The locked room
It’s the middle of my spring break.
The pace at which I’ve been writing isn’t bad.
But, oh! To keep up this pace through the end of March! And, if necessary, the beginning of April!
[Sigh.]
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’m also nearing the end of The Locked Room by Sjöwall & Wahlöö, which is about a “locked room” murder and a bank robbery. (I already finished The Locked Room by Paul Auster. How different Auster’s solitary existentialists from the social pawns of Sjöwall & Wahlöö!)
Sjöwall & Wahlöö are laying out their hippie credentials even more nakedly than before. Their protagonist, Chief Detective Inspector Martin Beck, is about to have a love affair with a hippie woman.
Their Sweden, meanwhile, continues to be a capitalist hell-hole with a socialist veneer. Landlords and factory owners ascend ever higher upon the backs of laborers. Bureaucrats run the social services so as to inflate unimportant statistics, while their rank-and-file workers, ill-treated and underpaid, quit the service professions and are replaced by nitwits – the only people that those professions have become able to recruit. (This is in the early 1970s.)
The series is getting a little preachy. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong.
It’s all grimly humorous. And there’s a great little joke about how a group of police, armed with guns, tear gas, and an attack dog, burst into an unlocked room.
The pace at which I’ve been writing isn’t bad.
But, oh! To keep up this pace through the end of March! And, if necessary, the beginning of April!
[Sigh.]
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’m also nearing the end of The Locked Room by Sjöwall & Wahlöö, which is about a “locked room” murder and a bank robbery. (I already finished The Locked Room by Paul Auster. How different Auster’s solitary existentialists from the social pawns of Sjöwall & Wahlöö!)
Sjöwall & Wahlöö are laying out their hippie credentials even more nakedly than before. Their protagonist, Chief Detective Inspector Martin Beck, is about to have a love affair with a hippie woman.
Their Sweden, meanwhile, continues to be a capitalist hell-hole with a socialist veneer. Landlords and factory owners ascend ever higher upon the backs of laborers. Bureaucrats run the social services so as to inflate unimportant statistics, while their rank-and-file workers, ill-treated and underpaid, quit the service professions and are replaced by nitwits – the only people that those professions have become able to recruit. (This is in the early 1970s.)
The series is getting a little preachy. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong.
It’s all grimly humorous. And there’s a great little joke about how a group of police, armed with guns, tear gas, and an attack dog, burst into an unlocked room.