Lisa Marklund has been around the Scandinavian crime fiction scene
for quite some time. Like many writers in that sphere her work has been
the beneficiary of a renaissance, hoisted aloft on the rising tide generated
by the success of Stieg Larrson. Thirty million books sold in 30
languages, she is no literary hanger on.Unlike many other Scandinavian novels that I have read Exposed is set in the blistering heat of a Swedish summer. I love those novelists who can write in such a way that the temperature they describe seems to radiate out from the pages. The heat here was as palpable as anything from one of Walter Mosley’s LA based Easy Rawlins novels.
The body of a young woman is found in a local Jewish cemetery in Stockholm: murdered and with a degree of savagery to boot. So starts the career of Annika Bengtzon. Labouring under a difficult relationship with her mother and a menacing one with her boyfriend, the chance of a career holds the potential for something different. But like so many duped by the notion of life intrinsically moving towards some teleological fulfilment, things in the office are not exactly on the up. A young intern working in one of the major newspapers, Annika is tasked with fielding and filtering the calls that come through to the newsroom. Judgement here is crucial if the paper is to steal a march on its rivals and grab the scoop. Many of the callers are bamboozlers. The requisite skill is to know when to leap or sit tight. On this occasion the tipoff about the body in the cemetery is genuine.
Annika wants to make it her story and the management approves. Eager to make her mark and establish a career in journalism she opens up a line of inquiry. She cultivates a contact in the police who is increasingly surprised at her ability to get there ahead of the posse.
She is quickly on the trek that leads her into the seedy side of Swedish club night life where sexual exploitation and violence against women is rife. The dead girl, Josefin, worked as a dancer in one of the clubs owned by her boyfriend, Studio 69. When it is discovered that the Swedish trade minister has a flat beside the club, but no persuasive alibi, and is quite prepared to resign, eyebrows are raised.
Annika takes on something of a crusading zeal in her bid to solve the killing. She comes to see the victim in personal terms, someone to whom she is obligated not to let down by allowing the investigation to slip into a cul de sac where it will be left to the cold case team: the irony hardly lost on her that a murdered woman who semed to have become separated from a finger during the attack, should have her case put on the long finger. Not for Bengtzon the detached functional way cops look at the dead sprawled in front of them in Law and Order.
The spotlight moves the way of the minister but matters are more complicated than that. Many Swedish crime fiction writers have a mistrust of their government and are driven to dig deeper than surface appearances would permit. A minister prepared to face allegations of murder rather than reveal what he was really doing outside the country when the murder took place, seems a fertile field of inquiry to plough, even if the death of Josefin is off that particular radar.
Annika loses he job after complaints from a local radio station that she was harassing the parents and friends of the murdered woman. Drawing the fine line between persistence and pestering is one probably best achieved over the course of many years rather than on the first job. She had built up a friendship with the flatmate of Josefin but not in the way that the seedy journalist familiar to viewers from Broadchurch will recall. Fortunately, she gets rehired.
Throughout Exposed there is prose writing, penned by someone who lived in considerable fear of a male partner. The reader feels that a terrified Josefin was trying to convey something of the misery she was enduring at the hands of a demanding partner. But there is a twist that hits you right in the temple.
Whilst not cut from the same cloth as Lisbeth Salander – few are – Annika is persistent and capable. There is one point towards the end where Salander and Bengtzon merge in a way that Annika’s boyfriend would very much disapprove.
The Paddy Meehan character from the television drama Fields of Blood tends to reflect the character of Annika Bengtzon: a young journalist up against the entrenched male culture in a business where she is more talented than them, with a healthy dose of the unorthodox thrown in for good measure.
Exposed is a story about a crime investigation and the investigator is a journalist. Marklund clearly calls on her many years working as a journalist and editor to bear on the narrative. The reader is invited inside the world of the newsroom rather than the police HQ. Larsson perhaps might have got his Millenium idea from this.
The first in a series of novels centred on the character of Annika Bengtzon, Exposed is a great appetizer for even more tasty dishes on an already well stocked Scandicrime menu.
Liza Marklund, 1999, Exposed. Corgi: London. ISBN: 9780552160933.
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