James Nicoll Reviews

1951’s Mästerdetektiven Blomkvist lever farligt is the second volume in Astrid Lindgren’s Kalle Blomkvist series. Originally translated into English as Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously¹—the current English translation is titled Living Dangerously and was translated by Susan Beard.

As established in the previous volume, thirteen-year-old self-proclaimed master detective Kalle Blomkvist and his chums Eva-Lotta and Anders reside in Lillköping, a town so small it has but two proper streets. How on Earth can living there be in any way dangerous?

To amuse themselves, Kalle, Eva-Lotta, and Anders conduct a relentless feud with their bitterest enemies and closest friends, Sixten, Benka, and Jonte. The factions take their names from exotic England’s War of the Roses— Sixten, Benka, and Jonte’s Red versus Kalle, Eva-Lotta, and Anders’ White — and embrace any pretext to defame and attack the other side.

The current justification for contention is an oddly shaped rock called the Great Stonytotem. The Whites have it, so the Reds want it. To that end, the Reds capture Anders — for values of capture that allow Anders to attend family dinners to avoid attracting unwanted parental attention — and subject him to the direst of tortures! Which is to say, yelling and insults and tickling.

Kalle and Eva-Lotta orchestrate Anders’ escape. As an unintended side-effect, Eva-Lotta overhears an exchange between local loan shark Gren and a client of whom Eva-Lotta sees only his green trouser legs. Gren demands his money. The client promises to deliver it in exchange for his IOUs.

Dispatched to move the Stonytotem to a safer place, Eva-Lotta encounters the man in the green trousers. Shortly thereafter, she encounters Gren. More accurately, Eva-Lotta finds Gren’s murdered corpse.

While Eva-Lotta did not see the murder, the conversation she overheard and the fact she saw the man in the green trousers hurrying away from the murder scene are highly suggestive. The police are delighted to learn that Eva-Lotta saw the killer’s face this time. Even better, she found an IOU with the man’s name on it! Case solved.

Or it would be solved, if the man in the green trousers were not a stranger from out of town, and if a badly traumatized Eva-Lotta could remember what name was on the IOU or where she put it. As it is, the police are at a loss to find the man in the green trousers.

The papers have a field day covering the murder. The out-of-town papers judiciously withhold Eva-Lotta’s name and address. Lillköping’s paper’s editor reasons that since the town is so small, and everyone knows everyone, there’s no reason to conceal either Eva-Lotta’s name or her address.

This is information the man in the green trousers will use. The only impediment between him and getting away with murder is that pesky eyewitness. Now he knows just who his next victim will be and just where she lives.

Unless, of course, Master Detective Kalle Blomkvist can save the day!

~oOo~

One of the early clues that Eva-Lotta is being targeted² is when a dog becomes ill after eating chocolate sent to Eva-Lotta in the mail. The chocolate was poisoned. The chocolate was also chocolate, which is bad for cats and dogs³. I am inclined to say our detectives misread the clues but got lucky⁴.

As previously mentioned, I thought for years that this was a British children’s mystery because the War of the Roses is mentioned. However, it turns out the War of the Roses is featured because the Kalle Blomkvist books are not set in England. The War of the Roses is an attractively exotic conflict in a far-off, little-known land, whereas the Thirty Years War is just this boring local conflict about which kids are forced to learn in school.

Lillköping may be tiny but it is impressively stratified, with its own bad part of town, into which only the foolhardy bored teens, and people who cannot afford nicer dwellings venture. No doubt many of you realize the implications for post-war Sweden’s Gini Coefficient. Feel free to discuss this in comments!

This is the Kalle Blomkvist that stuck in my memory, because it was the first murder mystery I encountered in which it was suggested that stumbling over corpses could be traumatic. Rereading reveals that Eva-Lotta and her chums bounce back faster than I remembered but at least the experiences provoke deep pondering…. For a little while.

While the novel is definitely aimed at younger readers, the evening spent reading it was well-invested. I am happy to have finally tracked down a copy of this old, half-forgotten favourite.

Living Dangerously is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), and here (Astrid Lindgren’s site).

I did not find Living Dangerously at Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Chapters-Indigo, Kobo, or Words Worth Books.

1: I presume that this was done for the usual reason: the publisher thought Anglophone readers might be put off by a foreign name like Kalle Blomkvist.

2: Eva-Lotta is two-for-two at being the target of unwanted attention in the Kalle Blomkvist books, first by a creepy older man and now a killer. Wonder if that is true for the third book as well?

3: Some people think animals have an instinctive sense for what foods are safe for them and which foods are not. I, on the other hand, had a cat who was determined to eat green peppers even though they caused massive, uncontrolled bowel movements. She was also determined to eat chocolate. Unwrap a chocolate bar anywhere in the house and she would appear, screaming for her share. Which she never got.

4: Except that Kalle discovers that knowing how to detect arsenic in food is a lot more fun than having actually found arsenic in food. Theoretical detection is much less scary than practical detection, because theory isn’t going to show up to crush your skull with a wrench.