YSTAD

The man should never have looked up. Weaving towards him over the water’s surface like a giant firefly the drone glared at him with beady eyes. Then two white flashes…  hot metal pierced his eyes. His body tumbled into the icy harbour water, dead before submersion.

If the late, great Henning Mankell had been writing Inspector Wallander police procedurals today that is how he might have introduced another horrific crime in Ystad. In twenty years the name of Kurt Wallander has become synonymous with this pretty, medieval market town and the surrounding landscape.

        

Ystad, on the coast in the county of Skåne, is at the southernmost part of Sweden. Before 1997, when the first Wallander crime novel was published, it is unlikely that many people outside of Sweden will have heard of it. I visited in the summer of 2010. As I walked its cobbled streets, flanked by colourful half-timbered houses and ubiquitous hollyhocks, I imagined criminals lurking in every narrow side street. Strolling down Mariagatan where Wallander lived in the early stories, I found the hospital where chilling events took place in the novel The Fifth Woman - a book in my top five crime novels published in the last thirty years.

Landscapes and mankind across the globe have fought each other for centuries. In Ystad we have the phenomenon of a landscape haunted by the ghosts of a fictional detective and appalling imaginary crimes. So many crimes (described in eleven novels and numerous short stories over fourteen years) that many readers have questioned how such a small Swedish town could play host to such carnage and crookedness.

Readers of Mankell will appreciate the Skåne landscape is as central to the plots as the characters of Kurt Wallander, Jussi his dog and the other police officers in Ystad. It is a gentle landscape with rolling fields. In early summer oilseed rape grows profusely. In autumn fogs roll in from the Baltic before the winter snows blanket farmhouses, fields and roads, providing perfect cover for murder and mayhem. At the nearby village of Kåseberga lies Sweden’s largest megalithic stone circle, Ales Stenar. It has stood a lonely, silent witness to actual and imaginary death and destruction.

Throughout my visit real life tragedy and violence in Sweden was never far from mind. For what happened here is so un-British. In 1961 the Secretary General of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, died mysteriously in an air crash. His farmhouse near Kåseberga is only twenty kilometers from Ystad. Thirty years ago the then prime minister Olof Palme was gunned down in a Stockholm street and in 2003 the Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, was fatally stabbed in a shop. I think Henning Mankell was creating in macrocosm in his Ystad crime novels the violence he perceived in Swedish society at large. The writer Andrew Brown wrote; “After Palme’s death, Sweden became, for a while, a foreign country to itself. The country we lived in was cracked open like a roofless house in winter."

There is this recurring theme in the Wallander novels - what went wrong with society. Kurt, in The Fifth Woman, at one point asks a hotel receptionist, “Why is it that everything is getting so much worse, more brutal?” He was talking about Swedish society in the 1990s. The answer is that the Sweden that was built after the war was brittle. Under the veneer of reconstruction was “quagmire”. The 1960s high-rise buildings were unfeeling. Inhabitants could not maintain their dignity. Thus, city dwellers felt unwanted and unloved in the place they knew well. So they kicked out. They perpetrated violent acts on fellow citizens.

To me the twin fascinations of crime fiction are the bringing of order out of chaos, (for I am a tidy fellow), and the exploration of harsh landscapes and their effects on mortal folk.

 As I read the Harry Bosch novels of Michael Connelly my mind constructs a vivid picture of Los Angeles - when I drove down Mulholland Drive a few years ago I imagined I was tailing Bosch or Joe Pike. Reading The Snowman by Jo Nesbo, I relive with Harry Hole my visit to the eerie Holmenkollen ski tower in Oslo. Landscape features strongly in the Martin Walker ‘Bruno Courreges’ novels set in Périgord, France; Stephen Booth’s novels set in the Peak District, especially The Devils Edge in the Peak District; Lindsey Davis’s ‘Falco’ novels in Rome; Michael Dibdin’s best Aurelio Zen novel, The Dead Lagoon set in Venice; and from the queen and king of police procedurals, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the city of Budapest plays a central role in The Man Who Went Up in Smoke. When I read these authors’ works I can sense the places they portray, adding to the enjoyment of the read.

Kurt Wallander talking to his daughter in The Fifth Woman draws me to an alternative analysis of what has gone wrong in our landscapes. I like this as it reflects my own sense of how our mode of life has changed. Mankell/Wallander says: “When I was growing up Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks. Then suddenly one day it was over. Socks with holes in them were thrown out. No one bothered to repair them. The whole society changed. ‘Wear it out and toss it’. As long as it was a matter of our socks, the change did not make much difference. But then it started to spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible moral code."

Instead of Sweden now think Britain. Jobs stricken urban landscapes in the UK may be a root cause of tension between some xenophobic Brexiteers and immigrants. Landscape, and human activity within it, influences a country and how it evolves. Crime fiction is enjoying an upsurge in sales. We must be wary of it anaesthetising our psyches against the real life terror playing out in cities, remote farmhouses and forests.

 If you would like to share your experiences of reading crime fiction and the places discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.

I keep an ever changing list of crime novels and their worldwide settings. If you would like a copy let me know.

Books by all the authors referenced above can be bought at: https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

The Fifth Woman, Henning Mankell. Harvill Secker. Sweden 1991    

Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell Harvill Secker. Sweden 1996                                                              

Quicksand, Henning Mankell. Harvill Secker. London 2016    

Fishing in Utopia, Andrew Brown. Granta Books 2008  

The crime fiction of Michael Connelly, Jo Nesbo, Martin Walker, Stephen Booth, Lindsey Davis, Michael Dibdin, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are all available in paperback

Blencathra

Impassioned debate this year over the management of the Lake District reveals strong opinions and not a little antagonism towards The National Trust. I am a mere fell walker, a grockle. Here is my two penn’orth and my celebration of a favourite mountain.



Buttressed like a slate cathedral Blencathra was formed 360 million years ago. It has stood watch in the northern fells of Cumbria, eying Celts, Romans, Angles, the Scots, the English, Urien Rheged and me. All came to make a living on, or explore, the northern slopes of the Lake District. It gave passage for packhorses and coffin carriers; provided inspiration to the laudanum-stoned Lake Poets. From 1879 it provided employment for a hundred lead miners and for over six hundred years its grassy upland has sustained generations of shepherds. Writing about the Lake Poet Robert Southey in 1839, the essayist Thomas de Quincey said the view from Southey’s house “was closed for many a league by the vast and towering masses of Skiddaw and Blencathra – mountains which are rather to be considered as frontier barriers.”

Photo by Helen Brooks

Photo by David Hall

I first set eyes on Saddleback (the other name) in 1967, from my seat in an airliner bound for Canada. I marvelled at the proud stature in, what was to me then, an alien landscape. Not setting foot on it until 1981 (via Hall’s Fell in the early days of my peak bagging odyssey) a further fifteen years passed before I felt the mighty mountain at it’s February fiercest.

The late, great Alfred Wainwright – a bean counter turned fell discoverer, writer, visionary and grumpy old man – wrote in 1962: “Blencathra is one of the grandest objects in Lakeland”. And with a mixture of awe and grudge a local foxhunter said: “there’s a terrible lot of unseen ground up there”. Only the eleventh highest fell in Lakeland, for me above every other it symbolises all that is essential to knowing the Lake District. AW concluded: “This is a mountain that compels attention, even from the dull people whose eyes are not habitually lifted to the hills”. He liked to get a grump in.

This ‘noble mountain’, as my bête noir at English A level John Stuart Mill wrote, has provided wonder to artists, photographers and painters and inspiration to many a writer. The parents of the poet W.H. Auden owned a holiday cottage at the foot of Blencathra at Wescoe just outside Threlkeld. Auden visited regularly in the 1920’s and 1930s. On returning exhausted and confused by the politics of civil war in Spain in 1937 I like to think he became refreshed by opening his back door and climbing Blease Fell, then to ponder life’s meaning from the summit – as countless walkers did before him and do today.

Photo by Helen Brooks

It is the sense of isolation and separateness of the Blencathra landscape, beyond the frontier with the rest of England, which is both endearing and attractive. Some visitors and local inhabitants feel entitled to protect it as it has always appeared. I used to think that a good trip to the Lakeland fells was one when I met nobody – when I had a mountain to myself. After I began to meet some of the farmers and shepherds any sense of entitlement in me gave way to one of curiosity about their part in the seasonal cycle of mountain life. Climb Blencathra in summer and you will see sheep lazily grazing the emerald green slopes and swallows dashing over the trickling streams. Ascend Sharpe Edge and then the side of Foule Crag in sub-zero February temperatures, with snow and ice under foot (as I did when Barrie, a friend, said “you just saved my life”), and you might just forget that shepherds make their living here.

A recent addition to the substantial literature of the Lakes is worth reading. James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life provides the testimony of a fourth generation hill farmer who, with validity, challenges ‘outcomers’ whose wish for “the future of our landscape would be tourism and wildlife and trees and wilding”. Maybe AW was right back in 1962 when he wrote “roads into Lakeland are being widened, straightened and enlarged to improve access for visitors, commerce and faster traffic.” He argued that Lakeland should be left “as we found it, as a haven of refuge and rest in a world going mad…as a precious museum piece.”

I would loathe the idea of Blencathra – or any mountain – being frozen as an antiquity. It withstood proudly the Celts and it just about commands walkers today. It certainly has had the awe of all the Rebanks, and Terry Abrahams in his new film The Life of a Mountain. For me farmers, tourists, painters, poets and sheep can co-exist, so long as self drive cars, lorries and the military are held at bay, no nearer than the M6.

Hill farmers struggle to make a living, putting the farms, the people, the way of life and their custodianship of the fells I love at risk. The Lowther estate still owns the fell. It owes James Rebanks’ descendants and my fell-walking grandchildren by not gambling with the future of a living, vibrant, working giant of a mountain. All with a love for Blencathra and the fells must listen to each other’s viewpoint (as a contributor to Abrahams’ film says “no we don’t have Wi-FI, talk to each other”) and ensure this unmodified landscape is sustained.

Photo by David Hall

If you would like to share your thoughts on the landscapes and ideas discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.

Books by all the authors referenced above can be bought at: https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

Wild Cumbria, W.R. Mitchell.  Robert Hale 1978

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Liberty Fund Inc. 2006

A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: Book 5 The Northern Fells, A. Wainwright. Westmoreland Gazette 1962

Recollections of the Lake Poets, Thomas de Quincey. Penguin 1970

The Shepherd's Life, James Rebanks. Allen Lane 2015

Blencathra: Portrait of a Mountain, Ronald Turnbull. Frances Lincoln 2010

Auschwitz

Auschwitz. The word screams torments whenever I hear it or see it. Just as Treblinka, My Lai and Aberfan do and now there’s another, Aleppo. Can there be any among us for whom Auschwitz does not symbolize cruelty, depravity, horror, destruction and tortured death?

In 2013 I visited the Nazi concentration and extermination camps near Oswiecim. A short holiday in the beautiful city of Krakow impelled a visit. Oswiecim is a typical, modern and commercial central European town situated 44 miles west of Krakow. But a short walk away is a landscape tenaciously linked to man’s inhumanity to man. For here are Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the notorious death camps where 2.5 million people died at the hands of the Nazis as part of Hitler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question. As Ota Kraus wrote, “Auschwitz was the scene of the greatest crime in the history of mankind”*.

After liberation in 1947 the two camps reappeared to the world as a museum and memorial site. 

There followed growing numbers of fascinated visitors, no doubt ghouls amongst them, but also writers and filmmakers who found a counter culture in which they could delve for artistic interpretation. Who has not watched with horrified fascination movies such as “Marathon Man”, “Schindler’s List”, “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” and “The Odessa File”? These films and many others are nerve-wracking to watch. Yet, for me, the novel “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron published in 1979 is the most shocking and heart-rending account of the effects of the death camps in 1940s Poland.

So on my visit I was unprepared for the initial reaction on walking over that ground at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and the feeling on entering the preserved buildings at Auschwitz I. Horror at what Jews and other misfits in Hitler’s Europe suffered in the camps was not what I felt. Maybe too much exposure to TV documentaries and Hollywood’s take on the Holocaust over the years, plus still being in thrall to Styron’s depiction of Sophie Zawistowska’s ‘Choice’, has inured me to more recent accounts of Nazi horror. (By the way, you have to reach thirty pages before the end of the novel before you discover what the Choice was. It is a stunning book.)

No, it was not horror I felt; on this visit what coursed through me was overwhelming anger. Anger and frustration on behalf of firstly the 140 escapers from the camp and then all the soldiers and families left to sort through the aftermath. A few escapers took with them samples of a pesticide called Zyklon B. Here was proof of Nazi atrocity. Some, like Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, took their testimony (later known as The Vrba-Wetxler Report) to the Vatican, Downing Street and Washington in the summer of 1944. Yet, for various reasons little was done to stop the appalling treatment of European Jews. What horrified me was how the officers and staff at the camps got away with their crimes for so long. And still the exterminations went on into 1945. And still, seventy years after the Russians liberated the camps, for me the landscape of Auschwitz was too horrible to look at.

Does history repeat itself? I think sometimes it does. In 1944 politicians, generals and priests equipped with the knowledge of what was happening in Auschwitz did not act to stop it for numerous reasons. Overabundant credulity regarding German atrocities in the First World War resulted in sceptism during the second war. This played a part. Also secrecy was a big factor in the Nazis’ success in keeping the world ignorant of their genocide.

In 2016 no brutal regime in the world can hide their atrocities for long from press, social media and its own mobile citizens. Think of  Aleppo. Today’s politicians, generals and priests are failing to stop the atrocities in Syria.  This time, sceptism and secrecy cannot be blamed. This time Obama’s US has vacated the hot seat of global power. There is a vacancy for a diplomat whose force of personality will bring Putin, May, Assad and Hillary to talk, not bomb… and talk, and talk. Then, the landscapes and citizens of Syria and Iraq could be saved.

Krakow today

*For those interested in how the world reacted to Auschwitz then and afterwards, (rather than accounts of what life was like inside) the following books may be of interest.

 I Escaped from Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba. Robson Books 2006                                                                      Auschwitz & After: Race, Culture & the Jewish Question in France. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. Routledge 1995                                                                                                                                          Sophie’s Choice. William Styron. Jonathan Cape. 1979. (1)                                                                                 A Theology of Auschwitz. Ulrich E. Simon. Gollancz. 1967                                                                                The Death Factory: document on Auschwitz.  Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka. Pergamon Press 1966.            Escape from Auschwitz. Andrey Pogozhev. Pen and Sword. 2007.                                                                  The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz. Denis Avey. Hodder & Stoughton. 2011.

(1)  Available in paperback at Blackwell's Bookshop  https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

If you would like to share your experiences of any of the landscapes discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.