Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog – books: The writer as detective: my investigation
The writer as detective: my investigation

RN Morris

January 10, 2008 1:51 PM

The detective is a metaphor for the writer: the isolated figure trying to comprehend a disordered world, constructing a narrative that makes sense, and trying to persuade others of believe in his or her account.

I was struck by this thought some time ago but it came back to me while reading Roseanna, the first of the Martin Beck novels by the Swedish husband and wife writing team, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. A Christmas present from my nine-year-old daughter (showing worrying precocity given the book’s adult subject matter), it was my first encounter with Martin Beck. I shall definitely be going back for more.

One of the earliest police procedural crime novels, with a highly realistic and unromantic depiction of policing, you might not expect it to give much house room to conscious literary effects such as metaphors. There are no metaphors in real life, after all. But it was the book’s emphasis on the drudgery and routine of police work, its insistence on the glacially slow rate of progress, its fascination with the failures and frustrations of the job that got me thinking that there was something of the kind going on. Or perhaps the drudgery and routine of writing, its glacially slow rate of progress, its failures and frustrations, were just too much on my own mind …

But this is a book with an American detective in it called Kafka – Elmer B Kafka, to be precise. There’s literary (and funny) for you. (As you can imagine, the Kafka character gives rise to a fair amount of deadpan humour, along the lines of “‘I got a cable from Kafka.’ ‘That’s a hell of a way to start a working day,’ said Kollberg.”)

Read on at the Guardian site. (Link at top of post.)