The movie was a spur-of-the-moment idea. The prime minister had had a stressful week. Seeing a comedy with his wife and son and his son’s girlfriend was just the tonic that Olof Palme needed. Bodyguards? It would have been cruel to call them back to work on a Friday night. Besides, this was cozy, peaceful Stockholm. This was 1986. Palme often mingled among his fellow Swedes without the formality of a security detail.
It was after 11 when the movie ended. Palme lingered outside the cinema, chatting with friends and constituents before locking elbows with Lisbeth and strolling toward the subway station. The night was chilly. Traffic was light.
Just after the couple stopped to admire something in a store window, a man walked up behind the prime minister and fired a bullet into his back. A second bullet grazed Lisbeth’s shoulder. The man fled down a narrow side street. By the time Olof Palme’s head hit the icy pavement, his blood pooling beneath him, a small crowd gathering around him, the prime minister was, for all intents and purposes, dead. A frantic ambulance ride to a nearby hospital could not erase the harsh reality. For the first time since Gustav III in 1792, a Swedish head of state had been assassinated.
But by whom? And why?
It’s hard to imagine a greater incentive for police and prosecutors than to solve the brazen murder of your country’s most prominent political figure. Yet, for the next 34 years, until they finally gave up in 2020, the Swedish authorities bungled the case at nearly every step.
Maybe I could help. This prolonged puzzle, spanning more than three decades, offered a tempting blank page for a rookie fiction writer. I’m a journalist by trade. I try hard not to make stuff up. The simple act of putting fingers on keys to weave a made-up story with made-up characters was enormously intimidating to me. I doubted that I could do it. But I wanted to try. I desperately needed a real, high-profile event to kick start the fictional story I had in mind.
Like the Palme murder, my story is about shattered innocence. Lost Colony: The Hennepin Island Murders is set in 2016, on a fictional island in the Mississippi River, 4,000 miles from Stockholm. But connecting that broad span of time and space, of miles and years, offered plenty of room for intriguing possibilities, mysterious characters and, most importantly, a hidden link between the original crime and the shocking murders that would turn a placid Minnesota island upside down.
As it turned out, those connections fell quite neatly into place. Swedish immigrants played a big role in the European settlement of Minnesota—and they “colonized” my fictional island, a time-forgotten neighborhood in the heart of Minneapolis. A prominent Swedish-American family emerged as creepy rulers of this island, living absurdly in a castle and building an iconic church where terrible events would happen and hidden secrets would be uncovered. (Where better to shatter innocence than a church?)
As for characters, I felt most at ease writing about the people I know best — newspaper people. And, even as newspapers sink sharply toward oblivion, they lend an inky, noir-ish aura to a story that, except for the reddest of blood, should be imagined in black and white.
Olof Palme had his own “span of connection” to deal with, not so much a span of time or distance but of ideology. Born into nobility, he defied his upbringing by aligning his politics with workers and the underprivileged. Hitchhiking through the U.S. after college, taking odd jobs along the way, he was appalled at the vast socio-economic separation between rich and poor. “America made me a socialist,” he once remarked. At Kenyon College in Ohio, he had written his thesis on the United Auto Workers union. He had also struck up a lifetime friendship with fellow student Paul Newman.
Later, as a politician, Palme helped to construct Sweden’s social welfare state and maintain its Cold War neutrality. He aligned Sweden with various liberation movements across the globe, especially in South Africa. Whether his liberal politics cost him his life can be left only to speculation—and to a new fictional account in which “Nordic noir comes to America.”
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