Roseanna and the Procedural

the purpose of crime fiction

“But the people in Stockholm are right to be frightened. It is not Stockholm’s becoming a city which frightens them. What frightens them is that the pressures under which everyone in this century lives are destroying the old simplicities.”

—James Baldwin, “The Northern Protestant”

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Two of the big knocks against crime fiction are that it glamorizes the police, and that it fetishizes female victims.

As a fan and practitioner, I don’t believe either are fundamental traits. They’re true here and there, in (usually) poor examples of the form. Not essentially true.

Instead I’d argue that crime fiction is the venue of tension where the justice system and the treatment of women is most criticized and debated. Put even stronger, crime fiction is really the only cultural site where that social critique consistently happens.

If the genre gets things wrong, warps and distorts the world—and of course it does, because every art does—at least it centers those issues. Show me another genre as concerned with womens’ roles in the mid-century, or with police brutality and corruption, or institutional rot, or plain and simple violence.

I don’t look at old cop shows or novels expecting them to share my values. ‘My values’ aren’t a fixed thing. What I look for is complexity of conflict and character. From Double Indemnity to Indemnity Only, crime fiction has a long tradition of both.

Yes, Law and Order is simplistic and could be considered propaganda for the justice system—but NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street were as much about the failures and compromises of the system as its successes. Same with Prime Suspect, Cracker, Touch of Evil, Wallander, Dirty Harry and The Shield. (Columbo, I’d argue, has little to do with the justice system and more to do with hubris and guilt, like the Father Brown stories.)

The best example I can draw on to support my argument is the Martin Beck series of novels by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, an umarried couple of Swedish socialists who wrote ten procedurals, starting with Roseanna.

Roseanna is about the rape-murder of an American woman aboard a Swedish tourist ferry, and the unglamorous and unheroic detectives who solve the case.

This is from the first page (and looks denser than it reads):

When the canal opened for traffic that spring, the channel had begun to clog up. The boats had a hard time maneuvering and their propellers churned up thick clouds of yellowish mud from the bottom. It wasn’t hard to see that something had to be done. As early as May, the Canal Company requisitioned a dredging machine from the Civil Engineering Board. The papers were passed from one perplexed civil servant to another and finally remitted to the Swedish National Shipping and Navigation Administration. The Shipping and Navigation Administration thought that the work should be done by one of the Civil Engineering Board’s bucket dredging machines. But the Civil Engineering Board found that the Shipping and Navigation Administration had control over bucket dredging machines and in desperation made an appeal to the Harbor Commission in Norrköping, which immediately returned the papers to the Shipping and Navigation Administration, which remitted them to the Civil Engineering Board, at which point someone picked up the telephone and dialed an engineer who knew all about bucket dredging machines.

The institutional neglect of The Wire in a few sentences.

A female corpse is found naked during the dredging. The story becomes sensationalized in the newspapers. Who was she, and who killed her? It takes months of work to learn her name was Roseanna McGraw.

At least one critic felt this was exploitation. But isn’t it more likely that a 50% female writing team included an element of exploitiation on purpose? That the story itself is commenting on the excessive attention paid to the victim, the male fantasies spun around her, and contrasting that with the prosaic work of learning who she was?

The Martin Beck novels are portraits of a socialist country under pressure. Domestically that’s true as well. Beck and his wife are estranged, and while she resents his long hours away, Sjowall and Wahloo don’t present Beck as a good husband and father who’s simply overworked. He’s unhappy, sickly, a workaholic, and in charge of a team of male detectives whom he likes and dislikes in equal measure. A very average person—as is the victim, which I think is what makes Roseanna great.

These ten novels (known as ‘The Story of a Crime’ in Sweden) are a testament to what crime fiction does best: make sense of death and violence in a world like ours. No other genre consistently aims for that. It’s what I love about crime fiction and what I hope to bring to my own work.

There are other points of view which are equally valid, but that’s what I believe.

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

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