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!
