Anders Roslund and Börje Hellström are a crime-writing duo from Sweden. Roslund is a journalist by training, while Hellström's background is as a criminal himself and now a campaigner for prison reform in Sweden. The duo have achieved some fame outside of the Scandinavian region, with Tre sekunder (translated to English as Three Seconds) being one of the "it" books that everyone seemed to have read in the crime fiction world after its translation in 2010.
Two Soldiers (Två soldater in Swedish) is the followup to that novel, and takes place in a similarly gritty-realist Stockholm and surrounding areas. Indeed, just as Three Seconds dealt with the imposing Aspsås Prison on the outskirts of the Swedish capital, a lot of the action in Two Soldiers deals with the same institution. Here, though, the main focus is on an escape from the prison, where the earlier novel dealt with an attempt to place an undercover agent inside the prison.
Our two main characters are Leon Jensen and Gabriel Milton, leaders of the Råby Warriors gang, which is in the process of adopting the name "Ghetto Soldiers" - a name which several of the police describe as being rather childishly American, but which there seems to be a sense of authenticity about. Jensen and Milton are 18 years old, and quite clearly belong to the same milieu as the American gangsters they idolise. It's hard to imagine things ending well for them, and it's hardly a spoiler to say that they don't end particularly well for them.
Jensen is incarcerated in Aspsås, leaving Milton to run the gang from the outside. It is implied, though, that Jensen is still pulling the strings, as there are excerpts of a long letter that he writes Milton containing a variety of instructions for how the gang is to operate as well as how Milton's girlfriend Wanda Svensson is to behave. Much of the focus, too, is on Jensen and the manner in which he exerts his influence over much of the rest of the prison population - I was surprised at times when a character would reiterate that he was only a young man, as he didn't seem to be at all.
Eventually, Jensen and some of his associates break out of the prison, and the novel takes a rather abrupt turn away from the gang to focus on Ewert Grens - the "series character" for Roslund and Hellström, if you will - and his police associates chasing the gang and attempting to recapture them.
Grens appears in a similar regard in Three Seconds, where I was left with a very unfavouable impression of him, as he comes very close to ruining the undercover operation at the heart of the novel through his sheer stubbornness. In Two Soldiers, Grens is similarly objectionable, riding roughshod over most of his colleagues and demanding results in unreasonable timeframes. He is also shown to bear grudges, as the events of Three Seconds have resulted in one of the other characters in that novel being promoted through the ranks of the Swedish police and intelligence service - Grens behaves abominably towards the other man. Moreover, Grens has an unfortunate tendency to throw tantrums for very little reason, which hardly makes him the kind of character the reader is going to identify with easily.
Indeed, it's actually very hard to identify with any of the characters here. Aside from Grens, the forces of law and order are championed by José Pereira (Sweden is a highly multicultural society, which explains what may appear to be unusual character names), who has the advantage of being at least a sympathetically-drawn figure. The authors, however, have the unfortunate tendency to re-introduce Pereira every time he appears in a scene - there are near-constant references to his fourteen-year-old twin daughters - and he drops out of the action entirely for much of the third "act" of the novel after trying to read Grens the riot act. If some of the care with which Pereira keeps being re-introduced were given over to some of the other characters' back-stories, perhaps there might have been a higher level of interest.
It's not much easier to identify with the criminals, either. In a well-written thriller, the reader can find themselves on the side of the petty criminals, but Jensen and Milton are simply violent drug-addicted thugs, and the opening 200 pages or so of this 600-page novel are almost a catalogue of their senseless and pornographic violence. Points for realism, certainly, but points at the expense of anything to really focus on.
In many ways, this leads to the broader question of what this novel is really "about". Good Scandi-Crime can hold up a mirror to these seemingly stable societies and show the less palatable underbellies which everyone wishes didn't exist. Think of the social commentary in Larsson's Millennium series, for a very well-known example.
This novel doesn't do that. While the "Ghetto Soldiers" have members who are clearly immigrants or of immigrant descent, the gang is multicultural and there's no particular delineation between the members beyond their names. There's a claim I've seen that Roslund and Hellström focus on the issue of "who the real victim is" where crime is concerned, however all the crimes committed in Two Soldiers are entirely unambiguous as to who the victim is. There's a rather ham-fisted attempt at social commentary as Jensen and Milton's upbringings are examined, but this really is a narrative thread that goes nowhere, so I don't even see any claim of examining the social condition of a depressed community outside Stockholm.
All in all, I'm left with the uncomfortable thought that this was just written for the sensationalist value. Certainly the relish with which some of the violence is described suggests as much.
Lastly, the novel is marred by some genuinely appalling editing choices. The duo have an irritating habit of breaking up long scenes with dashes and then inserting shorter ones for no apparent reason. When one character punches another, for example, the punch actually takes 3/4 of a page to land, as there keep being these little breaks and visions inside the heads of the two people involved.
What I'm sure is meant to be a sense of "urgency" (in a 600-page novel, mind) is conveyed occasionally by having the main text interspersed with other fonts - Jensen's letter, interview transcripts, medical reports, even the readout of a stopwatch for no apparent reason. Occasionally, these turn up in the middle of sentences, which is needlessly jarring. Jensen's letter, too, is displayed in an irritating "handwritten" font, which when coupled with his poor spelling only serves to waste time. On more than one occasion, too, the copyediting for the English version forgets to switch out of the "fancy" typesetting for a bit after the special section is finished. Alternatively, there are switches to events slightly earlier in the plot with no indication at all, not even another of these changes in typesetting.
As a final criticism, all too frequently we switch point-of-view character with a simple reference to "he" or "she", with the authors bothering to tell us that we're now following this or that person a paragraph or two later. This, again, is very jarring, and is one of the strongest indications for me that the novel was written by two individuals, as of course it was.
All told, this is a novel that wants to be many things it isn't. It's overlong and quite disjointed at times, as well as losing sight of what it's trying to achieve. Some of these problems may well come down to the fact that it was written by two people (a co-written novel can be done, as the duo behind Lars Kepler have proven in the Scandi-Crime space), but a lot really just sound like self-indulgent authors being given a blank cheque by editors and publishers.
Give this one a miss. 1 star.
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