Jean-Patrick Manchette writes what's been called "Situationist crime fiction," and his main English translator has also translated Debord's Society of the Spectacle. I've only read one of his books so far but he might be exactly what you're looking for. Interview with the translator: https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/donald-nicholson-smith-on-channeling-the-prolific-french-crime-novelist-24085
Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall were Marxists, and their Martin Beck series, written between 1965 and '75, becomes more and more overtly leftist as the series goes on. They're not exactly what you're looking for (police procedurals, not hardboiled), but they're definitely leftist and they're quite good. Murder at the Savoy is a good example. The victim is a wealthy industrialist, and at first the detectives think it's a political murder, but it soon becomes apparent that the deceased had his fingers in all sorts of capitalist pies and pretty much everyone in the country had a motive.
James Lee Burke has weird politics sometimes, but he's very anti-imperialist . . . I haven't read much of him yet but his early Dave Robichaux novels, despite being set in Louisiana, are almost didactic in the way they address the consequences of American intervention in Central America. The Neon Rain is almost an Iran-Contra novel, except it came out before the scandal broke.
Lee Child seems to be a succdem, and despite the reputation of the Jack Reacher novels, it's easy to see anti-capitalist patterns emerging once you read a few of them. Child is too commercially minded to ever really bring anything like that into the foreground, but the villains are often government actors, and Reacher's body count eventually includes not only high-ranking military officials but also a sitting U.S. Senator.
Had no idea the Beck writers were based. The Beck movies are super big here in Sweden but they're pretty lame(imo) standard police procedurals so I've never looked into the books. Maj Sjöwall even got the Lenin award(a swedish literary/cultural award) :sicko-yes:
I told a Swedish acquaintance I was reading the novels and she gave a grunt of disgust and didn't believe me when I said they were leftist. She's only familiar with those adaptations, and, yeah, it sounds like they've been sterilized into a mainstream mismatched-partners cop show. I haven't seen them myself, but from what I've gathered they're less of an ensemble piece and more about the Martin Beck / Gunnvald Larsson pairing, simplified to something like "Beck is the methodical one, Larsson is the boorish one."
Larsson is a character who really grew on me. He starts off just as an asshole who (occasionally) gets results, dammit, but it turns out he's a class traitor with nothing but contempt for his 1%er family. There's also a great scene where he berates a witness for going on vacation to junta-era Greece, which angers him so much that he doesn't even seem to notice how shamelessly she's flirting with him. His loathing for the rich doesn't make him a "good cop," of course, because there are no good cops, and that's why he makes for an especially interesting contrast not with Beck but with Kollberg, who in the later books comes to realize what his conscience and subconscious had been trying to tell him for the whole series - that the whole institution of policing is irredeemable, and he'd be better off quitting than attempting to change it from within.
The whole series is ultimately worthwhile, I'd say, but the early ones are a little plodding and the later ones are a bit too sensational. If I had to pick just one to start with, I'd go with The Laughing Policeman (consensus choice for the best) or Murder at the Savoy (when the political subtext starts to really ramp up and become text, in a way that ought to be satisfying to the average Hexbear user). There's also The Abominable Man, which talks about the fascist influence on Swedish police practices, but that one gets too thriller-y toward the end.
From an interview with Sjöwall:
“We wanted to describe society from our left point of view. Per had written political books, but they’d only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality. We wanted to show where Sweden was heading: towards a capitalistic, cold and inhuman society, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/22/crime-thriller-maj-sjowall-sweden
The introductions to the books mention a famous interview Wahlöö gave about how his Marxism informed the series, but I can't seem to find it online right now.
Oh, and I also recommend Fredric Jameson's book on Raymond Chandler. It's the most accessible Jameson's been, as far as I know, and it really unpacks the class aspects of the classic detective novels. Review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/like-glimpses-window-fredric-jameson-raymond-chandler/
Jean-Patrick Manchette writes what's been called "Situationist crime fiction," and his main English translator has also translated Debord's Society of the Spectacle. I've only read one of his books so far but he might be exactly what you're looking for. Interview with the translator: https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/donald-nicholson-smith-on-channeling-the-prolific-french-crime-novelist-24085
Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall were Marxists, and their Martin Beck series, written between 1965 and '75, becomes more and more overtly leftist as the series goes on. They're not exactly what you're looking for (police procedurals, not hardboiled), but they're definitely leftist and they're quite good. Murder at the Savoy is a good example. The victim is a wealthy industrialist, and at first the detectives think it's a political murder, but it soon becomes apparent that the deceased had his fingers in all sorts of capitalist pies and pretty much everyone in the country had a motive.
James Lee Burke has weird politics sometimes, but he's very anti-imperialist . . . I haven't read much of him yet but his early Dave Robichaux novels, despite being set in Louisiana, are almost didactic in the way they address the consequences of American intervention in Central America. The Neon Rain is almost an Iran-Contra novel, except it came out before the scandal broke.
Lee Child seems to be a succdem, and despite the reputation of the Jack Reacher novels, it's easy to see anti-capitalist patterns emerging once you read a few of them. Child is too commercially minded to ever really bring anything like that into the foreground, but the villains are often government actors, and Reacher's body count eventually includes not only high-ranking military officials but also a sitting U.S. Senator.
Had no idea the Beck writers were based. The Beck movies are super big here in Sweden but they're pretty lame(imo) standard police procedurals so I've never looked into the books. Maj Sjöwall even got the Lenin award(a swedish literary/cultural award) :sicko-yes:
I told a Swedish acquaintance I was reading the novels and she gave a grunt of disgust and didn't believe me when I said they were leftist. She's only familiar with those adaptations, and, yeah, it sounds like they've been sterilized into a mainstream mismatched-partners cop show. I haven't seen them myself, but from what I've gathered they're less of an ensemble piece and more about the Martin Beck / Gunnvald Larsson pairing, simplified to something like "Beck is the methodical one, Larsson is the boorish one."
Larsson is a character who really grew on me. He starts off just as an asshole who (occasionally) gets results, dammit, but it turns out he's a class traitor with nothing but contempt for his 1%er family. There's also a great scene where he berates a witness for going on vacation to junta-era Greece, which angers him so much that he doesn't even seem to notice how shamelessly she's flirting with him. His loathing for the rich doesn't make him a "good cop," of course, because there are no good cops, and that's why he makes for an especially interesting contrast not with Beck but with Kollberg, who in the later books comes to realize what his conscience and subconscious had been trying to tell him for the whole series - that the whole institution of policing is irredeemable, and he'd be better off quitting than attempting to change it from within.
The whole series is ultimately worthwhile, I'd say, but the early ones are a little plodding and the later ones are a bit too sensational. If I had to pick just one to start with, I'd go with The Laughing Policeman (consensus choice for the best) or Murder at the Savoy (when the political subtext starts to really ramp up and become text, in a way that ought to be satisfying to the average Hexbear user). There's also The Abominable Man, which talks about the fascist influence on Swedish police practices, but that one gets too thriller-y toward the end.
From an interview with Sjöwall:
The introductions to the books mention a famous interview Wahlöö gave about how his Marxism informed the series, but I can't seem to find it online right now.
Oh, and I also recommend Fredric Jameson's book on Raymond Chandler. It's the most accessible Jameson's been, as far as I know, and it really unpacks the class aspects of the classic detective novels. Review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/like-glimpses-window-fredric-jameson-raymond-chandler/
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