Book Review: The Department of Sensitive Crimes

Alexander McCall Smith brings forth a lighter shade of dark in this novel, a great replacement for Scandi-Noir

Raise your hand if you’re a little tired of Scandi-Noir: that subgenre of crime fiction, hailing from the Nordic countries, that’s all full of doom and gloom, horrifying murder, and wrecked personal lives of its characters. The stories are twisty and surprising, but all the blood and gore begins to wear on you. Well, here’s a great replacement. Alexander McCall Smith, writer of the delightfully warm and sunny Mma Ramotswe series, set in Botswana, Africa, now begins a Scandinavian series infused with the same sunshine. The Department of Sensitive Crimes is centered around the titular department, housed in Malmo, Sweden, which specialises in solving mysteries which are either too vague or too small-scale to be taken up by the normal police. “Sensitive” is deliberately a loose definition for these cases.

The lead detective is Ulf Varg. Varg is the quintessential Swedish fiction detective — living alone, dealing with self-doubt, with a troubled family backstory, yet gifted with crime-solving talents. The other characters in the department have their own backgrounds and quirks, and will doubtlessly feature in sequels.

The first case in the book is a strange attack on a market trader — a knife wound, but not where you’d expect it to be. Varg, while investigating the case, applies his lateral logic to figure out the physical description of the assailant before anything else. The description helps the local police to zero in on the culprit. But this is not the end of the case, because Varg and the department now feel sympathy for the perpetrator, and are led into more complications in trying to help him out.

In the meantime, a different kind of teenage drama is playing out. Bim, purely to impress her friends, creates an imaginary boyfriend for herself to show off. The boyfriend is a paramedic who’s totally devoted to his night shift job and who’s also devastatingly handsome. She even gets a photo with a random guy off the street to prove his existence. As time goes on, she finds it hard to keep him “hidden” from her friends, and “sends” him off to a remote place on assignment.

But the sudden disappearance of this boyfriend, plus the presence of some suspicious tools in her car, prompts one of Bim’s friends to report a possible murder. Varg is called in because these are teenagers, and it’s a sensitive issue. Every clue seems to point to a grisly murder of the boyfriend, though Bim denies everything.

In this case, as in the first, it is not so much the resolution of the mystery that matters. It is more the way the life of the characters changes after they are involved in the events. Bim’s circle of friends, for example, goes through upheaval. Her mother understands way more than she lets on, but waits for her daughter to confess. And in Varg’s department itself, the detectives are nonplussed at the behaviour of the girls and unsure of how far they want to chase the story.

The third case is, in my personal opinion, the weakest story. However, it’s made up for by the social commentary and philosophising that Smith throws in. At the request of a superior officer, Varg goes to a resort spa outside town, which is being plagued by rumours of a creature haunting it. He’s happy to take the chance to unwind in a luxurious location - but once he’s there, he’s too focused on the case to let himself relax. Step by step, speaking to all the people involved, Varg begins to understand the very human motivations behind the problem - and resolves it, though not to everyone’s liking.

The emphasis on the personal lives of its characters is typical of Scandinavian noir, and Smith retains that aspect of the genre. But he brings in his trademark quirkiness and humour that lights up the atmosphere, making this a very different book, almost a gentle spoof. Varg, for example, has a deaf dog named Martin who has learned to lip-read. Instead of the typical family quarrels in other books, here we have Martin beginning to be depressed with life, and needing treatment. Another character in the Department, Erik, is nearing retirement and is obsessed with fishing. He’d like nothing more than to leave this city behind and live in a riverside cottage. When Erik is around, every other sentence by Varg and others contains a fish-themed simile, rousing Erik again and again. This particular running gag by Smith is so well done that it takes a little while to see it, but once you have, you can’t help smiling every time it recurs.

If you’re a fan of Smith’s Mma Ramotswe series, you’ll probably like this book. Alternatively, if you’d like a light, feel-good interpretation of the Nordic crime genre that still features interesting characters, this is for you, too.