The Sword Of Justice: a slice of Swedish ‘super-salami’
Superintendent Evart Bäckström is one Scandi crime’s outstanding creations. He’s an utterly loathsome creature; lazy, corrupt, bigoted and entirely self-centred. Yet his sly intelligence and his ability to manipulate any situation to suit himself mean that he has an impressive case clearance rate and a public persona to match his inflated self-image.
Bäckström is just the man, then, to investigate the murder of a leading criminal defence lawyer… which turns out to be a complex case involving a maltreated dog, a minor member of Sweden’s royal family, the mafia, feuding Iranian and Iraqi factions, the Russian Romanovs and Fabergé eggs.
Author Leif Persson delights in detail and, as a result, this is a solidly dense read. However awful Bäckström’s behaviour (and it can be truly appallingly terrible), he is blissfully unaware of how ghastly he is, so the joke is always (even if it’s unwritten) on him. The real detectives are the women around him, who Bäckström despises and denigrates as he carelessly delegates. The supporting characters are beautifully drawn; often seen only through Bäckström’s eyes yet Persson cleverly gives them depth and detail that Bäckström would never notice.
There’s a lot of plot in this novel; some of it integral to the tale and some of it existing only to entertain. There’s an entire shaggy dog story involving a parrot, which is ridiculously funny. By contrast, the extended art history lesson on the provenance of missing Russian icons was so tediously presented that I actually had sympathy with Bäckström and yearned for it to be cut short.
Persson doesn’t write ‘Nordic noir’, and this is far more than a simple police procedural. It is extremely clever, engaging and subtle. However, there were several sections which were so slow that the narrative flat out stalled; perhaps it’s time for an editor to intervene in the author’s extended indulgences?
Just like a Russian doll, The Sword Of Justice contains a series of separate stories, each one buried within another narrative. There’s a real sense or surprise as each new aspect is unveiled, and the eventual solution is entirely satisfying. But this isn’t a thriller, and nor will it satisfy readers who seek a rapid page-turner. It’s a slow-burn, sophisticated series of observations, wrapped in a convoluted plot that is best enjoyed at a leisurely pace. A bit like one of Bäckström’s better dinners, in fact.
7/10

The Bäckström series is very popular in Sweden, so perhaps something was lost in translation. Judged as a mystery it is unsatisfying, filled with inconsistencies and loose ends, and everything is explained at the end by the perpetrators instead of emerging from detective efforts of either the police or the reader. As a police procedural it has all of the intricate detail, but it's entirely unconnected with the plot. As a thriller it fails to create or sustain tension. We never care much about what happened, or what's going to happen.

There's barely enough main plot for a short story, so this 700-page epic is shamelessly padded with everything the main character eats or drinks, and how he gets from one place to another, and dozens of irrelevant side-plots, none of which are resolved. There is also quite a bit of repetition. An incredible 12 chapters in the middle of the book, nearly 100 pages, is devoted to one dinner, and the only connection to the plot is some historical background on artwork that might have been related to the murder. There are 90 separate references to Bäckström drinking alcohol, he goes to bed 43 times (and 8 times we're told the brand name of the bed), he reflects on his penis 29 times often at length and there is an equal number of references farts and characters soiling themselves. A curious (to me, anyway) peculiarity is the number of American cultural references--particularly movies and crime television--that far exceeds Swedish or global references.

The appeal of the book seems to be the cast of eccentric characters interacting in humorous way. The trouble is each character is exactly one joke and there aren't 700 of them. Bäckström himself is a narcissist and we're supposed to laugh at his homophobia, racism, contempt for other people and sense of immense entitlement. But the world of the book is exactly the one Bäckström imagines--male homosexuals are sneaky cowards, lesbians are martial arts, bodybuilder rapists, immigrants are nearly subhuman--either violent primitives or clinging without ambition to the fringe of society--and this applies to those with Swedish citizenship going back generations, the government is deeply corrupt and heterosexual women are always prowling for the next sexual encounter. So I'm not sure what part is supposed to be the joke.

I don't read Swedish, so I can't comment on the quality of the translation, but the style is flat and plodding. There are some poor choices. For example, to an American a car called a "Merc" is a Mercury, but the translator uses it as a slang shortening of "Mercedes." Other slang expressions, brand names and meaningful place names (that is, names that tell you whether something is a road, place, lake, park or whatever) will be unfamiliar to many non-Swedes. This doesn't cause confusion, but I consider it sloppy.

I can't find much reason to recommend this book. It has flashes of humor and some striking characters, but nothing like enough to reward wading through all its pages.

I am impressed that Leif G.W. Persson could keep making his characters keep changing how they acted and reacted to situations. I was always saying in my mind not to go with this character or that one, and I was usually right. What I was really liked was Bäckström's assistant Anchor Carlsson, figuring out what was going on with Pinocchio's nose for her benefit at the end of the story.

It was interesting to see how Bäckström handled his meetings with the press without getting found out. But what was funny, his boss seemed to know that Bäckstrȫm was the leak, but couldn't prove it. What was also amusing was to see how GeGurra was able to handle Bäckström in finding the music box.

Everything that happened about the murder of the lawyer Thoma Eriksson seemed to wind up being with Bäckström's former acquaintances or former convicts. It also seemed that Bäckström had no qualms about figuring how he could benefit monetarily from any situation he encountered. Proving the providence of the artifacts we encounter all the former heads of state that were relevant to the story.

I throughly enjoyed the story and all the characters from history and from Leif's mind. I would recommend this book to my readers of my blog, but also tell them to be prepared for a long story (720 pages).