Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

Murder most Swedish

Thanks to writers like Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, the picturesque streets of Stockholm and Ystad are thronged with visitors looking for something far more sinister than the perfect holiday snap. Andrew Pemberton follows the trail of the country’s crime novels

Illustrations Migy

People prefer fiction to fact,” says Vivianne Jeppsson with the slightest hint of a sigh. A tour guide based in Ystad, which lies on the south coast of Sweden just an hour’s drive across the Øresund Bridge from Copenhagen, she takes hundreds of tourists around her home town each year. She shows them the narrow streets and half-timbered houses of the medieval city centre. She points out the roses and hollyhocks snaking up the walls of the 13th-century monastery. She walks them past the hustle and bustle and 1950s styling of the Freidolf café. These visitors, however, aren’t here for mere sightseeing – they’re here for murder. For Jeppsson is the premier guide for In The Footsteps of Wallander: the walking tour based on the exploits of the dark, misanthropic, humourless detective Kurt Wallander, featured in the famous books by Henning Mankell.

New York may boast the astonishingly successful Sex and The City Tour, in which tireless Carrie Bradshaw fans march around Manhattan for up to eight hours, while visitors to London can prowl the alleyways of the city on the Jack The Ripper walk, but Sweden is cornering the market in its own kind of magical mystery tour. In addition to Jeppsson’s Wallander walk, there’s the Millennium Tour in Stockholm, which takes fans around the places mentioned in Stieg Larsson’s 20 million-selling thriller trilogy. Then there are the Murder Tour, which visits the Swedish capital’s most grisly crime scenes, the Stockholm Syndrome Tour – which, one presumes, everyone raves about once it’s over – and the Stockholm Ghost Tour.

Wallander wander

The Wallander tour, conducted in English, Swedish and German, has been running for eight years, during which time it has successfully mined the public’s ongoing fascination with the bestselling books. So far, 10 stories have been serialised on Swedish TV, while a further 24 have been made by Mankell’s Ystad TV Studio, which is located at the town’s old army base. Most recently, the BBC bought the rights to serialise six books, with Kenneth Branagh starring as the grumpy hero.

So why are so many people so interested in retracing the steps of a man that Branagh describes as “a walking open wound”? Says Jeppsson, “He is a normal man. He has normal needs. You can relate to him.” Her yomp around Ystad (pronounced ‘ee-stad’) takes in the colourful shops and cafés, and beautiful churches of the medieval town. With cascading window boxes lining the route, one observer has pointed out that Ystad “is more dainty than dangerous.” The tour takes in the Hotel Continental, where Wallander likes to dine, the Ystad Saltsjöbad, where Wallander once failed to enjoy a one-night stand, and a succession of bars and pizzerias in which he occupies his often-miserable downtime.

“It is a great feeling to come to this beautiful medieval town and discover a fiction in the middle of it, “ says Jeppsson. “But once you are here you will also find a landscape similar to Provence. A lot of artists choose to live here because of the special light, and the landscape of beaches and pine trees. With 400km of coastline, you are in close contact with water wherever you go. It’s just a wonderful place.”

Millennium magic

Just as Jeppsson hopes Wallander will help tourists appreciate Ystad, tour guide Sara Claesson describes the main mission of the Millennium Tour as telling “the story of Stockholm.” But she too admits that while “the people in the Millennium books are fiction, they really mean something to people.” Designed to attract younger visitors to the city, there were eight Millennium tours in 2008. This year, there will be over 300. “We get everyone from 18-year-olds to those who aren’t able to walk any more,” says Claesson. And when the David Fincher-directed remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo hits screens in December, “there will be even more tours.”

Most of the walk is located in the once working-class but now bohemian district of Södermalm, an island in the centre of Stockholm. “All the good guys in the books are from Södermalm,” says Claesson. “It is where Larsson lived. All the bad guys are from elsewhere.” As a campaigning journalist who received death threats from right-wing extremists, Larsson’s home is a secret. But the apartment of Mikael Blomkvist – the books’ hero – is another matter, and the view over Riddarfjärden from ‘his’ flat is a tour highlight. The walk also takes in the 7-Eleven mentioned in the books, where sightseers can buy Billy’s Deep Pan Pizza. From there the tour snakes through narrow 18th-century cobblestone paths to the coffee houses where Blomkvist feeds his caffeine addiction and the hotels where he enjoys secret trysts. It passes by the offices of Blomkvist’s fictitious Millennium magazine – actually the offices of Greenpeace – and stops at Montelius Vägen, a wooden walkway from where you can see the courthouse and police headquarters that feature heavily in the books. The truly committed can even take a three-hour ferry ride to Sandhamn in Sweden’s outer archipelago, to visit where the late author had a summerhouse.

Curious crimes

Back in the downtown region of Stockholm, talkative expat Englishman Anthony Heads runs The Stockholm Murder Tour, a walk that revisits famous crime scenes from 1920 up to the present day. Heads – a crime enthusiast who has lived in Stockholm for 10 years – dresses as a detective and recounts the facts behind each case, and even produces photos of the crime scene to make his grisly points. He says he often gets police officers taking the tour. “They have rarely heard of all the crimes I talk about,” he says. “They are always surprised.”

Heads’ ‘favourite’ story concerns the so-called ‘vampire murder’ of 1932, when a prostitute was found murdered in her own apartment, her body drained of blood. “Next to her body they found a soup ladle that the murderer used to drink her blood,” he says. “It is very creepy.” Heads believes Swedes are fascinated with crime. “There is something in the Swedish national psyche that attracts them to crime stories, real or fictionalised,” he says. “When prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986, Sweden became less of an open, naïve society. It lost its innocence. Now the country is very interested in crime and the underworld.”

Sara Claesson, however, doesn’t quite agree. “I think that Stockholm is more like the British TV series Midsomer Murders,” she says. “Midsomer is a very nice place, where lot of people get murdered – but it’s fiction. I am not afraid of Stockholm. At least, I don’t think so…”

FR Meurtre à la suédoise

Les rues pittoresques de Stockholm et d’Ystad sont envahies de visiteurs à la recherche de sensations plus sinistres que les habituels clichés de vacances. Andrew Pemberton suit à la trace les lieux emblématiques de la littérature policière.

« Les gens préfèrent la fiction à la réalité, » nous dit Vivianne Jeppsson. Cette guide, basée à Ystad, emmène les touristes dans « les Pas de Wallander », une promenade commentée des exploits du détective misanthrope Kurt Wallander, le personnage de l’écrivain Henning Mankel. Apparemment, la Suède se place en bonne position sur ce marché des tours insolites.

Le tour de Wallander, organisé depuis huit ans, pérégrine à travers la merveilleuse ville médiévale, d’où l’on aperçoit l’Hôtel Continental, où Wallander aime dîner, et les bars et pizzerias dans lesquels il vient souvent noyer sa déprime. « C’est fantastique de découvrir cette charmante ville du Moyen-Age sous l’angle de la fiction, » confie Jeppsson. « Une fois sur place, vous serez aussi conquis par la beauté de l’endroit. »

La guide Sara Claesson, considère pour sa part, que la mission principale du Millennium Tour de Stockholm – qui conduit les fans à travers les lieux de la célèbre trilogie de Stieg Larsson – est de raconter « l’histoire de Stockholm. » Cette année, la ville prévoit la mise sur pied de plus de 300 tours, destinés à attirer les plus jeunes visiteurs. La plupart des circuits se déroulent dans ce qui fut autrefois le quartier ouvrier, devenu le district bobo de Södermalm, où vivait Larsson.

Enfin, dans le centre de Stockholm, Anthony Heads, un Anglais expatrié, a monté le Stockholm Murder Tour, qui revisite les fameuses scènes de crime de 1920 jusqu’à nos jours. « Il y a quelque chose dans l’esprit des Suédois qui les passionne pour les histoires de crime, » conclut-il.

NL Moord op z’n Zweeds

De schilderachtige straten van Stockholm en Ystad krijgen tegenwoordig drommen bezoekers te slikken op zoek naar heel wat meer onguurs dan vakantiekiekjes. Andrew Pembertom volgt het spoor van misdaadromans in Zweden.

“Mensen verkiezen fictie boven feiten”, beweert Vivianne Jeppsson. Ze begeleidt als gids in Ystad de wandeltocht ‘In De Voetsporen van Wallander’, gebaseerd op de belevenissen van Henning Mankell’s misantropische detective Kurt Wallander. De rondleidingen zijn een schot in de roos voor Zweden.

De Wallander-tocht bestaat al acht jaar en doorkruist het mooie middeleeuws dorp maar ook herkenbare locaties zoals het Hotel Continental, cafés en pizzeria’s waar Wallander zijn (vaak zwaarmoedige) vrije uren doorbrengt. Het is fantastisch om fictie in dit prachtige middeleeuwse dorp met je eigen ogen tot leven te zien komen”, aldus Jeppsson. “En eens je hier bent, ontdek je ook wat een wonderlijke plaats het is”.

In Stockholm beschrijft gids Sara Claesson de ‘Millenium Tour’ als ‘het verhaal van Stockholm’. Ze neemt fans mee naar allerlei locaties uit de wereldberoemde trilogie van Stieg Larsson. De rondleiding moet jongere bezoekers aantrekken naar de stad en zal dit jaar meer dan 300 keer van start gaan. Het grootste deel van de wandeling is in Södermalm, een voormalige arbeiderswijk dat nu een bohemienachtig gebied is geworden, waar Larsson leefde.

Tot slot organiseert de Engelse expat Anthony Heads de ‘Stockholm Murder Tour’ langs tal van beroemde misdaadplekken van 1920 tot nu. “Zweden en misdaadverhalen, dat is een perfect match”, zegt hij.

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