8/20/18

Hard Cheese (1971) by Ulf Durling

Ulf Durling is a Swedish physician, psychiatrist and a teacher of psychiatry, who became the director of the Danderyd hospital north of Stockholm, but during the early 1970s he penned a detective novel, Gammal ost (Hard Cheese, 1971), which earned him the Swedish Academy of Crime Fiction's award for best debut – initiating his secondary career as a mystery writer. After sixteen novels and nearly a hundred short stories, the SAFC honored Durling with the title of Grand Master.

A 2014 short story, "Fallfrukt" ("Windfall"), was printed in the November, 2016, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and collected a year later in The Realm of the Impossible (2017). The short story was better than expected, for a Swede, but the solution arguably disqualified it as an impossible crime story. However, it inspired me to finally toss Hard Cheese on my towering pile. Something I had been reluctant to do before.

One of my early forays into the genre was the work of two Swedish crime writers, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, but they were so awful that I probably would have abandoned the detective story, there and then, had it not been for A.C. Baantjer and Agatha Christie – who had already shown me a very different kind of detective story. You can blame Sjöwall and Wahlöö for my unapologetic hostility to the modern, character-drenched crime novel during my years as an apprentice detective fanboy.

So how did Durling fare? Do we still have to scrub Sweden from the map for their part in the Scandinavian noir or did I find a pinprick of hope in Durling? Well, let's find out.

Hard Cheese was translated by Bertil Falk and published by John Pugmire's Locked Room International. I suppose the plot is best described, on the surface, as a blend of Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936), John Dickson Carr's The Arabian Nights Murder (1936) and Peter Lovesey's Bloodhounds (1996).

The story has three narrators with each narrative answering questions from the previous section, or raising new ones, which reminded me of the structure of The Arabian Nights Murder and two of the narrators belong to an intimate circle of friends – who meet weekly to discuss and dissect their favorite detective stories. Something that obviously reminded me of Bloodhounds, but the humorous first part of the story, with the three amateur detectives taking a wack at the case, recalled Case for Three Detectives.

Johan Lundgrun, Carl Bergman and Dr. Efraim Nylander are the three elderly men who hold weekly meetings to discuss detective stories and the first part is narrated by Lundgrun.

During the 35th meeting of the group, in 1969, Bergman eagerly told Lundgrun and Nylander that he had a visit from his son, Detective Sergeant Gunnar Bergman, who indiscreetly told him the particulars of a case he's currently investigating – a case with all the trappings of a fictional locked room mystery! One that happened in their own, small town backyard. A shabby guest, Axel Nilsson, is found dead in his room of a seedy, second-rate hotel, the Little Boarding-House, after the cleaning-lady was unable to enter the room. The door was battered down and inside they found Nilsson's lifeless body: lying fully dressed beside the bed and evidence at the scene suggests he had his the back of his head on the footboard. Someone had emptied the content of a bottle of wine over the body. Nevertheless, it still appears to be a case of an unfortunate (drinking) accident, because the door was locked from the inside with the key sticking in the door lock and the windows were closed. So, if this was murder, the primary problem is how the murderer entered and left a locked hotel room.

I think this first narration is easily the best part of Hard Cheese. Lundgrun, Bergman and Nylander do a lot of woolgathering, constructing and demolishing numerous false solutions, which were all modeled around the fragmentary information given to Carl. So, naturally, they come up short, but I love a good piece of amateurish armchair detective work and this section of the story had it in spades.

The second part of the story, narrated by Detective Sergeant Gunnar Bergman, is more grounded in facts and has him tangling with the shady proprietor of the Little Boarding-House, Mr. Blom – who has found a lucrative way to make certain guests pay more for their room. Another character Bergman has to deal with is a local drunk and petty criminal, Algot Cronlund, who turned out to hold the key to the problem of the locked door. I thought this was an interesting contrast to the previous part with the three armchair detectives attempting to crack the case.

Sadly, this second part also had shades of the troubled, Scandinavian policeman. Bergman is not an alcoholic with a broken marriage, but his children can be a handful and he's very aware of his own (intellectual) short comings. He appears to be not entirely happy about his life, the town he lives in or his ramshackle car. This is why I, like Dr. Gideon Fell, prefer the chuckle of the Great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St. Paul over the hum of everyday life.

The third and last part is narrated by one of three detective readers, Dr. Nylander, who rapidly solves the case based on the character and backstory of the victim, the bottle of wine and a wedge of cheese that had been found in the waste basket of the hotel room. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with the solution.

Firstly, the locked door of the hotel room began as the key problem of the plot, but the second half pretty much dismissed this aspect as irrelevant with an incredibly simple explanation. Something I could easily forgive, because Case for Three Detective pulled a similar gag. Once the titular detectives had paraded their intricate, but incorrect, solutions around, Sgt. Beef solved the case with a plain, simple explanation – reached by routine detection and commonsense. And it worked. During was unable to replicate the same effect here as the story lacked in the fair play department and the identity of the murderer has its own issues, which is linked to the lack of fair play. But the most galling was the postscript.

If you forget about the locked room angle, the murder method is absolutely ingenious. A trick you hope to find when opening the pages of a detective novel, but the pointless postscript trampled all over it.

Hard Cheese started out as a parody of the detective story, but Durling ensured that as little of the actual detective story reached the finish line and tripped the best part on the last page of the book! So this made Hard Cheese more of a deconstruction than a parody of the detective story and that approach just doesn't work for me. I'm too much of a purist for that.

On a whole, I did not dislike Hard Cheese, on the contrary, it was an enjoyable read and really liked the first part of the story, but you should not expect it to make my best-of list for 2018. 

On the upside, I'm now completely up-to-date with LRI. I've read everything they've published. Even Derek Smith's Model for Murder (1952)! So I hope, by the time this post goes live, Pugmire has announced a new title. I need my regular locked room fix!

17 comments:

  1. Thanks for the review!
    I see your review agrees with what other people are saying about it. I'll probably stay away for now as I still have a lot of clasics to get through...

    And new Halter is going to be released on 1/9 !

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    1. Yes, I'm aware of the imminent release of a new Paul Halter title and the PW review was intriguing, to say the least. Looking forward to its release!

      I just hope Pugmire decides to look at either The Traveler from the Past, The Twelve Crimes of Hercules or Penelope's Web for his next translation. Because those are the three Halter's that intrigue me the most.

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  2. Okay, I got a comment on a Blogspot forum earlier this week, so let's try this again...

    I'm with you on your overall assessment of this one; I think it has a great chance to play up to the conventions and expectations of the genre while also being a solid detection experience in its own right...and then it just sort of fluffs it.

    Mind you, 'Windfall' was the same sort of thing: setting up a classic piece of impossible crimery and then deliberately undercutting the experience by playing rather too knowingly on the classic trappings of the genre. Which is not to say that Durling is a bad writer -- far from it, I'd be very interested in seeing any other impossible crime stories in either lenght published in English -- and rather more that he's experimenting in a way that doesn't really provide appropriate preparation for the experimentation.

    If you look at, say, Anthony Berkeley or Leo Bruce when they did this well, their subverting of the expectations was played against a richer background of parody. Durling is playing in the same sandpit, but using perhaps a more realistic milieu to explore the same ideas. The incongruity is a bit like Midsomer Murders suddenly veering into a serious look at the causes and effects of urban knife crime...what you get might be well-intentioned, but there's nothing preceding it which really establishes that ending.

    Right, let's hope this posts after all that...!

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    1. "Which is not to say that Durling is a bad writer..."

      Absolutely. Durling is a good writer and even a decent plotter (see murder method), but where he fails, based on my reading of Hard Cheese and "Windfall," is not his slightly more realistic approach to the detective story. It's his deconstructionists and dismissive attitude towards the conventions of the traditional detective story.

      As pointed out in my review, Durling disposed of every single element that made Hard Cheese a traditionally-styled detective story: the locked room problem, proper clueing, the clever murder method and the less than fair identity of the murderer. You would almost think Durling was apologizing for having done something as unbecoming as writing an old-fashioned mystery novel and cleared the table of all the offending material. Leaving the reader with, what is ultimately, a novel of character and petty crimes masquerading as a locked room mystery.

      Berkeley and Bruce also played with conventions and subverted expectations, but never in a dismissive or apologetic way. They still wrote detective stories and they worked as such. Even if they were turned on their head or poked fun at. You can't really say the same about Durling.

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    2. I think my superpower is Making A Point Poorly Online And The Someone Comes Along And Clarifies It In About A Third Of The Words And Also Makes It Better Than I Did. But that's cool, mthe important things are a) we agree, and b) I appear to be able to comment on your blog again -- woo!

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    3. I'm still baffled by the comment problems between blogspot and wordpress, but glad your comments are coming through again. Let's hope it stays this way now.

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  3. One of the problems with the modern world is that when you believe in nothing, everything must be treated ironically. Someone like Robert E. Howard comes through because he believes so intensely in what he is doing that he carries you along no matter how crazy the story is. Modern authors don't actually believe in what they are doing, so they think they are being modern by subverting the very thing they are supposed to be trying to accomplish.
    On the other hand, the Martin Beck story The Laughing Policeman is in my top 20 all time great list (it also won an Edgar) and The Fire Engine That Disappeared is a close second. Martin Beck spends a lot of time groaning in the modern manner but the detection is solid. Per Wahloo also wrote an important science fiction/detective story The Thirty-First Floor. I would highly recommend all three of these books (even though the authors were communists).

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    1. "One of the problems with the modern world is that when you believe in nothing, everything must be treated ironically."

      Very true. At least here in the West. Thankfully, traditionally mystery readers, like us, can fall back on a ridiculously large, seemingly inexhaustible, catalog from the past and places like Japan. Not only do they have a neo-orthodox movement, but also manga and anime series, like Detective Conan, which demonstrate what you can do when you allow yourself a little creative freedom. A Western produced counterpart of Detective Conan would likely be unable to accept its unrealistic, somewhat goofy premise on its own terms and run with it. And have some fun with it.

      I appreciate your recommendations for The Laughing Policeman and The Fire Engine That Disappeared, but I'll never touch another Sjöwall and Wahlöö. A while back, I was tempted by The Locked Room, but, after reading more about it, I decided to give that one a pass as well. They're not for me.

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    2. One of the problems with the modern world is that when you believe in nothing, everything must be treated ironically. Someone like Robert E. Howard comes through because he believes so intensely in what he is doing that he carries you along no matter how crazy the story is. Modern authors don't actually believe in what they are doing, so they think they are being modern by subverting the very thing they are supposed to be trying to accomplish.

      Beautifully put. I wholeheartedly agree.

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  4. You are right about the Japanese. They are still capable of writing what they mean and believing in what they write. They don't live in a fantasy world like we do. And manga has a huge fan base which writes and sells its own amateur comics. Also, I have to say that I think Hard Cheese is the stupidest name for a detective story I ever read. It sounds like the title of a cooking manga.

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    1. According to the translator, the Swedish title, Gammal ost, is shorthand for an expressing meaning to take revenge for an old, longstanding grievance (give back for old cheese). Since there's no equivalent in English, he went with the equally appropriate expression Hard Cheese (i.e. bad luck). So the title does make sense in the context of the story.

      I've been harder on this book here, in the comments, than in the actual review. So let me reiterate: on a whole, Hard Cheese is not a bad read and the opening is really good, but it was disappointing and disheartening Durling completely dismantled it as a detective story. This is not a parody of the detective story, but a deconstruction and that's not for everyone.

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    2. I can confirm that this is a typical Swedish idiom:
      "Ge betalt för gammal ost", meaning to have a score to settle with someone.

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    3. That was the phrase Falk mentioned in the opening.

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  5. Thanks for the review. :) I recall quite liking it, as an interesting but not great read. It's nice to see some diversity within the LRI imprint, though. I'm certainly looking forward to the upcoming release of yet another Halter novel!

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    1. I agree. Hard Cheese makes for an interesting contrast to the other locked room titles from LRI. However, readers who liked all those other impossible crime novels and short stories might not exactly be charmed with what Durling pulled here.

      Yes, the plot of the next Halter translation is intriguingly promising.

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  6. See, I actually didn't know that a postscript existed until I read this. I read this and thought, "Wait, what postscript?"

    Welp. The book is now degraded in my eyes, if I understand it right.

    ---The Dark One

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    1. Your comments shows how bad and unnecessary the postscript really is. Nothing is left of the detective story after it and you're better off knowing nothing about it.

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