[SKRIVA] Rec: Locked Rooms and Open Spaces, ed B Falk

(Fick nedanståënde per post alldeles just. Nedanstående recension är på engelska för div engelskspråkiga listor. --AE)
One shouldn't perhaps review a book where you are represented yourself, but on the other hand this isn't just a review - I'll also say something more general about Swedish mystery fiction. The object at hand is the anthology Locked Rooms and Open Spaces, edited and translated by Bertil Falk (old-time fan of mysteries, sf, and also an author himself) and published by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box. This is a small-press US/Canadian publisher (addresses in both Wisconsin and Ontario), found at www.batteredbox.com. Looked Rooms... presents 16 Swedish mystery/detective stories from 1857 and up to now, and AFAIK it is the *first* such anthology in English. It's a bit of a pioneer work. Editor Falk's translations seem good and there's a nice cover by Nicolas Krizan (well-known from sf circles). Johan Wopenka provides a good introduction to Swedish short-story mystery writing. Of the stories only one is from the 19th Century, just over 1/3 is from the first half of the 20th, and the rest are later. The oldest one from 1857 is August Blanche's "Lars Blom and his Disappearing Gun", which isn't much later than the "start" of the mystery genre (or so many say) by E A Poe in 1841. Blanche was a well known publisher, theatre man, author, etc and it is quite possible he read Poe. His story is in every sense a real mystery with a detection element (even if I personally think the solution is slightly silly). My own story "Clues" (2002) ends the collection, a story anthologised in Swedish and also by Eurocon earlier this year (Creatures of Glass and Light, ed K Mogensen). I think it is placed last to suitably round off a collection which works as a mystery history tour - my story is set in a future moon colony, and that provides a long time span for the book, from horse carriages to spaceships. Some words on mystery fiction. The Swedish version of this genre has been parallel to but perhaps slightly later than the Anglo-Saxon version. Sweden also had a thriving short-story publishing press from the late 19th century and through the 20th, with publications resembling pulps and so called penny dreadfuls. A majority of the stories are from this tradition. Formats were slightly different, but the idea was the same: adventures and thrills for a reading public at a cheap price. And just like in the US and UK, most of this press died off with the arrival of new media (TV, vinyls with rock'n'roll, the paperback book, etc), so for several decades back the short story has had a tougher time. In Sweden today, there are just 4-5 of tiny magazines for short stories (some for sf/fantasy/horror, also at least one for mysteries, but printruns are only in the hundreds). What has been going well in later years is the novel. The Swedish mystery novel has done particulary well, but we find very few (or more precise: none) of the today bestselling mystery novelists in this collection. They are too occupied with crowding the bestseller lists for novels, to find time writing short stories. Of the today bestselling Swedish writers we have names like Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, Stieg Larsson, Camilla Lackberg, etc (also Jan Guillou, mostly into political thrillers). Their sales outperform most foreign writers, except Dan Brown and J K Rowling, and it is said they are doing extremely well in e g Germany where the publishers have vacuumed the market for more "Schwedenkrimi". There are at least two main lines of mysteries: the detective story (whodunnits), dealing with solving crime, and the crime story (howdunnits?), dealing with crime more in general. Looked Rooms... tilts towards the detective story (which in Swedish is nicknamed "deckare", from "detective"), and you can detect that from "looked rooms" in the title. The looked room, where someone is murdered without anyone being able to enter or leave, is a classic detection mystery and most of the stories in the collection deals with locked rooms. Even Blanches early story is a "locked room". I know that the editor Bertil Falk is very fond of the "locked room" concept. The often rather old atmosphere in the early stories makes them slightly difficult for me. The settings, the style, the way people talk etc has changed a lot. I'd more recommend the newer (post-1950) stories. I don't think an English readership will find the Swedish settings difficult to get into, except perhaps for Bjorn Karlin's funny and surprising "The Cures of the Royal Palace", where the Swedish king disappears in an elevator between two floors (it is in the story introduction - each story has one - said that the king himself read the story and *was amused*). An interesting story - hailed as perhaps the ultimate locked room mystery - is Jan Ekstrom's "Reg No 94.028/72 Murder", where a scientists is murdered in a sealed cold temperature lab, though the solution was perhaps a bit too complicated. Several of the stories have technological contraptions as part of the solution, like Karl-Erik Ostrom's "Sixten Hard Pulls Off a Scoop" where a gun set-up with a trigger-spring plays a role, or Jan Eric Arvastson's "Death in the Balloon" where poison is delivered through a technical device. I think any complicated device should be clearly indicated or hinted to beforehand to give the reader an opportunity to ellery-queen-like solving the puzzle. But the device in Julius Regis' "The Invisible Sword" is so easy that you couldn't call it "complicated". Some stories have a wonderful sense of humour (Karlin has been mentioned), like Johan Wopenka's short-short gem "The Man Who Read 'The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr'". I smiled a lot at the last sentence. I won't go into all stories. That the collection is only ca 155 pages, means that most stories have to be rather short. That's perhaps a weakness. I imagine a lot of very good longer stories had to be excluded. (You'll find some of them in the many anthologies from Jan Broberg or the crime writer group FKIS - they have some gems missing here.) Looked Rooms and Open Spaces is an odyssey through time in a small country's mystery writing. Not all stories are brilliant; some are, and others are at least amusing or interesting. 

--Ahrvid

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