Caroline Åberg - Stockholm Noir

I changed light-blue to forget-me-not blue. I deleted small mouth and put in a different sentence: Her mouth was covered by police tape. I added, In her lap, a volume of the Swedish law book, Regulations Concerning Property and Buildings, was open to the famous Chapter 12: How Pigs Should Be Let Loose in an Oak Forest. This I deleted again. It was too ridiculous, even by the standards of Swedish crime novels.

The whole scene was nothing but a piece of shit. Deader than the victim it described. Nothing left to do but start over; but I couldn’t concentrate. When you stop answering the phone, after a while people stop calling. The only ones who keep on trying are people who believe they are too important to be ignored. And so my thoughts immediately turned to...

I picked up my cell phone. Just as I suspected. Anette.

Of course, I had no intention of calling her back, but as I was about to put it back down, it buzzed with an incoming text message. Anette again: Am in town. Want to get together?

Get together? Did I want to get together?

I looked out from my office window: the factory buildings, the rusty water towers, the glittering water...

After an aborted attempt at reflection, I texted back: If you want to meet me, you’ll have to come to my end of town. I don’t know why I used those exact words (I was thoroughly interrogated about them later on), but my idea, in addition to playing hard-to-get, was probably the chance to meet like we used to — at a bar in Hornstull. Those were my best years, when I held down both her job and mine. I was a copywriter, and I hadn’t started to think so damned much.

It was now just about a year since we had broken up, ending our own personal party, which had gone on, with few interruptions, for thirteen months. We’d hit the town, mostly as part of Södermalm’s promiscuous and sorrow-free — or perhaps soulless — art and media circles. Her ambition then was to be a fashion designer, a dream of so many young women.

Anyway, we met at work and soon went on to happy hour, which merged into parties and weekends at bars and clubs, including gatherings on apartment balconies during the light summer nights. Events. Retro raves. Pretend-bourgeois dinner parties. Microbrews and MDMA. Sex in bizarre places. That idiotic conviction of youth that everything you hope for will come true.

Not long after she left me, I lost my job. Hit by depression, I self-medicated with uppers and downers, and it seems I said a few things to my boss and coworkers, things I didn’t have enough talent to get away with. I was also the last hired, and then the economy tanked, so I was the first to go.

But I’d bounced back.

Or so I told myself.

This past summer, I’d been spending many late nights by my wide-open window in the cramped office. I watched the guard dogs running around off leash on the grounds of the cement factory across the street. Often, when I would hear the bass booming from one of the nearby clubs, I’d think of it as the rhythm of a life that was no longer mine. A life retreating farther and farther away.

In retrospect, I’m amazed that I ever met a woman like her. She was way out of my league, even back then, or should have been. She was always the center of attention. The kind of person people say could be a model and who later actually becomes one, moving up and away from their lives and toward other parties in other cities. (I assume you’ve seen a photo of her somewhere. By then, I was already out of the picture.) And what did I have? Besides a reasonable face and a reasonable fashion sense?

So if I was going to go out and see her again, I wouldn’t hurt my reputation to have our acquaintances see us together again.

But that’s not how it turned out. She interpreted my text message more literally than I’d intended. Or perhaps she was hit by childish inspiration. She wrote: Playing hard to get! Still, I have an errand close by. Let’s meet at the swimming dock, 6 p.m., okay? I’ll bring wine!

She meant the little floating dock down by the lake so quaintly named the Triangle. You can find it between Liljeholmen and Gröndal. Just a few hundred meters from my tiny office. I thought it would be embarrassing — we’d skinny-dipped there one late, drunken evening, shortly after we first met — but I couldn’t see how to get out of it. So I agreed. I didn’t believe her about that errand in the vicinity. Either she wanted to relive her teenage years (I knew she’d attended a Waldorf school not too far from there) or she was working on her image of being spontaneous and crazy.

I sighed and started a new crime scene, one a bit less far-fetched. They found her naked body, cut to pieces, in the water...

The hum of a sewing machine came from the office next door. It was three hours until six. I had time to think about the details.

Details matter to losers. I really wanted to see myself as a careful, rational, and methodical person that year — sitting, as I was, in a tiny office between Liljeholmen and Gröndal, wanting to become a crime writer. I had read interviews with successful crime writers. According to them, all it took was a bit of discipline. The only thing that mattered was regular work hours and a strict schedule. Don’t deviate from the conventional narrative arc, follow it without sentimentality, and you will reach the pot of gold at the other end. I had also read countless articles on “How to Write a Best Seller .” The pathways to achieving this miracle differed only slightly. A story that worked always began with presenting the protagonist, preferably in a different situation from what he finds himself in at the end. Step two is introducing a conflict that forces the protagonist to act. And so on, until all seems lost before it eventually reaches a perfect conclusion — neatly tying up all loose ends.

That was the plan. And how hard could it be if you had enough pens and Post-its, a computer and a sick imagination, and a tiny office in an old rundown building?

Wanting to become a crime writer was not the most original or even greatest of ambitions. In Sweden, there are police officers and lawyers and criminals and psychologists all writing crime novels; poets and intellectuals all writing crime novels; hundreds of journalists and doctors and teachers and housewives all writing crime novels. This was a country where even the minister of justice wrote crime novels!

So the general impression was that anybody could write a good mystery, and once you’d written one, you’d become an international success. Who gives a shit that there are fewer homicides in all of Sweden in a year than in any large American city in one or two months? That’s exactly what makes Swedish murders so tantalizingly exotic and symbolically loaded. And if your prose is a bit lacking, your foreign editors would improve it. Yep, you didn’t even have to write well to write crime novels. An equitable business worthy of the world’s most equitable society: the Swedish Model!

Even I wanted to write a detective novel, of course. Then I’d make some money and gain some status and — not the least important thing — I’d be able to revel in macabre scenes of violence in a socially acceptable way. Which, when you get down to it, is exactly why so many people read these books.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that I soon got tired of my pathetic plots and wound up in a never-ending cycle of creating new descriptions of crime scenes and murders. Not being all that rational of a person, I seldom came up with a good method.

Oh, I forgot to mention how I supported myself. Inspired by my own drug use I had set up a modest and discrete mail order business. It was based on the ability to receive mail under a false name at this old rundown office building, where nobody kept track of who was renting which space. The same dynamic also got in the way at times. It meant a lot of running up and down the stairs and new faces all the time, who were, as Stockholm people are in general, often hard to tell apart. But I thought of this business as just something temporary until I achieved my dream of being a real writer, and, of course, that’s why I had this tiny office in the first place.