Exit to the Right

By : Bo Tao Michaëlis

Better than any other genre the crime novel reflects the profound political changes of recent years; it hints at a move away from utopias to fixed positions.

It is extremely gratifying that the Danish crime novel has found its feet in recent years. That it is consolidating itself as something other than an imitation of foreign, particularly Anglo-Saxon, tradition and is establishing itself as a characteristic feature of the contemporary Danish literary landscape.

There are many reasons for this gradual but quite clear development. We can note that the crime novel is now officially acknowledged in Denmark as an artistic means of expression worth taking seriously. We can stress that the crime novel in particular is flourishing at the moment for the very reason that it is an excellent vehicle for pinpointing the global, historical and social changes that little Denmark has been subject to and part of for the last twenty years. Or to put it in more literary terms, a manner of writing that so far has been practised by a small number of authors is now clearly attracting others and setting them going. For the very reason that there is a new, youthful market for this kind of novel and, as suggested above, because it has come in from the cold of the newspaper kiosk into the warmth and comfort of the bookshop.

A Janus face
An author who at intervals since the 1960s has been writing serious crime novels and representing modern Danish prose on the bookshelf is Anders Bodelsen. He is not himself particularly happy to be classed as a crime writer. But this narrowness of outlook is personal to him and cannot alter the fact that more than any other Danish author he has been influenced in style and content by the moral and psychological thriller. His first "crime novels" from the 60s, Tænk på et tal (The Silent Partner, Penguin, 1978), and Hændeligt uheld (Hit and Run, Run, Run, Penguin 1971/ One Down, Harper & Row, 1970) persuaded many reviewers to compare him with the American Patricia Highsmith. An influence which he has not specifically rejected, and which is presumably linked to the fact that in his work as a film reviewer he often wrote admiringly of Alfred Hitchcock. A film director who has not only made a film of a Highsmith novel, but whose entire range of psychological suspense shows an affinity with her right down to thematic and aesthetic detail.

Rød September (Red September), Bodelsen´s latest novel from 1991, is quite clearly a return both to the themes of his earlier work and a variation on the typical Highsmith plot. The interior dual character is split between two figures, an outward-looking Janus head placed on the shoulders of two brothers who in their immediate natures, existentially and politically have developed each in his own direction. They have developed as contrasts not only directly to each other, but also in the sense that they enact a vibrant dialectic discussion of presentday Denmark. One day, Jens, a recently divorced civil servant, catches a glimpse of his brother Søren in a Copenhagen suburb. Not that there really ought to be anything strange about that. Copenhagen is still a small metropolis. But the demonic power in this event lies in the fact that Søren was declared dead five years ago. He died in a landslide in Austria, and none other than Søren´s wife Vera identified the body.

Political fog
This fascinating opening, when we cannot be sure whether Jens is seeing things or Vera is lying, develops into an gripping political plot. In his young days Søren was fanatically left-wing, later to become a journalist on Jyllands-Posten, Denmark´s most conservative newspaper. Or did he? That is to say, did he, like so many other left-wing radicals of the sixties switch to right-wing views when it was in that direction they saw their future careers, with detached houses, Volvos and pets dogs. That is certainly what Jens did. And as he is a respectable economist with Social Democrat views, it is a thorn in the flesh to him that his daughter Laura is growing up as a yuppie and a devoted fan of Denmark´s Liberal Foreign Minister. What has gone wrong over the years has become an existential question for Jens. Not only on account of his own depressing life in his parents´ old house, but also because the present has changed so radically. The Danish singer Carl Brisson, who used to sing a song about a little Copenhagen where nothing was lacking, and John Lennon´s utopian creed Imagine, are leitmotifs that constantly recur throughout the book. For when Søren finally turns up on his brother again, severely wounded after a final mission in Copenhagen on behalf of his supposed friends in the PLO, the plot takes an introspective turn and reverts to an old theme of Bodelsen´s: the security of childhood that evaporated as the two brothers each went off on their own. One treading the goldpaved boulevard of compromise, the other the romantic path of political commitment. It is not revealing too much of the point of the novel to say that disappointment awaits them both.

For they are no longer young, and the world which once seemed so conveniently divided into East and West has been transformed into a moral fog and political haze. Søren and Vera still cling to each other in a kind of "love that will last beyond death". But Jens, who has always been half in love with Vera, has to realise that a princess can only be retained in a middle class house as a dream. Søren moves towards an uncertain fate as a cripple in Berlin, while in his little life Jens falls into the deep Biedermeier sleep.

Classic plot
It can be argued that Rød September changes direction and is transformed from a political discussion thriller into a melancholy chamber play for three people from a pampered generation. And the same dichotomy is found in Leif Davidsen´s Den sidste spion (The Last Spy). However, here it is scored for a large orchestra and is a grandiose composition in the spectacular style, taking us to Afghanistan, Thailand, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union - and ending in the exclusive Østerbro district of Copenhagen. For here, too, we follow three contemporaries who have each chosen their own path into a career or love. On their way they are accompanied by women who live on men´s premises, but who also take their fates into their own hands when the hour of truth strikes. Where Bodelsen has a remarkable sympathy for the clandestine Søren, Davidsen is far less ambiguous in pointing to the scoundrels. As in his previous novel, Den russiske sangerinde (The Russian Singer, Andre Deutsch 1991/ Random House 1991), He has very little good to say of the Eastern Bloc, which is now crumbling into tiny national cubes. And with Davidsen, spies die as they deserve, lonely and deserted.

Tom Gubrowski, a police officer, is brought home from his post in Thailand, where he has been keeping an eye on the drug traffic. It is none other than Jette Jansen, the Head of Danish Intelligence PET, who brings him home from the Asian warmth to the European cold. He is to uncover a mole in the Danish intelligence service now that the accounts of the past are to be settled in the light of present-day political change. This classic plot, known from countless other novels in the "you know that we know that they know" genre turns into a stroll down memory lane.

Tom had a brief affair with Jette in his youth. And her predecessor in the job, Morten Haslund, who has drowned in Finland just before the start of the novel, was his childhood friend. As was the artist Pelle, a rather cuddly Communist, a useful fool, who did a good trade in his social realist paintings behind the Iron Curtain. It is these three men who more and more become the key figures in the final confrontation, in which the last spy is to be brought down.

Lukewarm careerists
All the way through Den sidste spion we are aware that Leif Davidsen knows his Eric Ambler, Len Deighton and John le Carre. But his novel is something more than a Danish imitation. Firstly, because Denmark is a very small country indeed when it comes to international espionage. And secondly because its cultural stance and its tradition as a "semi-socialist" nation represents a different and more tempered relief from the Cold War between East and West.

Tom Grubowski, whose Polish name itself points to his position as an outsider, is a loner in relation to his generation. He was never a fellow traveller, because he saw at a very early stage what human dignity and human rights those people travelled in who defended the Soviet Union and company. But also a professional anti-hero who refused to take part in the new age´s dance around the golden calf. The "victory" over eastern Europe is dearly bought, and typical of the universe created by Davidsen the careerists in this triumphant procession are lukewarm scroundrels with double standards. Heartless, and with an eye solely to power and prestige.

With a woman´s eyes
An ice maiden of this kind is Jette Jansen, a calculating and beautiful senior yuppie who long ago gave up all hope of husband and children. In brief a nasty, cold character in Davidsen´s novel. But there are other sides to these career women than the frigid way of life which men usually view with critical eyes. And Mette Winge presents some of them in her novel from 1991, Sandflugt (Sand Drift) She, too, includes a female head of the security services, but this one has vast problems in her own life. Because she wants it all - career, husband and children. And that has its price. A tragedy not least for women whose youth has been left behind, who could not afford, or did not have the opportuniry, to buy or sell a traditional women´s life.

Sandflugt is not an entirely successful thriller. Its story about two friends, Lise and Miriam, both of whom meet a bitter fate because they are obsessed with the same, bizarre male spy, is too heavily laden with set pieces from the genre. (Mette Winge was far better on home ground in her previous fin-de-siècle thriller, Novemberlys (November Light) But on the whole, Sandflugt makes interesting reading. Because it presents a clear female point of view, and does so in an original and different manner.

Winge´s two main characters are just old enough to have taken part in the women´s liberation movement of the 70s, and for that very reason too old to be able to know what to make of the reactionary view of women of the 1980s. Female values which once were to be alternatives to masculine values, are now simply perfume and powder in the boardroom. And although both women dream of "doing what people do", one of them as an estate agent, the other as an unemployed academic, the only exit is to the right. In this case it means death for the two women. Beautiful losers, who gain our affection even if they commit all the mistakes mothers used to talk about and women´s groups used to warn against.

The Women´s Affair
Certain women´s groups, however, have survived in the "beautiful, rich and alone against all" way of life of the 80s. They still meet and talk of their collective experiences and of going to bed with the enemy - husband, fiancé and lover. So everything is delightfully as it always was, and yet so cynically different. At least if one is to believe Carl Kock, the very Danish private detective and the very Copenhagen taxi driver who for the third time is the main character in a novel by Flemming Jarlskov: A Women´s Affair?

The question mark in the title is not simply rhetorical, but, thanks to the intrigue, an open question to the reader. For this affair concerning a series of bestial murders on women in Copenhagen in reality places an intelligent and mischievous question mark over (certain) women´s alleged solidarity with their sisters. Through his fiancé, Lena, Carl Kock is introduced to a group of women one of whom is terrorised by some sexual pervert on the telephone. A man who has an intimate knowledge of her right down to the slightest detail and who is for ever ringing her up to intimidate her. This situation leads to a large question mark being placed against female solidarity. For ultimately the girl is completely on her own, and all her grandiloquent friends are in the process of seeing to their own interests. And Carl Kock seems to believe that that is what it has always been like. But what was latent and unspoken in the female culture of the 70s has become obvious and open in the following decade.

Carl Kock´s battle for and against these latter-day amazons develops quite consiously into a satirical portrait of present-day manners. Like Bodelsen, Davidsen, and Winge, Jarlskov notes the right turn into the deepest recesses of established society in the 80s. With his classic Phillip Marlowe first-person narrative, in which Kock is braver as a rabbit in God´s acre than as a lonely wolf in the city, the confrontation with hypocrisy has existential rather than political overtones. Women´s attacks on male values are incoherent and relative. Because a man´s best aftershave is still power, and his charm is irresistible if dressed in a suit woven of prestige and money. And these phenomena are far more in need of analysis than gratuitous chatter about men´s raunchiness or callous petty-mindedness. For men are many things, as are women.

Danish setting
While the other three writers all remain within the confines of the psychological and political thriller - and have its element of realism and probability as the safety-net accompanying this kind of writing - Jariskov has achieved the well-nigh impossible. For with elegance and humour, but without losing out on tension, he has managed to transplant the hard-boiled American private eye novel to a Danish setting, without attempting the parody of turning Copenhagen into New York or Los Angeles. And where the others traditionally have set their action in the ill-defined border region between upper and middle class, Jariskov approaches his work from a proletarian, lower middle class angle. Times change, but there is no more sun on the shady side simply because of the collapse of the Wall and victory in the Gulf.

Exit to the right
Of course, there have been other Danish crime novels in the past year. But I have chosen to concentrate on these four simply, because I find them the best. And most representative of the positive developement of crime literature in recent years. All four novels provide an artistic record of the moral and social transformations running throughout the 80s and into the 90s. The world political situation is transplanted to Danish surroundings in a debate on responsibility and guilt. And that in a country, which still has a nostalgic yearning for Carl Brisson´s tramcar Copenhagen and John Lennon´s happy 60s. A time when friendships were created and destroyed for many reasons. When women dreamt of other times and possibilities. But now it is September, and it is time to put your women´s badge on the shelf and look to your own appearance. Humphrey Bogart from Casablanca Airport stalks Tom Grubowski and Carl Kock at Islands Brygge, but they are outsiders in the army of welldressed men going to and from between the Stock Exchange and Christiansborg. There is an element of nostalgia in all four novels, but it is by no means what it used to be. Of course there is something nostalgic about old photographs, but no one can remember who took them. The way back is paved with lies, illusions and mistakes. Something went wrong for a group of people who found themselves standing somewhere to the left of centre. Now the year 2000 is approaching. And there still only seems to be an exit to the right.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine nr. 2 1992

Translated by W. Glyn Jones