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Narrated by David Rintoul
Alexander McCall SmithUnabridged — 7 hours, 15 minutes
Narrated by David Rintoul
Alexander McCall SmithUnabridged — 7 hours, 15 minutes
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Tucking into a brand-new mystery series by Alexander McCall Smith is a lazy-dazy pleasure, something like going fishing. And, as the author reminds us in The Department of Sensitive Crimes, "If you can't find the time to go fishing, then…well, what's the point?"
Tucking into a brand-new mystery series by Alexander McCall Smith is a lazy-dazy pleasure . . . What binds the stories are the tight relationships of Varg and his colleagues and their hilariously human crotchets.”
—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
“Alexander McCall Smith’s engaging book tackles bizarre activity and teeters between comedy and pathos.”
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
“Droll, droll, droll.”
—John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Depend on the author of the “No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” and “44 Scotland Street” novels to make even a Nordic Noir mystery delightful.”
—Tom Beer, Newsday
“McCall Smith . . . extends his gift for comic situations and insightful commentary to a projected series set in Sweden . . . Detective Varg promises to be a complex series character, and the department itself looks certain to deliver more oddball yet poignant cases.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“The celebrated Scottish storyteller has turned his pen to Scandi-crime, setting his latest series with Detective Ulf ‘The Wolf’ Varg heading up a department of singular characters in the Swedish city of Malmo. It’s as if Fox Mulder, Lisbeth Salander’s maiden aunt, and Kurt Wallander collaborated on a new unit, and it’s great fun.”
—Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post (10 Books to Read in April)
“The author of more than 80 books has not lost his literary touch, but his latest account of the doings at Sweden’s Department of Sensitive Crimes hits a new high of hilarity.”
—Muriel Dobbin, The Washington Times
“With astonishing heart and mind, Alexander McCall Smith launches a bold and original new series. With The Department of Sensitive Crimes, he invents a new and compassionate genre: Scandi Blanc. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but in the end I did both. I'm already looking forward to the next one.”
—Alan Bradley, best-selling author of the Flavia de Luce series
“Appealing . . . The interpersonal relationships McCall Smith so sensitively portrays and the ethical issues he raises matter far more than the sleuthing. Fans of gentle mysteries will look forward to the sequel.”
—Publishers Weekly
2019-01-21
The chronicler of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (The Colors of All the Cattle, 2018, etc.) and 44 Scotland Street (A Time of Love and Tartan, 2018, etc.) takes on Nordic noir. Guess who comes out on top.
The staff of Malmö's Sensitive Crimes Department are pretty sensitive themselves. Ulf Varg worries what sorts of life choices will be left to him once he turns 40. Anna Bengsdotter, married to an anaesthetist, is secretly in love with Ulf, and he with her. Carl Holgersson shoulders most of the squad's actual work out of a cheerful sense of duty. Clerical assistant Erik Nykvist fishes whenever he can and dreams of his retirement, when he expects to fish even more. The group is evidently assigned to investigate crimes too marginal and quirky for anyone else in law enforcement. Why would someone stab market trader Malte Gustafsson painfully but ineffectually behind his knee? Has university student Bim Sundström's boyfriend gone to the North Pole, as she claims, or has she actually done away with him? (Not-really-a-spoiler alert: She's made him up in response to her chums' nonstop questions about her love life.) And why has someone launched a social media attack that seems intended to put the spa run by Police Commissioner Felix Ahlström's cousin out of business? Tearing himself from the side of Marten, the beloved poodle mix he's taught to cope with his deafness by lip-reading, Ulf and his cohort reluctantly partner with uniformed officer Blomquist to bring the parties involved to justice.
Fans of the bestselling author's long-running franchises won't be surprised by the two most distinctive features of the gravely waggish department's caseload: The mysteries seem both utterly inconsequential and quietly provocative, and they have long tails that continue to flop around even after they're nominally solved.
| BN ID: | 2940171172411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2019 |
| Series: | Detective Varg Series , #1 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Chapter One
Free Association,
Charged at Normal Rates
“Søren,” said Dr. Svensson, gravely, but with a smile behind his horn-rimmed glasses; and then waited for the response. There would be an answer to this one- word sentence, but he would have to wait to see what it was.
Ulf Varg, born in Malmö, Sweden, the son of Ture and Liv Varg, only too briefly married, now single again; thirty-eight, and therefore fast approaching what he thought of as a watershed—“After forty, Ulf,” said his friend Lars, “where does one go?”—that same Ulf Varg raised his eyes to the ceiling when his therapist said, “Søren.” And then Ulf himself, almost without thinking, replied: “Søren?”
The therapist, kind Dr. Svensson, as so many of his patients described him, shook his head. He knew that a therapist should not shake his head, and he had tried to stop himself from doing it too often, but it happened automatically, in the same way as we make so many gestures without really thinking about them—twitches, sniffs, movements of the eyebrow, the folding and unfolding of legs. Although many of these acts are meaningless, mere concomitants of being alive, shaking one’s head implies disapprobation. And kind Dr. Svensson did not disapprove. He understood, which is quite different from disapproving.
But now he disapproved, and he shook his head before he reminded himself not to disapprove, and not to shake his head. “Are you asking me or telling me?” he said. “Because you shouldn’t be asking, you know. The whole point of free association, Mr. Varg, is to bring to the surface—to outward expression—the things that are below the surface.”
To bring to the surface the things that are below the surface . . . Ulf liked that. That, he thought, is what I do every time I go into the office. I get out of bed in the morning to bring to the surface the things that are below the surface. If I had a mission statement, then I suppose that is more or less what it would be. It would be far better than the one foisted on his department by Headquarters: We serve the public. How bland, how anodyne that was—like all the communications they received from Headquarters. Those grey men and women with their talk of targets and sensitivity and more or less everything except the one thing that mattered: finding those who broke the law.
“Mr. Varg?”
Ulf let his gaze fall from the ceiling. Now he was staring at the carpet, and at Dr. Svensson’s brown suede shoes. They were brogues, with that curious holed pattern that somebody had once explained to him was all to do with letting the shoes breathe, and was not just a matter of English aesthetics. They were expensive, he imagined. When he first saw them, he had decided that they were English shoes, because they had that look about them, and that was precisely the sort of thing that a good detective noticed. Italian shoes were thinner, and more elegant, presumably because the Italians had thinner, more elegant feet than the English. The Dutch, of course, had even bigger feet than the English; Dutchmen, Ulf reflected, were tall, big- boned people. They were large—which was odd, in a way, because Holland was such a small country . . . and so prone to flooding, as that story he had been read as a child made so clear—the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke . . .
“Mr. Varg?” There was a slight note of impatience in Dr. Svensson’s tone. It was all very well for patients to go off into some reverie of their own, but the whole point of these sessions was to disclose, not conceal, and they should articulate what they were thinking, rather than just think it.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Svensson. I was thinking.”
“Ah!” said the therapist. “That’s precisely what you’re meant to do, you know. Thinking precedes verbalisation, and verbalisation precedes resolution. And much as I approve of that, what we’re trying to do here is to find out what you think without thinking. In other words, we want to find out what’s going on in your mind. Because that’s what—”
Ulf nodded. “Yes, I know. I understand. I just said Søren because I wasn’t quite sure what you meant. I wanted to be sure.”
“I meant Søren. The name. Søren.”
Ulf thought. Søren triggered nothing. Had Dr. Svensson said Harald, or Per, he would have been able to respond bully or teeth because that was what he thought of. They had been boys in his class, so had Dr. Svensson said Harald, he might have replied bully, because that was what Harald was. And if he had said Per, he would have replied teeth, because Per had a gap in his front teeth that his parents were too poor to have attended to by an orthodontist.
Then it came to him, quite suddenly, and he replied, “Kierkegaard.”
This seemed to please Dr. Svensson. “Kierkegaard?” the therapist repeated.
“Yes, Søren Kierkegaard.”
Dr. Svensson smiled. It was almost time to bring the session to a close, and he liked to end on a thoughtful note. “Would you mind my asking, why Kierkegaard? Have you read him?”
Ulf replied that he had.
“I’m impressed,” said Dr. Svensson. “One doesn’t imagine that a . . .” He stopped.
Ulf looked at him expectantly.
Dr. Svensson tried to cover his embarrassment, but failed. “I didn’t mean, well, I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”
“Your unconscious?” said Ulf mildly. “Your unconscious mind speaking.”
The therapist smiled. “What I was going to say—but stopped myself just in time—was that I didn’t expect a policeman to have read Kierkegaard. I know that there’s no earthly reason why a policeman should not read Kierkegaard, but it is unusual, would you not agree?”
“I’m actually a detective.”
Dr. Svensson was again embarrassed. “Of course you are.”
“Although detectives are policemen in essence.”
Dr. Svensson nodded. “As are judges and public health officials and politicians too, I suppose. Anybody who tells us how to behave is a policeman in a sense.”
“But not therapists?”
Dr. Svensson laughed. “A therapist shouldn’t tell you how to behave. A therapist should help you to see why you do what you do, and should help you to stop doing it—if that’s what you want. So, no, a therapist is certainly not a policeman.” He paused. “But why Kierkegaard? What appeals to you about Kierkegaard?”
“I didn’t say he appealed. I said I had read him. That’s not the same thing as saying he appealed.”
Dr. Svensson glanced at his watch again. “I think perhaps we should leave it at that,” he said. “We’ve covered a fair amount of ground today.”
Ulf rose to his feet.
“Now what?” asked Dr. Svensson.
“Now what, what?”
“I was wondering what you were going to do next. You see, my patients come into this room, they talk—or, rather, we talk—and then they go out into the world and continue with their lives. And I remain here and think—not always, but sometimes—I think: What are they going outside to do? Do they go back to their houses and sit in a chair? Do they go into some office somewhere and move pieces of paper from one side of the desk to another? Or stare at a screen again until it’s time to go home to a house where the children are all staring at screens? Is that what they do? Is that why they bother?”
Ulf hesitated. “Those are very profound questions. Very. But since you ask, I can tell you that I’m going back to my office. I shall sit at my desk and write a report on a case that we have just closed.”
“You close cases,” muttered Dr. Svensson. “Mine remain open. They are unresolved, for the most part.”
“Yes, we close cases. We’re under great pressure to close cases.”
Dr. Svensson sighed. “How fortunate.” He moved to the window. I look out of the window, he thought. The patients go off to do significant things, such as closing cases, and I look out of my window. Then he said, “I don’t suppose you could tell me what this case involved.”
“I can’t give you names, or other details,” replied Ulf. “But I can tell you it involved the infliction of a very unusual injury.”
Dr. Svensson turned round to face his patient.
“To the back of somebody’s knee,” said Ulf.
“How strange. To the back of the knee?”
“Yes,” said Ulf. “But I can’t really say much more than that.”
“Odd.”
Ulf frowned. “That I should not explain further? Is that odd?”
“No, that somebody should injure another person in the back of the knee. Of course, the choice of a target is hardly random. We injure what we love, what we desire, every bit as much as that which we hate. But it is odd, isn’t it? The back of a knee . . . ”
Ulf began to walk towards the door. “You’d be very surprised, Dr. Svensson, at how odd people can be. Yes, even in your profession—where you hear all sorts of dark secrets from your patients, day in, day out. Even then. You’d be surprised.”
“Would I?”
“Yes,” said Ulf. “If you stood in my shoes for a few days, your jaw would hit the table in astonishment. Regularly.”
Dr. Svensson smiled. “Well, well.” His smile faded. The jaw. Freud, he remembered, died of a disease that affected his jaw. Alone in London, with enemies circling, that illuminating intelligence, liberating in its perspicacity, flickered and died, leaving us to face the darkness and the creatures that inhabited it.
