Easy Money (Stockholm Noir Trilogy 1) [Paperback]

"Easy Money" is a debut crime novel from Jens Lapidus, billed as one of Sweden's most successful criminal defense lawyers, and, on the basis of this book, one of the best acquainted with Stockholm's underworld. It's a new entry in the sweepstakes to follow the phenomenal international success of Stieg Larsson, the superb Scandinavian thriller author, who gave us The Millennium Trilogy before his untimely death. EASY MONEY has received high praise from various Euro critics and high praise indeed from James Ellroy, one of the deans of hard-boiled American mysteries, who wrote, "At last, an epic European thriller to rival the Stieg Larsson books. It's an entirely new criminal world, beautifully rendered - and a wildly thrilling novel."

Lapidus's novel is set in Stockholm's underworld, where cocaine rules, and is told from the perspective of its mob bosses, patsies and thugs. It centers on three men. JW is of humble rural stock, but has managed to crash a rich, chic party crowd: now, if only he had the money to run freely with them. When he's offered the chance to sell cocaine to this crowd, he grabs it. Jorge, a young drug dealer of Chilean origin, has just succeeded in a celebrated breakout from jail, and wants revenge against those who put him there. JW's boss is anxious to recruit Jorge to widen his territory, and sets JW on the Latino's trail. But so is Mrado, brutal muscle in the high on the food chain Yugoslav gang that put Jorge inside in the first place. These three anti-heroes combine and recombine, all seeking their places in the sun.

The novel is written in a language slangy, fast-paced, and telegraphic enough to rival Ellroy's. But, whereas I, like many Americans, have some familiarity with Los Angeles, where Ellroy sets his work, I know very little about Sweden, Yugoslavia, or Chile, and I didn't always know what Lapidus was talking about. Lapidus's writing or perhaps his translator's also has an odd tic: over and over, often several times in a page, he uses a clumsy contraction that I'm not sure exists in English: "Jorge'd,"for, I gather, "Jorge had." This set me into mental gymnastics every time, as I was busy remembering the Latin pronunciation of "Jorge," and then I had to tag the "'d" on its end. A true mental tongue-twister. Furthermore, I found the book to be testosterone-soaked: in its pages, women exist solely for sex and the delivery of children. It often reminded me that the first, Swedish title of Larsson's first book, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was MEN WHO HATE WOMEN. It sometimes seemed to me that I kept reading this long book only because it had opened on a woman's abuse, and I was anxious to find out what had become of her; information that wasn't shared until nearly the end of the book's more than 450 pages. However, the book does finally arrive at a fairly exciting, powerful conclusion.

Come to Scandinavian mysteries, I go back beyond the Martin Beck Mystery Series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Lapidus has got something here, but I'm not sure what. However, I would be willing to give him another try.

The influx of immigrants into Scandinavia over the last 25 years or so has provided a rich source of material for crime writers, as the criminal elements amongst the immigrants have gradually taken a large role in organized crime. This fast-moving, but overlong, novel is about the complex interactions between two such groups, and other local criminal gangs, as they maneuver to control a range of illegal enterprises, principally cocaine dealing.

The main characters are: JW, a student; Jorge, a small-time South American drug pusher; an Arab drug dealer who operates on a larger scale; and the Jugo gang, a vicious bunch of Serbian criminals. JW is from a poor background who has infiltrated a set of rich kids in Stockholm and supplies them with cocaine. Later he gets more heavily into the drug supply business when he is recruited by the Arab dealer to extend sales into the public housing estates in the Stockholm suburbs. At the same time he is trying to find out what happened to his sister, who left the family home some years earlier and subsequently disappeared. Jorge is an escapee from prison, but while on the run falls foul of the Jugo gang and is badly beaten up. He is rescued by JW on orders of the Arab, who wants to use his knowledge of the drugs distribution business outside the Stockholm central region. Jorge seeks revenge on the Jugo gang.

This web of subplots becomes even more complicated and probably too intricate, as conflicts arise within the gangs, leading to betrayals and regroupings of the main players. Everything comes together, including learning the fate of JW's sister, in the hectic events of the last few chapters, when the Arabs, JW and Jorge take delivery of a gigantic shipment of cocaine from the UK, which is then high-jacked by a breakaway group from the Jugo gang, only for the police to arrive having received a tip-off from a member of the same gang. Jorge escapes, but the rest are captured, and at the end the boss of the Jugo gang continues to control his criminal organization.

`Easy Money' is not the usual Scandinavian crime novel, where a crime is committed and is solved by a detective with his small team. Here there are many interwoven strands, no named detectives, and the police play almost no role until the last few pages. The action is all between the criminals themselves. The language is also far cruder, violent, and overtly sexual throughout than in those novels. The translation seems to have chosen its use of slang for the American market, but this sounds curiously false in places. There are also errors in the descriptions of locations outside Sweden. Overall, although the complicated plot is quite well structured, the writing is too often deliberately designed shock the reader.

No disrespect to the author, translator or publisher, but this just isn't my kind of book. I read as much translated crime fiction from Scandinavia as I can, but Easy Money is unlike any other book from the region I've read so far. It's a US-style gangster book, told from the point of view of various male criminals - in prison, drug-dealing, stupid, violent, desensitised, nightclubbing, double-crossing, brand-name consumer addicts, Neanderthally sexist, and so on. The plot is pretty standard, but because there is no sympathetic protagonist or police/law/non-criminal perspective, to like the book you have to be the type of reader who enjoys reading unadulterated nastiness. The novel is fast-paced but generic, a descendant of many films such as The Godfather and of many books by "hard-boiled" US authors. One could regard it as the flip side of the 360-degree dissection of the police and security forces depicted by Leif G W Persson in Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End (which, like Easy Money, is also first of a trilogy). If you like the evil side of slice-of-life stories, this might be one for you (but there are some really nasty scenes, eg the fate of the woman who features in the prologue). Me, I prefer current Swedish authors such as Liza Marklund, Helene Tursten and Johan Theorin.