With the Dead

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A few days before Christmas, I drove 6 hours from Stockholm to Halland Province to see my family. About 1.5 hours south of Gothenburg and 1.5 hours north of Malmö, and a little in from the coast, there’s a small place called Marbäck. A hundred people live there, spread out over 27 hectares of land. Most are craftsmen, plumbers or carpenters, or old crop or dairy farmers. 

My father worked his whole life as a car mechanic. To this day, I love repair shops, car dealers, the smell of used tires and gasoline. My mother worked at the local police department, never as an officer but she did pretty much everything else: a 911 dispatcher, an IOA (internal officer assistant), and administrator. If you needed to file a police report, my mother would help you do that. 

She knew everyone in town: every drunk (including cops), every gambler (cops here too), every user, dealer, petty criminal, prostitute, every battered woman, rape victim, every known fraudster, con man, everyone.

She rarely talked about her work, of course. Wasn’t allowed to. And while me and my brother were with our father at work all the time, we rarely got to go to the station with her. She wanted to protect us from things we shouldn’t see or hear. I have only a few memories of being there, of being in a room where I sensed I shouldn’t be, with officers coming in and heading out, talking about things officers talk about (coffee, sports, politics, family, and what they saw on the streets). 

From watching my mother and her colleagues, I learned early on that police officers were regular workers, just like the carpenters and plumbers in Marbäck. They got up, did their job, and then went back home. They weren’t superheroes or anything, they were just people. The stakes were a bit different, but the basic moral code was not: the principle about labor and life was pretty much the same.

* *

Sometimes, like all people, my mother needed to talk about her work. One time, when I was 8 or 9, she was in the kitchen making dinner with my father.

“There’s so much of it now, you know? I had to send kilos off to analysis today. Not grams, kilos. It’s because we’re right between Gothenburg and Malmö. Drug smugglers go through here like it’s a fucking parade or somethi—Hey. Hey, Christoffer, what are you doing in here? Go to your room, dinner isn’t ready yet.”

She was worried, of course. About her town, about the amount of daily work simply becoming too much. But also, I realize now, worried about me and my brother. 

Working where she worked, every day you saw a parent’s worst nightmare. 

Returning to my room, I wondered about the word smugglers.

**

In my childhood home, there weren’t many books. After work each day, my parents had to take care of me and my brother, and at the end of every night they were simply too exhausted. Instead, they watched the national news (“Shit,” my father used to comment), listened to the regional news broadcast over the radio (“Shit”), read the headlines in the local paper (“This country’s been going downhill ever since they shot Palme”), had a beer or a glass of wine, and went to bed.

The first school I went to didn’t have a library, but every other week a Book Bus came by. It had the pale, beige color of white people’s skin, was full of books, and stopped outside our school. For our first year of school, me and my classmates all read the same book, learning the basics of reading. But now, on this day in, I think, March 1995, I remember a cool blue sky overhead, we all walked in a good obedient line toward the Book Bus, with the task of choosing a book on our own. 

I was 8 years old and an average reader. Same with writing. I wasn’t good, not bad, just average. In the bus, I browsed the shelves with only one thing in mind: the book needed to be thin.

There was that word again.

Five Go To Smuggler’s Top.

Enid Blyton. What a weird name. 

And I still didn’t know what that word meant. 

But I knew one thing: I had found my book. As we returned to our classroom, we all got to read for a little while before class ended. And then, something happened to me. 

“I remember going through your backpack that day,” my mother tells me. “And I found this book, the Five book. And I was like, what’s this? He took it home?”

We weren’t supposed to do that. The books were the property of the City Library, But I had gotten so enthralled by the story that I smuggled the book into my backpack and took it home. 

I felt like I had discovered a secret. Gold had been struck! No longer would life be this gray stream of dreary school days and gloomy weekends, long Mondays and dull Tuesdays, boring Januarys and never-ending Februarys, bleak Marchs, dead Aprils… No!

If you were a kid in Marbäck in the early 1990s, you had a lot of time to kill and you needed something to help you dream. 

“Soon, that was all you did,” my mother says. “You just stayed in your room and read, all the time.”

Only problem was, as I looked around, apparently nobody else knew how great reading was. Nobody around me seemed to read. 

One day, while visiting my mother’s parents, I noted something about my mother’s younger brother. 

My uncle seemed to read. 

He was an educated man. That was unusual. He had gone to Chalmers up in Gothenburg, one of the finest universities in the country. And he had bookshelves, loads of them, full of novels with intriguing spines all cracked. 

“Oh, you like books?” he said, happily surprised. 

“Yeah, I think I do.” 

“Have you read Sherlock Holmes?” 

I shook my head. 

He smiled, as if he already knew, and turned to one of his shelves to find it.

My uncle. My first confidant.

“You were so lovely together,” my mother tells me. “You and him, on the bed, a book between you, while the rest of us were eating or having coffee at the dinner table. You were so beautiful. I was so happy. He really loved you. And you him.”

At this point, her tears come. 

* *

Soon I graduated from Sherlock Holmes, Biggles, and The Hardy Brothers to – this was the mid-1990s, a golden age of Swedish crime fiction – Kurt Wallander and Van Veeteren. I devoured them all. 

I had begun to write as well. And, like most writers starting out, I wrote what I read, in my case: mysteries and crime stories. Sometimes, I think that if I had been given horror or fantasy novels, sci-fi, even teenage love dramas, instead, that’s what I would have written. It could be that simple. 

It’s probably not.

* *

It’s December 27th, 2022, in the afternoon. I’m 36 years old. 

“It’s 20 years ago, tomorrow,” my mother says.  

“Is it?”

“Yeah. It happened on December 28th, 2002.”

How strange time can be. 

* *

A river runs through town. It’s called Nissan. It’s big and black and the current is very strong. 

On December 30th 2002, two children – American, actually, visiting Swedish relatives for the holidays – are playing down by the waterline, exploring the area. The previous night was cold and parts of the river are now frozen. The kids spot something stuck in the ice.

It’s a young man’s head.

Two days earlier, on December 28th, a 22-year old man had gone missing in our town. I was 16, too young to know him. I had met him once, though, at the video store where he worked part-time.  

During the next few days, more body parts emerge in the water. They’re covered in black plastic bags. A torso, a thigh, a lower leg.

Exactly what happened, only a few people know. The victim, the missing 22-year old man, had been out clubbing after work. There, he met two men, a 28-year old and a 46-year old. 

“Both were well-known to us,” my mother said. “Petty criminals, drunks.” 

Having left the club, they all went to an apartment in town. 

“It’s strange, though, [Victim’s Name] is a good kid, not involved in any trouble. He studies at the local college and works at a video store. Why he would leave the club with these two criminals, nobody knows.”

In the apartment, early in the morning, for some reason, violence erupted. The young man died. The 46-year old said he did it alone; the 28-year old claimed he left the apartment before it happened. The next day, the 28-year old returned and found the victim dead on the floor and the other man in the apartment, still. 

A day later, somebody had butchered the body.

Eventually, the 46-year old got sentenced for manslaughter, the 28-year old only for aiding and abetting a criminal. Few people believe those sentences to be accurate. 

* *

“There are so many strange anniversaries in life. Twenty years ago this morning, [Victim’s Name] wakes up to what’ll be his last day. Twenty years ago today, right now, he’s at work. He’s looking forward to going out later. You know? Why the hell did he die? It just seems so meaningless. These two crackheads who were involved, like, what drove them? Maybe there isn’t even an answer.” 

* *

One day, in 2004, I sit in front of the education counsellor at my high school, and hear her say something about criminology.

“What’s that?” 

Criminology, I soon learned, was a different kind of key to the things I was already interested in. In one way, it’s just like crime fiction. 

Part of what makes crime fiction so powerful, is this: it’s not really about crime. At its core, a good crime novel deals with matters of the human heart, unravelling threads like jealousy, hate, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, desire, addiction, loss, and love. One of the first things I learned in criminology is that while crime is a very common phenomenon, serious crimes are relatively rare. When they do happen, it is often the result of these very human things taken to their extremes or turned on their heads. 

Criminology was, and is, obsessed with meaning. That goes for science in general, as it provides us with meaning and context. It explains things. But criminologists also know that sometimes meaning can be elusive. Writing this, I think of my mother’s words, about the killing and butchering that happened in this town on December 28th 2002: What drove them? Maybe there isn’t even an answer.

Could the worst of crimes be devoid of meaning? Strange things happen all the time, every day, and we don’t think too much of them because they don’t affect us that deeply. They are just “coincidences” or something else, depending on what you believe in. Criminology taught me the rough brutal truths about crime: it’s dirty, bloody, messy, painful, raw, costs a lot, and, sometimes, it’s beyond meaning in any reasonable sense of that term.

Sometimes, the criminologist – just like the writer – has to accept that. 

Initially my fiction writing and my work in criminology were two separate workshops. I started writing because I needed something to help me dream; I started studying criminology because it was offered to me and it sounded intriguing.

Over time, of course, most things in life tend to mesh together. Criminology offers some ideas, tools, or notions of what it means to be a human being, how what we are is connected to what we do, and how that, in turn, may be connected to criminal activity. Understanding such dynamics is key to good crime writing. 

* *

I was in a bookstore on the afternoon of November 24th 2014. At 28, I had been living in Stockholm for nine years, and successfully defended my PhD thesis in criminology in April of that year. I had published four novels in Sweden, and, most recently, on October 12th, I had become a father. I was doing well. Life was sleep-deprived, full of diapers, and wonderful. 

In my pocket, the phone rang. It was my mother. “It’s your uncle,” she said, quietly. 

* *

The house where he lived with his wife and two kids, my cousins, was pretty. We used to go there for birthdays and, sometimes, midsummer celebrations, Easter, and other holidays. I remember a piano where my uncle used to play, I remember a bright kitchen, a sweet little lawn outside, and the book shelves in the living room. All the bookshelves.  

On the morning of November 24th 2014, my uncle was alone in the house, asleep having worked a night shift. He probably awoke and smelled smoke. Going downstairs, searching for the source of the smell, he approached the old sauna they used as a storage room. 

The electric cables. A short circuit, something going wrong. I don’t actually know the details. All I know is what I remember that they told me: the smoke-filled room made him unconscious within seconds. As the house burned down all around him, he was already dead. He was 53 years old.

* *

You live a life centered on questions of crime, criminals, and cops, but it’s an old set of electric cables that end up breaking your heart.

* *

Oh, you like books? 

Yeah, I think I do.

Have you read Sherlock Holmes?

* *

On November 24th 2014, I lost my first confidant.

He was buried on January 9th 2015. I took the train down from Stockholm. I was writing on my way there, still have the words:

On foot to a funeral 

A cigarette glowing

The wind howls like children

Black as soot is the snow

I’ve tried to put them in a novel, many times, but they never make it through. 

* *

“It’s strange with the dead,” my mother said earlier today. “You feel closer to them during the holidays, somehow. Don’t you think?” 

I think of G. K. Chesterton. He wrote something about traditions in the afterword to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If I remember it correctly, he discards of the idea that traditions are repressive or conservative; on the contrary, Chesterton claims, traditions are the most democratic of institutions as they involve the living as well as the dead. Like we’re in communication with each other, reaching through ancient gates.

I think of this as I prepare to depart and go north tomorrow, on the anniversary of the murder in 2002. I think of my uncle, my child, my girlfriend, my family, the place where I grew up, where me and my brother learned to do the The Marbäck Shuffle, where I became a writer. 

How do my fiction writing and my criminological work fit together? 

The truth, I think, is this: I don’t really know. But I do know that all of these things have been important. 

All I try to do is tell the stories that, for better or worse and for one reason or another, come to me, and then do what I consider every writer’s task: To search for the very depths of an event, how deep they can penetrate a character and how far-reaching they may be out there, in the world. To explore that story in all of its complexity and depth, even when it’s ugly (especially when it’s ugly), to tell it like it’s the last thing I’ll do, and walk my characters all the way home.

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