Murder on the Thirty-First Floor

With sirens screaming, a police team race through the city streets towards The Skyscraper. On the eighteenth floor Inspector Jensen is shown into the presence of The Company’s director, "The Publisher". The Company has received an anonymous bomb threat. The bomb is set to detonate at 1400 hours which is in half an hour's time. Jensen instructs The Publisher to evacuate the building. The Publisher however insists that production cannot be halted and evacuation is impossible. Eventually he agrees - with the exception of evacuating the Special Department on the thirty-first floor; the lift doesn't go to that floor and there would no be time to evacuate it. With The Skyscraper cleared, 1400 hours comes and goes without the threatened show more explosion. Back at police headquarters, Jensen is reminded that this is an unprecedented crime and whilst there has been no bomb, the threat must still be investigated - with utmost discretion and with all interviews handled by Jensen himself. Above all Jensen must not interfere with the course of The Company's work. He has seven days to find the writer of the anonymous letter...

Per Wahloo and his partner Mai Sjowall's jointly written "Martin Beck" series of the 1960s are thought of as Scandinavian crime classics. MURDER ON THE 31ST FLOOR, along with THE STEEL SPRING, are Per Wahloo solo works. Both books have a sci-fi slant, set in an undesignated future society, and both feature Inspector Jensen as investigator.

Originally published in translation in the UK in 1966, this novel's fictional future might send a shudder of recognition through the reader of the 2010s in the light of recent media/conglomerate scandals and a growing awareness of corporate power. Inspector Jensen struggles through his seven day deadline to find the would-be bomber. We follow his trail into the corrupt and closed-circuit world of The Company and the society it feeds. And this is a society shaped by The Accord, an agreement between all political and trade union organisations and The Company, a huge corporate which controls all newspaper and magazine publishing and their subsidiary industries including distribution, paper manufacture, even furniture production. The Company's iconography is everywhere - promoting conformity and “dignity”. Culture is fed to individuals through the Company's magazines and newspapers, alongside the processed meals available from public vending machines (the food industry is also an arm of the Company). Society's crime rate has fallen dramatically but so has the birth rate. Alcoholism and suicide rates have also risen. There are grimly prophetic touches such as the suburban mass-housing which are neatly dubbed “self-clearance areas” by the Ministry of Social Affairs. These are arranged around a bus station, parade of shops and piazza - as the bus route is axed, the shops close and are boarded up and the piazza becomes a graveyard of junked cars, occupants gradually leave until the development's now decrepit flats are left with about twenty percent occupancy.

This is an Orwellian tale in the scale of its imagination. But don't make the mistake of identifying Jensen as a liberal sceptic. Jensen's responses to rule-breaking and informality are a sharp reprimand for the perpetrator, he has a job to do and he will do it. A jewel of objective writing, this is a cool, beautifully-paced mystery containing a chilling vision of a corporate-owned dystopia. show less

mi sbilancio in numero di stellette forse sull'onda dell'entusiasmo da fine lettura. Ma il libro è davvero notevole.
E' un giallo "futurista" scritto nel 1964. Non tutte le previsioni sono azzeccate ma è abbastanza impressionante la corrispondenza tra le situazioni descritte dall'autore e molti aspetti della nostra realtà contemporanea.
Un orwell minore ma non troppo.
Il poliziotto imperscrutabile e ulceroso che registra per noi un collasso sociale senza speranza mi ricorda un vecchio racconto a fumetti di Altan ambientato proprio in Svezia. Qualcuno sa dirmi il titolo?

PS. il "cellulare", termine usato più volte nel corso del racconto, non è il telefonino, ma il furgone della polizia. All'inizio ero caduta nell'inganno ma la data del show more libro mi lasciava perplessa.
Cito questa sciocchezza perchè il racconto parla anche di questo: di come si perdano le idee personali anche grazie alla perdita di padronanza del linguaggio con cui esprimerle (esempio della locomotiva) show less

An odd Alphaville-inspired sci-fi dystopian tale masquerading as a detective novel. The crime is a bomb-threat sent to a newspaper conglomerate, the murder--as we find out--is one of ideas and freedom of speech. Wahloo's writing style is plain and objective, with hints of Kobo Abe-like surrealism. Not much 'detecting' goes down in the very short novel, just a process of elimination, with each suspect telling more and more of the story. However, it is a bit prescient for 1966, looking towards the media conglomerates like NewsCorp. Worth a look--I got thru it in a few sittings.

Strangely compelling. A stark writing style that nevertheless kept me enthralled and engaged right down to the last page. Reminded me a little of the likes of Graham Greene or Franz Kafka - the grey and wretched selling and society, and the police officer plagued by bad digestion and ill patience. Recommended.

Here is a police novel set in a near-future world where the police/welfare state is fully established.

A powerful combine, called The Concern, has bought up all the magazines and newspapers in this unnamed northern country. The people are fed a constant diet of bland, meaningless nonsense. Anything that could cause people to be concerned or upset is removed. Whether it is a children's comic book or a women's magazine, there are lots of bright colors everywhere. Sometimes, the same pictures of children or puppies are used in different publications. Everything is edited and printed in the same thirty-floor skyscraper.

The building receives an anonymous, mailed bomb threat, and those in charge don't know what to do. After worrying that the show more disruption will be too costly, the decision is made to stage a fire drill, and the building is evacuated. When no explosion happens, Inspector Jensen of the Sixteenth Division is given the task of finding out who sent the bomb threat. His boss, the Chief of Police, intentionally does not want to know what's going on. Jensen has one week in which to crack the case, and he cannot let anyone in the skyscraper know what he is doing. That might cause them to become nervous or fearful, something which is practically a criminal offense. His investigation leads to the nearly-mythical thirty-first floor of the building, which few have seen, home to the Special Department.

I can only give this a rating of Pretty Good. It has some really good utopian ideas in it, but I guess Swedish police novels (where this was first published) are a lot different than American police novels. It reads like a cross between 1984 and an episode of the police show Dragnet; Inspector Jensen is a person of very few words. show less

This novel comes before THE STEEL SPRING which I reviewed recently. Again it is a dystopian novel. In the unnamed country crime rates are falling and so are birth rates, but the government has recently made it illegal to become inebriated not only in public but also at home. Every night the jails are filled with drunks, and the government makes a small fortune by fining the inebriates.

Publishing of all sorts has become a monopoly of the group that owns The Skyscraper, the 31 storey building that dominates the capital city's skyline. As a result the people are fed a bland diet of feel good material whatever their choice of reading. The Skyscraper employs over 4,000 people and these all have to be evacuated when the bomb threat arrives by show more post. Stopping the presses even for a short time is extremely expensive, and the managing director of the publishing group contacts the chief of police for advice and immediate action. Neither is pleased when Chief Inspector Jensen advises that they must evacuate the building as he can't guarantee safety of those inside. However there is no bomb.

Jensen is given seven days to find out who sent the threat. His life is complicated by the fact that the pain that eventually sends him out of the country for a transplant in THE STEEL SPRING is ever present, but he is a dogged investigator and eventually finds out the truth.

This is not your every day crime fiction novel and those who have no taste for political polemic or satire might like to steer clear of it. show less

A very good novel. Also a fable or parable .... With a moral. The name of the book is a Double Entendre ... In that the word murder relates to people being murdered and ideas or the freedom to speak with criticism of currently commonly held points of view being murdered. A thinking person’s novel.....of what might happen if the media had only one voice and no room for sound disagreement or reasoned debate. Sounds like it could be a current novel... Not one written in Sweden in 1966. In it's own way, its Fahrenheit 451, but with a mystery genre. Not bad. Paul Floyd, Minneapolis, MN USA