Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (1964) by Per WahlööWe open with a bomb threat delivered to an unnamed authoritarian nation's sole publishing conglomerate. It accuses the company of murder and says that the bomb has been set to go off at a certain time as retribution for the murder. Chief Inspector Jensen is assigned to the case--his initial goal is to convince the Director that the building must be cleared...against protests of how much money will be lost in the time the presses aren't running. He succeeds...mostly. Everyone is evacuated except for the mysterious "Special Department" on the thirty-first floor. Fortunately, the time for the bomb to go off comes and passes and nothing happens. But the conglomerate's officials insist that the police--Jensen--must find the person who sent the threat. The Chief of Police tells Jensen that this is his case and he must find the culprit within one week or.... (or what is never made quite clear--what is clear is that there will be Consequences with a capital "C")
What follows is pure police procedural with Jensen looking for those who may have some sort of grudge against the conglomerate or those in charge of the publishing concern. He works his way slowly through all who have left the company (whether voluntarily or not...) until he's able to pinpoint the culprit. Who has one final surprise for the company.
Here Be Spoilers! I can't talk about the book as I'd like to without spoiling what mystery there is....read further only if you have read this previously or don't mind knowing a great deal about what happens.
So...Wahlöö's novel is more dystopian future than it is mystery. It has more kinship with Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Farenheit 451 than it does with Sherlock Holmes or Wahlöö's joint-efforts with Maj Sjöwall in the Martin Beck series. Oh, there is a mystery--who is behind the bomb scare and why? And Chief Inspector Jensen does discover the answer to that. And there is murder--of a sort, as the culprit tells Jensen in their interview:
Do you understand the implications of what I have just said? This was murder, an intellectual, murder far more loathsome and distasteful than physical murder. The murder of innumerable ideas, the murder of opinions, of freedom of speech. Premeditated first-degree murder of them all, to give people guaranteed peace of mid, to make them disposed to swallow uncritically all the tripe that's stuffed into them. Do you see, to spread indifference without opposition, forcibly injecting poison after first making sure there is neither doctor nor serum available.
The murder of free thought, of the right to question, of the possibility of a difference of opinion and the means to argue for it. Wahlöö builds his world upon the idea that television started this unnamed country on this path to anti-intellectualism; that the government built upon the "tripe" being doled out on television to water down everything from newspapers to magazines to sports events. I wonder what he would make of the world today and the effects of social media?
As social commentary, this is excellent. Wahlöö builds his dystopian world well. Those of us familiar with Orwell and Bradbury recognize the warnings well. The characters that people the novel are nearly all nameless, fairly interchangeable cogs. The only one who has a name is our protagonist, Jensen. The publishing conglomerate has no name. The men and women who work for (or who previously worked for) the company have no names--only positions. Jensen's superior officer is known only as the Chief of Police. His subordinates are merely Civil Patrol officers. We have a definite sense that the individual is not important. Jensen's chronic stomach issue seems to me to be indicative of the underlying discontent of this "perfect society." Other pointers are the uptick in drunkenness and suicides (that, in this world are never labeled as such--accidents, that's what they are, accidents).
There are two things that bother me about this story. First, just before Jensen confronts him at the end our culprit has sent another message with a bomb threat. We're left hanging as to whether it's real this time or not. Jensen who is monitoring things from the police station by radio and wonders in the last line whether the explosion, should it come, would be audible to him. (Although Jensen's reactions right before that last line seem to indicate that he believes it's real this time...) And, connected to the first, if the bomb is real, then there will be murder. Because once again the thirty-first floor is not evacuated which means that all the critical thinkers and intelligent writers who are secluded there will be blown up. This is dissatisfying in and of itself, but I'm also disconcerted by the fact that the one who is protesting the intellectual murder, the suppression of the writing of those critical, intelligent men and women would be ultimately responsible for their physical deaths. Of course, the conglomerate would also be guilty since they did not evacuate those people, but I'm not quite sure what Wahlöö's intent is by making the culprit and the conglomerate equal partners in any responsibility for deaths. And, it seems to me even though Wahlöö doesn't make it explicit, that Jensen would also have blood on his hands since he doesn't insist that his men see that those on the thirty-first floor are evacuated as well.
One other random thought--what was the deal with the badger and the Director there at the end? Did the badger bite him? Was the Director seriously injured? Or was the badger more symbolic? I'm just not sure what to do with the badger.
I'm not quite sure where I stand on rating this one. The social commentary is excellent and the writing style, setting, and characters all work well to underline the themes. But as a mystery I find it lacking. Despite the discovery of the culprit, there is no real resolution. Yes, the man is captured but we don't know how much he is responsible for--we don't know the extent of his crimes and that is unsatisfying. I'm also not satisfied with Jensen as our detective. I'm more in favor of a detective who wants justice to be done and I'm not sure Jensen is on the side of the angels. He may be following the strict justice of his society, but if the bomb is real he's definitely not blameless. I guess I'm going to go with ★★★
First line: The alarm was given at exactly 1.02 p.m.
Last line: He sat quite still and wondered whether the explosion would be audible so far away as this.
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