A Bad Penny Always Turns Up

I posted this morning on a David Broder column. It felt good to be back.

I hadn't posted since back in July, and I don't see any good reason to go into all the reasons, and/or excuses, for my absence. There was a death in the family. That necessitated two trips to Florida. Those, plus my week's vacation in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in September, provided me with a pretty good backlog of work both at the office and at home. Et cetera, et cetera.

But I have been reading. Scandinavian mystery novels have been prominent lately. I read Jo Nesbo's Nemesis and Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. According to a reviewer I heard on NPR (yes, I listen to NPR sometimes), Larsson's novels are consciously descended from a series of detective stories by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. I read a bunch of those novels back in the '80s (we were living in Pennsylvania at the time, as I recall), and they were very good.

A Swedish friend of mine commented, apropos of Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers, that all the Swedish mystery writers were Maoists. I'm not sure about that, but it is true that the detective novel has been used by them as a means of social criticism. That's certainly true of Stieg Larsson, who died shortly after delivering the manuscript of his third novel The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Of course, there is a long tradition of using the mystery novel to shine a light on the seamy side of society. Dashiell Hammett, author of the classic The Glass Key, was a committed Communist (and one hell of a good writer).

I finished Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein, today. It's long - the text ends at page 748 - but it is a fascinating and detailed look at American politics from 1965, when we all thought we had entered into a liberal consensus, through 1972, by which time that consensus had been shown to have been an illusion. After Tuesday's election I have to agree with Perlstein that we still live in Nixonland.