In 1993, the Literary Review in Britain asked its readers to nominate the worst sex scenes from recently published fiction—those carnal descriptions exceptional in their "absurdity" or "general awfulness"—for consideration in the magazine's newly inaugurated "Bad Sex in Fiction" contest. Eighteen years later, this effort to "rescue the novel" from tumescent unmentionables, as editor Auberon Waugh explained it, has become an annual tradition.

Perhaps it's time for the Literary Review to expand its franchise, adding a gong for the worst political writing in a novel. The aim of the Bad Politics in Fiction award wouldn't be to eliminate politically pointed storytelling—ours would be a poorer culture without Koestler, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell or Greene—but to lighten the heavy-handed didacticism of writers left and right, from Stieg Larsson to Ayn Rand.

Larsson, the Swedish political activist and author of the fabulously successful political potboilers known as the "Millennium series" (beginning with the ubiquitous "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), would surely be a retroactive Bad Politics contender, for his cartoonish tales of sinister capitalists doing battle with righteous journalists and anarchist hackers. Larsson died in 2004, before his fiction was published, leaving three completed manuscripts and, according to his longtime girlfriend, whom he met when both were members of a Vietcong support group, fragments of a fourth.

With more than 50 million Larsson books sold world-wide, publishers scrambled to anoint his literary heir—preferably a political and prolix Scandinavian. Go into any bookstore and you will spot a table work by previously unknown authors, the vowels in their names laden with circles, umlauts and slashes, their dust jackets adorned by images of snow-filled landscapes and thick birch trees, with blurbs promising a story in the tradition of Stieg Larsson.

Larsson's literary heir, though, was already on the job before Stieg's first book was published. Swedish crime writer and former Maoist agitator Henning Mankell, the author of the popular Kurt Wallander detective series, has sold tens of millions of books around the world, and the BBC has transformed his most famous creation into a Kenneth Branagh-helmed series, introducing Wallander to the PBS "Masterpiece" crowd. And like Larsson, Mr. Mankell is a writer of middling talent and radical political beliefs.

Stieg Larsson's best sellers have already been turned into Swedish films and will soon be adapted by Hollywood. Copyright Everett Collection / Everett Collection

Wallander returns to print this month in "The Troubled Man," the 10th and final entry in the series, which finds the detective investigating the disappearance of his son-in-law's parents. The missing father is the impossibly bourgeois former navy officer Håkan von Enke, and his vanishing hints at sinister forces lurking behind the Swedish elite. After Wallander insinuates himself into the case, his prescient hunches force him to confront Sweden's supposedly dark Cold War history; hunt down von Enke's former military comrades; question his own assumptions about East and West; and discover that "the USA could be just as big a threat" as the Soviet Union was.

Indeed, as Wallander explains to his daughter, the Cold War was a morally ambiguous time, a different time. "Not worse, not better, just different." It's a sentiment that many Czechs, Hungarians, East Germans and Estonians would surely dispute.

"The Troubled Man" is a mess of a book, its lazy plot existing only as a framework upon which Mr. Mankell can build an increasingly confused political argument. When Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie's little Belgian detective, solves a case, readers might expect to be treated to a scene where all the potential suspects are gathered and the perpetrator unmasked. Mr. Mankell assembles his players for a tedious political lecture.

To be sure, it isn't just the direction of Mr. Mankell's politics that rankles but the frequent incoherence. If you think that the Soviet Union was a negative force in the world, keep in mind that "behind every Russian was an American," whatever that means. The author lacks the sophistication and delicate plotting of John Le Carré or Graham Greene, both of decidedly left-wing sympathies, and instead bifurcates his story with appealing characters of proper political outlook on one side and reactionary villains on the other.

And if a tub-thumping agitprop mystery doesn't appeal, readers will find little relief in the writing. Mr. Mankell has not been well served by translator Laurie Thompson—unless she has perfectly captured with English clichés similarly hackneyed Swedish prose. As it is, readers of "The Troubled Man" encounter characters who talk "about everything under the sun" and get along "like a house on fire." A missing person is said to have "gone up in the proverbial smoke" (presumably not issuing from the house on fire). Wallander warns of giving out police information "to any Tom, Dick, or Harry."

Left Bank Pictures 2009

But the main trouble with the "The Troubled Man" isn't the B-movie plot or the C-movie dialogue but the general problem with all political-minded detective stories: The guilty are too easy to spot. Mr. Mankell sends up a steady stream of ideological flares indicating who can and cannot be trusted. The formula is as simple as the author's politics: If characters embody values antithetical to those held by Mr. Mankell, it's a safe bet that they are guilty of (or complicit in) the crime under investigation.

For the ideologically unsophisticated reader, the dialogue helpfully highlights objectionable political views. Criticizing Olof Palme, a beloved figure on the left, is strictly off-limits, as when an incredulous Wallander asks another character: "Are you seriously telling me that you attended a dinner party at which the guests said bad things about a Swedish prime minister who had been murdered twenty years earlier?" When you stop laughing, add that person to the list of suspects.



"The Man From Beijing" also turns its attention to Africa, offering a uniquely stupid defense of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, a man "constantly and brutally attacked in the Western media." Indeed, "Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe were under siege . . . . He was depicted just as anti-Semites used to depict the Jews, and this man who had spearheaded the liberation of his country was ruthlessly defamed." Yes, that's right: Robert Mugabe, the tyrant in the toothbrush mustache, as the Anne Frank of sub- Saharan Africa.

One wants to be bipartisan, but it's hard not to conclude that Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have much to answer for. The husband-and-wife team, recently recognized by the Times of London in its list of top-50 greatest crime writers, midwifed the modern Scandinavian political police procedural in the 1960s. Ms. Sjöwall and Mr. Wahlöö's Martin Beck series, which has been republished in the U.S. by Random House, was created to both entertain and offer a Marxist critique of social-democratic Sweden. They of course give old Karl the last word: The final Beck novel ends on the word "Marx."

Thus began the crime writers' "long march through the institutions," as the communists like to say. And batty politics became something of a requirement for Sweden's most famous writers. Jan Myrdal, the son of Nobel Prize- winning sociologists Gunner and Alva Myrdal and a favorite of Mankell's, enthusiastically supported Maoist China, Deng Xiaoping's brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square, the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and Albania's Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Similarly, P.O. Enquist, the author of the international best seller "The Royal Physician's Visit," celebrated the Khmer Rouge's march on the "whorehouse" of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, excoriating those shedding "crocodile tears" over the brutal evacuation that culminated in a genocide that killed nearly two million. Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's best-known thriller writers, is rather infamous for his 1977 book, "Iraq: The New Arabia," a hagiography of the Baath regime, and for declaring, in the week after the 9/11 terror attacks on America, that the U.S. was "the greatest mass murderer of our time."

The Troubled Man

By Henning Mankell
Knopf, 367 pages, $26.95

Cashing in on the Swedish pulp invasion, best-selling American mystery writer James Patterson recently teamed up with Liza Marklund, a feminist newspaper columnist and best-selling mystery author in Sweden, to produce "Postcard Killers"—a best seller itself, naturally. Ms. Marklund's latest solo offering, "Red Wolf," follows the Swedish formula, with 1960s radicals, discussions of the Black Panther "freedom fighters" and digressions on how "the mills of capitalism ground down culture" and have made everyone but Ms. Marklund rather miserable.

According to their fans, these members of the Swedish intelligentsia are telling a deeper truth about Swedish society that, to the naked eye, looks placid and egalitarian but conceals something uglier—xenophobia, misogyny (the Swedish title of Lars son's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is "Men Who Hate Women") and subterranean fascists—that honeycombs the structures of power. The region wrestles with very real threats from religious extremists—just last year, a failed suicide bomber in Stockholm and an assassination attempt against a "blasphemous" cartoonist in Copenhagen. But somehow that theme doesn't turn up in crime fiction from the school of Mr. Mankell, Ms. Marklund or the popular Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø.


Sweden bequeathed to the world brilliant but often overlooked writers such as Hjalmar Söderberg, Vilhelm Moberg, August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf. Nowadays the country's literary reputation is being murdered, but there's no mystery about the identity of the perpetrators.

—Mr. Moynihan is senior editor of Reason magazine.