Pirat. Ha ha!)

Everything describing the IB affair in this novel is true, up until the conclusion. But since Sweden is an arms-exporting country, who knows? Sweden is militarily neutral. Squeezed beween the NATO member nations Denmark and Norway on one side and Finland and the former Soviet Union on the other, this seemed like the smart thing to do for a long time. Not having any allies during the cold war forced us to maintain a strong national military defense. It also made us build an advanced weapons and arms production infrastructure, and the Swedish parliament has agreed to a limited and controlled export of this matériel.

In 1986, the Indian government closed a deal with the Swedish company Bofors, worth 8.4 billion Swedish kronor. The Social Democratic government was deeply involved in the agreement. Prime Minister Olof Palme talked the whole deal through in several meetings with Indian prime ministers Indira Gandhi and, later, Rajiv Gandhi.

It became clear that Bofors got the order after 300 million kronor of bribes. The scandal dominated the Indian election campain in 1989 and actually caused Rajiv Gandhi to lose his office. (There have been several deaths in the aftermath of this deal, which might be quite coincidental. Olof Palme was shot dead in Stockholm on February 28, 1986. The man in charge of controlling the Swedish export of war matériel, Carl Algernon, was killed in a strange accident in the Stockholm subway January 15, 1987. A Swedish journalist who investigated the Bofors affairs, Cats Falck, was found dead in her car on the bottom of the ocean, and Rajiv Gandhi was murdered in 1991.)

The role of the Swedish government in this affair is still not clear. The Social Democrats have promised, again and again, to publicly "wash their dirty laundry" in this matter.

We're still waiting.

Our society is well regulated. We don't mind that Big Brother is watching. Every citizen is given a personal number at birth. This number follows you everywhere: bank accounts, taxes, phone bills, car registration, stocks, employment records, and so on. Everybody's number is published (with few exceptions, which I will explore in my novel The Paradise Trust) and can be located through the tax office. Using this number, you can find out a man's income, his wealth, his previous wife's maiden name, and his kids' grades in math. Everything is on the official record about us Swedes, but also about the people in power. Every piece of paper lodged with our authorities is public, as well as all the bills and receipts turned in by our officials. Anyone can check every expense by our politicians, union leaders, and other authorities.

Still, they cheat. In the 1990s, an endless line of powerful people were caught going to gambling clubs, brothels, porno theaters, and on exotic vacations at taxpayers' expense. In July 1994, I found a limousine bill that proved that Bjorn Rosengren, the leader of a huge union cartel, had lied about a visit to a porn club during the 1991 election. Rosengren had to resign, and the cartel made it no secret that they thought this was my fault.

These events inspired me to write the novel Studio Sex. Oddly enough, the members of this very union selected me Author of the Year for this book. And everything worked out for Bjorn Rosengren as well. His pals in the party made him governer of Norrbotten, my home region. Today he's the minister of industry in the Social Democratic government.

All of these affairs have, of course, been brought to the attention of the Swedish people by the media. The Swedes read more newspapers than those of almost any other nationality, probably because all nongovernmental broadcasting was forbidden until the late 1980s. Until then, we had two state-run TV channels and three state-run radio stations. Broadcast news programs have always been strict, official, and uncontroversial. Investigative journalism and groundbreaking news have usually been found in the tabloids.

The Swedish evening papers blend the serious and the popular in a way I haven't seen anywhere else: investigative work sits next to celebrity scandals. The papers have a true love-hate relationship with their readers. Swedes love to discuss and question the tabloids and cuss at them too. Lately, a debate has centered on a mentally disturbed drug addict who was convicted of the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. Later, he was acquitted by the appeals court and is, therefore, a free man. In the last ten years, the man has received 1 million Swedish kronor from the tabloids and the new commercial TV stations, mainly for giving interviews. This is still not acceptable practice in Sweden and has been strongly condemned by sections of the public. The murder of Olof Palme remains unsolved to this day.

I wish you exciting and thoughtful reading.

Liza Marklund

Avarua, Rarotonga

New Year's Day, 2002

The events in this book take place nearly eight years before those of my previous novel, The Bomber.

Chronologically, Studio Sex is the first in the series about the crime reporter Annika Bengtzon. When we meet her here, she has just started work as a young freelancer at the tabloid Kvällspressen.

Have a good read!

Liza Marklund

Hälleforsnäs, July 1999