The Locked Room
Thomas, Brian P.
Book Review/Brian P. Thomas Of Socialism and Sleuths A pretty blonde paces a main thoroughfare in Stockholm, and finally walks into a bank and holds it up. As she is heading for the door, a gym...
...Should you be so benighted as to ask, you will be informed in withering tones about how the Swedish elderly are treated with respect and tenderness, and how the ill are cared for thoroughly and efficiently, and how the disenfranchised are made a part of society to an extent unheard of in America...
...A slipshod autopsy reveals that the man has been shot through the heart, and despite the absence of a weapon or a note, the death is officially listed as a suicide...
...For those who revel in macabre keystonecoppery and a well-chosen detail which suggests more than it explicitly states, this latest collaboration by SjOwall and Wah1436 would be an apt gift...
...What is most striking about the picture that emerges from this Swedish novel is that the alienation and lack of community for which capitalism is so often castigated is also a problem for socialism...
...She disappears before the alarm sounds...
...By the time he solves the case he manages to connect it with the bankrobbing blonde, weaving a couple of theretofore unsolved, seemingly unrelated crimes together in an elaborate tapestry...
...affords us an interesting window on Swedish life, and some sobering reflections on how socialist theory has been put into practice...
...A landlady notices an ominous stench emanating from the apartment of an elderly tenant, so she calls the police...
...The police force in Sweden has so few cops-on-the-beat that street criminals do what they will with virtual impunity, while the burgeoning upper echelons of the law enforcement bureaucracy are systematically skewing crime statistics to make it appear as though only a more powerful, more pervasive police bureaucracy can stem the chaotic tide...
...When SjOwall and Wah1•36 describe the avidity and the highly subsidized incompetence of their government, they wrinkle their noses inbitterness...
...Even if we grant the Marxist contention for the sake of argument, it is hard to tell which is the grimmer portrait...
...Others who are curious about the human toll exacted by socialism in anomie and inefficiency will find themselves scrutinizing their received notions about what role a government ought to play in the lives of its citizens...
...Two patrolmen force the door open and discover a two-month-old corpse, eaten with worms and stinking so foully that they both nearly faint...
...The Locked Room challenges the unspoken belief of many that all the gloom in Sweden has been herded before the lens of Ingmar Bergman' s camera, leaving the rest of the country an elysian glade...
...Anxious to spend as little time as possible within noseshot of the corpse, they rush through the investigation perfunctorily and find that the room is completely locked, and that there is no gun in the apartment anywhere...
...Take another whiff...
...Whether or not Marxists are justified in their claim that capitalism reduces all of the ties between men to commercial ones, a peek at The Locked Room raises serious doubts as to how the socialist alternative can avoid reducing human relations to a strictly bureaucratic level...
...If it irks you to hear America described as a police state, and if you have a hard time reconciling tales of near utopia under socialism with Sweden's appalling suicide rate, then The Locked Room belongs on your reading list...
...Noses bent to the Left can smell little but ordure at home, but their nostrils dilate with satisfaction at the scent of the wind from Sweden—ah Socialism, how contentedly it chews its cud in the Scandinavian meadows...
...The Locked Room is more than a deft police procedural novel with terse characterizations and a darkly funny plot...
...As she is heading for the door, a gym teacher with a misplaced sense of heroism lunges at her, and she shoots him out of panic...
...Detective Martin Beck has just recovered from a nearly fatal gunshot wound inflicted at the end of the previous Sji3- wall/ novel, and he is assigned to the case of the locked room since it is deemed a not-too-strenuous puzzle...
...It also Brian P. Thomas is a student at Brown University, majoring in philosophy...
...Swedish socialism at work and play is a cow of unusual sanctity in the hagiograThe Locked Room by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahltid translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin Pantheon (1973) $5.95 phy of some American intellectuals...
Vol. 9 • August 1976 • No. 10
