Reviewed by: Blues for folkhemmet: Næranalyse af Arne Dahls Europa Blues by Peter Kirkegaard Benjamin Mier-Cruz Peter Kirkegaard. Blues for folkhemmet: Næranalyse af Arne Dahls Europa Blues. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 2013. Pp. vii + 238. Peter Kirkegaard’s analysis of Arne Dahl’s (Jan Arnald’s) novel Europa Blues (Månpocket, 2001) is a valuable addition to the growing inventory of theoretical studies in Nordic crime fiction. Divided into three parts, the study effectively navigates Dahl’s rich novel in a way that offers the reader a comprehensive and critical overview of the genre as well as a meticulous, close analysis of the novel’s narrative structure that puts the theories of Tzvetan Todorov, Peter Brooks, and Roland Barthes to the test. The book’s middle section, however, is an ambitious, if not tedious, chapter-by-chapter analysis of the entire thirty-nine-chapter novel that is less accessible than its inspiration, Barthes’s poststructuralist analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine (S/Z, Basil Blackwell, 1970). Fortunately, Kirkegaard’s work, as a whole, offers sufficient variations and critiques of long-standing and recent studies of crime fiction alike. Blues for folkhemmet is particularly beneficial in its exploration of Sweden’s historically nuanced take on the genre, especially with regard to the nation’s unique ideology of folkhemmet (the people’s home). The following is a brief review of the book’s three main sections. Part 1, “Teori, krimi-plotologi” (Theory and Crime Fiction Plotting), is a keen overview of structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of story, plotting, fabula, and sjuzhet. More specifically, this chapter devotes subsections to introductions and semi-critical analyses of Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (in The Poetics of Prose, Cornell University Press, 1977), Dennis Porter’s The Pursuit of Crime (Yale University Press, 1981), and Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (Vintage Books, 1984). With clarity, Kirkegaard guides his reader along Todorov’s and Brooks’s theoretical discussions of plotting and suspense in a way that aptly prepares the reader for the chapter-by-chapter analysis to come. Indeed, Kirkegaard is critical in his assessment of these texts with regard to Dahl’s writing, yet much of his original criticism is postponed until the second and third parts of the book. Still, Kirkegaard disagrees early on with Todorov’s historical understanding of the genre, and he convincingly demonstrates how Todorov’s typology is especially limited in today’s socio-politically saturated crime [End Page 312] fiction. In Part 1, Kirkegaard admirably maintains a conscious balance of theoretical reflection and pragmatic review of the genre, and he ends the chapter with a study of the historical and literary distinctions of mystery, detective, and crime fiction. This final section is a brief yet handy primer of the genre; however, it is less potent than his preceding discussions of Barthes and company. Kirkegaard introduces Part 2, “Analyse af Europa Blues” (Analysis of Europa Blues), by warning us that it’s “time to face the beast” (p. 47). Clearly aware of the arduous endeavor at hand, Kirkegaard plunges into his meticulous chapter-by-chapter (though some chapters are fortunately grouped) analysis that weaves in and out of Todorov’s, Brooks’s, and Barthes’s respective approaches to the narrative. Under the heading “Plotologi, skridt-for-skridt” (Plotology, Step-by-Step), he begins with a concise yet detailed analysis of the first eighteen chapters of Europa Blues. Kirkegaard deconstructs Dahl’s diverse police force, the A-Group, as he unpacks the story’s plot, red herrings, and the novel’s manipulation of narrative time, tense, intertextuality, focalization, and construction of suspense. Indeed, it is evident by the first eighteen analyses that Kirkegaard is well versed in S/Z; but there is also an unshakable sense of being spoon-fed the text, a risk that any such pedantic analysis might induce, no matter how gifted the writer. The mere length of Dahl’s novel makes this method of close reading ostensibly contradictory to the suspenseful nature of the genre, even as it simultaneously illuminates it. Happily, chapters 18–29 are grouped and critiqued according to characters (Paul Helm, Kerstin Holm, Arto Söderstedt, Shtayf, etc.). The latter...