Answer: the book that’s most outstanding in an ideal direction.
And what’s more ideal than a procedural mystery?
And what more outstanding than one set abroad?
Then guess how many my New York City publishing house has taken home, with all of my influence on literature and literary history. In forty years, just you guess how many.
So I know about Swedes.
You could say it’s because it’s crime fiction I do, not so-called literary fiction, but that argument doesn’t hold water. Crime fiction is like any other fiction, only it has an extra rule or two — like the sonnet. We need red herrings. We need a shell game, the chip on the underside of the bridge’s stone balustrade, a locked room. A murder that turns out to be an elaborate suicide. Doesn’t the sonnet have rules like that?
Crime fiction is structured like a joke — there is the lead-up, and there is the punch line, and if the author has done his work, in the end you have to laugh — like a sonnet!
Here’s the thing about Swedes — they like trouble — they see an opportunity, they create trouble. Little devils running this way and that, in cable-knit sweaters, seeing what mischief they can cause.
You want my thoughts, the PBTSASC1R MQ LG0UW
Swedes haven’t been right since the assassination of Olof Palme in ’86.
There are events that come and after everything’s different.
Remember what Kennedy said: a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety.
And: Their only remedy is the street.
Why would he say that?
He said it, and they killed him for it.
America’s a country with a terrible history of political violence. Not so, Sweden. Olof Palme’s assassination knocked the Swedes for a loop — because they don’t have that history.
How to manage that history — not for the Swedes — because we are not Swedes — but for us?
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In our country — not in Sweden — these thoughts of political violence are everywhere you look.
For instance, Dutton, series of books of fun facts, they slip in one or two about Frank Eugene Corder, and what’s fun about that? Or Morrow, Raymond Lee Harvey. The starter pistol that scared poor Carter’s pants off. Pocket has a checkout-aisle mass-market guy that slips them in by the fistful — Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheik Mohammed — you see the type. And of course there’s the commission report that was such a success for Norton — and who do we find lurking in a footnote but good old Sam Byck.
Do you know that old chestnut, Our American Cousin?
There’s the character who says, I’m an interesting invalid.
He speaks of lonely sufferers and interesting invalids.
Don’t you think I’m an interesting invalid?
Well, don’t you?
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Political violence keeps pushing in at the margins.
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It has always been my policy to cut all such references from my books.
Study the acts, cut the reference.
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Internalize the acts, your understanding of the acts, then eliminate the evidence.
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Otherwise it doesn’t feel safe.
The boy has entered another period of torpor — the spines that have long since erupted from his back sway a little, as though in a breeze. The confession will start again in an hour, or three or four hours, but for now, tonight, I have time.
Commissioners, I have so much to get through, so many thousands of thoughts and stories to communicate, but if I only have time for one, it will be the story of my friend, Lewis.
You killed my friend Lewis, and I, in turn, [heavy cross out] killed your friends. Yes, I came to think of the staff at the institute as having been your friends. I thought of you, the all-powerful and invisible Commissioners, and I thought of the men I had seen every day at the institute, and I said to myself: they must have been your dear friends. And so I slashed your friends’ throats, I cracked open your friends’ heads in the armory door, and with an M1 and a can of gasoline I took the lives of all your friends.
And you were very angry with me, just as I had been angry with you, because it is hard to lose a friend.
And so you threw me in a cinder block hole and left me to rot. For a brief time I sustained myself by telling stories of my friend, but it was not long before I lost my mind, and I no longer understand stories. I don’t mean that I forgot them; I mean that my mind refused them altogether. Yes, I was quite insane for decades. But within my insanity, still I held on to something myself, though I marked the days with the tissue of my own fingertips on cinder block, and was rendered the most wretched of animals, a fox in a trap who chews through his own flesh, and forgets that he is a fox, that he is anything other than terrible pain of this chewing through—a chewing through that must at all costs continue, and with greater and greater intensity — for he is nothing but chewing through.
A hundred of us, from all over the country, timed to arrive on the same day. But a series of blizzards had made train travel impossible, and so the two of us were late.
I had come from a state home for boys in Alabama, he had come from an orphanage two counties over — but we caught our trains at the same station, and our two minders rode with us in the same compartment.
Neither of us spoke. I studied the face of this colored boy. He wore thick black glasses. His smile that would come and go, as though flipped by a switch. A smile that didn’t have anything to do with the jerkwater towns we were passing in Tennessee, or Kentucky, or the graded expanses of snow in Illinois, the grids of windbreak pines, the slight frowns of our minders as they read their papers.
On the second day, there was a stop at a station in Wisconsin. A lunch counter. The dollar bills we received from the billfolds of our respective minders.
At the lunch counter, we held tight to our bills.
We stood there and held our bills, and I remember sizing Lewis up — thinking, he is a bit bigger than I am, I wonder if I could take him? Because it seemed to me then, for no reason I knew, that we’d have to fight.
He turned to face me, smile flicking on and off. I clenched my fists in my pocket and prepared to strike. But he just laughed and said, “Let’s tell them we bought sandwiches and they cost a dollar and we ate them.”
My hands released — and I felt the letting go echo in my open palms.
I said, “It’s a plan.”
We were almost giddy, running on the platform, sliding on long tongues of glare ice in the low brilliant hitting sun. We made gestures as if we were eating sandwiches — and even mimed struggling over one, which — our gestures revealed — was torn in two, and we immediately mashed our gloves at our mouths. Then the whistle blew. And as we walked side by side to the car, something changed. Our sense of [heavy cross out] giddiness at getting away with this — not theft, exactly — began to sour. I think we were both embarrassed, to have made such a fuss over a dollar. The smallness, the pettiness of it — and the giddiness it had opened up inside of us. If we could have gone back and erased the giddiness, it would have been fine. But we didn’t know how to do that.