CRIME: DECLAN HUGHESreviews Easy MoneyBy Jens Lapidus. Translated from the Swedish by Astri von Arbin Ahlander Macmillan, 480pp. £12.99
JORGE SALINAS Barrio is a Chilean immigrant, a small-time drug dealer taking the fall for some Serbian gangsters. It’s not as if they’re going to reward him for keeping his mouth shut; more that the alternative is too frightening to contemplate. But after 15 months in Stockholm’s Österåker close-security prison, navigating uneasily between the gangs, the Hells Angels and the Bandidos, the Original Gangsters and the Yugos, Jorge has had enough. He hatches an escape plan. He wants his revenge.
Johan Westlund – JW – is a small-town Sven with big city dreams, a business student trying desperately to keep up with a fast set of fashionable rich kids who live a life of designer labels, nightclubs, cocaine and babes JW had thought only existed in the pages of glossy magazines. The only trouble is, to finance his big nights out in Stureplan, the happening area of the city, JW must live like a rat, shoplifting and starving until Saturday comes.
It’s a struggle, and there’s always the risk of exposure, especially since he drives a cab part-time: what if the boyz found him out? So when his boss, Abdulkarim, suggests that dealing a little cocaine, first to his friends, and then to all their friends, would be an easier way for JW to make a lot more money, it feels like a sure thing.
Mrado Slovovic and Radovan Kranjic fought alongside each in the Serb Volunteer Guard, Arkan’s notorious Tigers. Now Radovan controls the Serbian mafia in Stockholm and Mrado is his enforcer, ruthless and loyal, if a little resentful. When Jorge breaks out of jail and threatens to expose Radovan’s drug business, Mrado is quick to track the Chilean down and warn him off. But following a dispute over the coat-check concession in a southside club that ends in a very public bloodbath, Radovan begins the gradual process of easing Mrado down through the ranks of the organisation. Mrado, however, has plans of his own.
Jorge and JW hook up and, under Abdulkarim’s wing, make a killing in the Stockholm cocaine trade. Soon JW is advancing various money-laundering schemes so he can buy a BMW and live the GQ dream. In the meantime, Mrado fights on two fronts: against his boss and against the Swedish police, whose Operation Nova is targeting gang activities across the city. When another of Radovan’s lieutenants joins forces with Mrado, the stage is set for a bloody climax.
There is much to admire about Easy Money, Jens Lapidus’s 2006 thriller, which was a massive bestseller in Sweden and has been made into an equally successful movie (the English language rights have been bought by the makers of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). The story is stretched across a broad canvas, from gangland low to socialite high, and pays close attention to manners and class, the traditional palette of the social novel.
The plot is deftly made and turned, and the characters’ actions are believable; rarely do we feel anyone is being obliged to act for the sake of a twist or a thrill. The gangsters, whether obsessing over the minutiae of body building or fulminating against the child custody arrangements imposed by vengeful ex-wives, feel real: violent, egotistical, cruel and self-pitying. And the research, whether accurate or enhanced, is genuinely interesting, from the detailed arrangements involved in setting up shelf companies in the Isle of Man in order to wash dirty money, to the drug compound near Birmingham, where dogs are trained as drug mules and packets of cocaine are grafted into the hearts of cabbages for export.
All this is very well, but for this reader, not enough. The problems are threefold. The book is at least a third too long, a besetting sin in contemporary crime fiction but maddening nonetheless, especially when much of the excess is spent reminding you of things you’ve just read 50 pages ago; the effect is repeatedly to undermine narrative tension and drive. The characters are almost uniformly unpleasant, and they are all viewed at a cool, alienating distance that makes empathy difficult, sympathy impossible. Worst of all, it ain’t what he says, it’s the way that he says it. The malign influence of James Ellroy (who gives the book a blurb) combines with a Eurotrash Esperanto to give us telegraphic prose of tooth-aching banality:
“JW: on his way to the top. Jet Set Carl’s offer – a golden opportunity. Abdulkarim: overjoyed. Babbled on about their expansion plans. ‘If you just find that Jorge dude,’ he reminded JW, ‘we’ll own this city’.”
And here’s that Jorge dude, planning his escape: “Checked out the connecting highway. Possible alternative routes. Learned the signs for marsh, hill, forest. Saw where the ground was okay. Visualised. Memorised. Measured. Marked. Mused.”
And this, redolent of Little Plum from the Beano: "They jumped into a taxi. Patrik with blood on his jacket and T-shirt. Bad."
Pronouns, verbs, articles: where? Story: excellent. Style: bad. I bet the movie is terrific.
Declan Hughes is a novelist and playwright. His latest novel, City of Lost Girls, is published by John Murray
