It Started with Dickens

Af : K. Arne Blom

A Swedish crime writer has met his Danish colleague Anders Bodelsen and talks about his work, in which each book sets out to be different from what has gone before

Anders Bodelsen wrote his first book, De lyse nætters tid (1959) (The Season of White Nights) at the age of twenty-one, and it was published during the year in which he reached twenty-two.

He was brought up in a home with literature at its very heart. His mother was an art historian, his father a professor of English language. His father was in the habit of reading aloud to the family, and many were the weighty tomes by great authors he read to them.

Anders Bodelsen started as a perfectly ordinary storyteller. His first publication was followed by the sharp social novel Villa Sunset (1964) (Villa Sunset), one of whose targets is vulgar, ruthless journalism, and then came a couple of splendid collections of short stories, in particular Rama Sama (1967) (Rama Sama), where in the story "Skjul" (Hiding Place) we find an embryonic Bodelsen crime story.

The authors of the welfare state
It is as a crime writer that Anders Bodelsen has achieved fame. After Rama Sama he was acknowledged by Henrik Stangerup as "the welfare state´s most exciting young realist author", and the one element certainly does not preclude the other, for during the 1960s the crime novel increasingly established itself as an ever more important literary genre. To a considerable and quite palpable extent, Anders Bodelsen was to play his part in this interesting course of development. His first book had been generally well received, but one reviewer called it an exceptionally unrealistic work, giving it as his opinion that the principal character really ought already to have died of alcohol abuse in the opening chapter. And obviously, if we begin to check up on the centilitres, they add up to quite a lot before we, the readers, lose count of how much he is drinking. But it seems that not even a beginner can be allowed a little poetical licence. Anders Bodelsen started writing because he would not study.

"I read law and economics at Copenhagen University for a couple of years until I couldn´t stand it any longer. I simply refused to go on studying. I wanted to write."

Breakthrough
His major breakthrough with his readers came with Tænk på et tal (1968) (Think of a Number).

"I had long had a thriller waiting to he born," he says. "And perhaps the explanation is to be found in my father´s habit of reading aloud."

"I remember very dearly that he read Charles Dickens´ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). It acted as a stimulus when I really started to write. That novel would probably never have been as famous as it has become if Dickens had really managed to finish it before he died. He had certain problems with it, of course. Edwin Drood belongs to the great mysteries in the genre and is itself an enigma that will never be solved. It is possible that Dickens only managed to write a third of it. It is possible that Edwin Drood himself would end by being murdered. It is possible that he was to have been the one to find the solution, or perhaps he was to be the victim, or the perpetrator. There are countless possibilities in this book."

If it was conceived as an enigmatic detective story, it might seem a little surprising that it should have inspired Anders Bodelsen to this extent. For if there is one thing for which he has not become famous, it is as the author of what we might call classical whodunits.

Not highly favoured
The crime novel did not enjoy any particularly high esteem as literature at that time. Before publishing Tænk på et tal, Bodelsen defended his book. He feared he would be accused of providing escapist entertainment and indulging in sales speculation. But, he wrote, a thriller, a crime novel, is not something to be rated as second-class literature. It has admittedly to be entertaining, and the outward action has admittedly to be driven along at an exciting pace, and the writing has admittedly to be abrupt and brisk, conceived in images, but there can quite well still he a serious purpose to a thriller. And it must be said that the book came and conquered, whereby Anders Bodelsen became very much a participant in the development of the crime novel and helped to bring it closer to other kinds of narrative fiction, to literature proper.

"People thought I was influenced by Patricia Highsmith when I wrote it," he says. "But in fact I didn´t read her until later. On the other hand, Georges Simenon meant a lot to me as a source of inspiration; not the Maigret books, however, but his other works, principally the novel L´homme qui regardait passer les trains (1938) (The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By). I am well aware that my basic plot is by no means unique. There are several books about someone who discovers that a crime is being planned and usurps it for his own sake."
What he wanted to achieve with Tænk på et tal - and was so successful in doing - was to tell a story about what he calls a man with no sense of solidarity; the man who breaks out of the system and the ideals expected of him, but who lacks any ideas or system of his own. As in several of the following books, Tænk på et tal is the story of someone who because of a series of coincidences ends in a situation making him at one and the same time both perpetrator and victim - the victim of chance.

"A criminal is a loner and an egoist, in extreme cases an egomaniac. A criminal can generally speaking be anyone at all, as we all run the risk of falling prey to chance and coincidence.
I have asked myself the following question: Suppose I had the opportunity of a million kroner at the cost of the life of some Chinese who was completely unknown to me, would I take it? I would most certainly not trust anyone who answered no to that question."

Bodelsen as inspiration
We must presumably not exclude the possibility that Anders Bodelsen´s artistic progress and literary significance inspired more and more Danish authors to tackle the crime novel. Looking back, it seems there has never been a more vigorous and determined attempt to achieve quality in this genre in Denmark than during the final years of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, with names such as Frits Remar, Poul Henrik Trampe, Torben Nielsen, Dan Turèll, Leif Davidsen and Flemming Jarlskov as the leading writers. It is difficult not to see Bodelsen as an essential, influential precursor and source of inspiration to others to risk trying out the genre and its possibilities, while at the same time an eccentric like Poul Ørum had a finely attuned understanding of the genre both before and after Bodelsen´s breakthrough.

Life a source of inspiration
That life is a notable source of inspiration, and that in idea for a plot acts as a magnet, is something on which we can agree as Bodelsen looks back on an episode that preceded the appearance of Tænk på et tal.
"I was at the bank, filling in a form to draw some money. When it came to my turn at the counter, the cashier turned over the first sheet, saw the carbon copy, and explained that I would have to fill in a new form, as some customer before me had used mine as a pad to write on. What that customer had written had gone through on to my copy. I filled in a fresh form. And I had got an idea."

Debts and disaster
Hændeligt uheld (1968) (One Down) is the story of debt and blackmail and disaster, a morality tale about modern people. The conclusion is that you can never escape an old debt without falling prey, to a view one.

"I have been called a moralist, whatever that implies. What I try to do is to release the reader´s sense of the immoral and the unfair."
Bevisets stilling (1973) (Consider the Verdict) is one of Bodelsen´s most powerful works, an intense, close study, of people in a state of disintegration who also become the victims of chance.

"That book is very close to reality and is based on an actual event. It is it about lying as a tool. Someone starts lying and becomes entangled in a web of lies with chaos as the result."

Actually, Bevisets stilling is a thought-provoking novel about the justice system, but thanks to its power it acts as a robust social novel filled with warmth and compassion and human understanding.

While we are talking about this novel, Anders Bodelsen mentions how, as a novelist, he is influenced by film, the imagery of film and its expressive art.

An academy prize
It was the Swedish Academy of Crime Writing that awarded a prize for Mørklægning (1988) (Blackout). It is a compact, effective novel that seems to contain not a single superfluous word. It is a timeless story in a book tied to a specific time, the late summer of 1944, when everyone is beginning to sense and realise that the German occupation of Denmark will come to an end within a very foreseeable time.

"Ten years ago we could riot avoid still seeing the occupation in black and white, and the Germans represented the black," says Anders Bodelsen. "Admittedly the Danish population lived from day to day, but there were also those who were more accommodating to the Germans than the occupation authorities demanded, and there were some who hedged their bets. They supported both sides and so took out a kind of double indemnity insurance.

Mørklægning is really not about the tragic or the heroic, but rather about looking for justice far beyond all reason.

I read Das Versprechen (1958) (The Pledge) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and the main character in that novel, Hans Bärlach, fascinated rne because he was virtually obsessed with doing justice.

I would hke to write a book about the actual occupation as well, about the relationship between the authorities of the German occupying power, and the authorities of occupied Denmark, but I wonder whether I shall ever manage it. The basic idea I have is probably more suited to a play."

Mørklægning is about a period fifty vears ago. Rød september (199l) (Red September) is about things much closer to hand: the heat of the cold war, urban guerillas and terrorism.

Red September
Rød september is about two brothers, Jens and Søren, their conflict and yet their sense of loyalty towards each other and to the surrouriding world and its ideals.

Søren is thought to be dead, but he turns out to have feigned death in order to become a terrorist. He is seen in Copenhagen and discovered by his brother. He has come back in order to clear up after marxism; this is how the symbolism in this moving and rather sad novel is to be experienced.

"Søren is fundamentally still a communist and moreover a convert to fundamentalism. He distances himself from the friends of his youth and believes them to have been fanatics. He is no fanatic himself. He considers violence as something to be used only when justified, and he rejects violence for the sake of violence."

Rød september is marked bv the same tautness and precision that were characteristic of Mørklægning. They demand careful reading and give a great dcal in exchange.

Anders Bodelsen wrote a thriller at a time when realism was beginning to take root in crime writing. He ready intended it to be a once-and-for-all event. But he continued and has contributed effectively to developing and refining the genre and has helped bring it closer to ordinary literature.

"The thriller today is without any well-defined form, and the distance between crime writing and other literature no longer really exists," says Anders Bodelsen.

Each time he writes a new book, he wants to write something that is coinpletely unlike everything else he has written before. But through the collected works there is a quality suggesting that more than many other crime writers he has acutely, observantly and expressively portrayed modern man as a product of a modern society in which there is sometimes far too great a risk of going astray and becoming alienated.

Denne artikel stammer fra Danish Literary Magazine nr. 9. 1996

Oversat af W. Glyn Jones