Title:

The Department of Sensitive Crimes

Author:

Alexander McCall Smith

Category:

Mystery / Thriller

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

August 27, 2023

lexander McCall Smith is a worldwide phenomena - a prolific author with over 90 novels, and over 40 million books sold, yet I had never read any of his works. So I thought I would give one his books a try. Our library did not have The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency available, nor did it have 44 Scotland Street, but it did have The Department of Sensitive Crimes on the shelf, and since that is the first book in McCall-Smith's Detective Varg series, I checked it out. What a disappointment. I am truly puzzled by McCall-Smith's popularity. Although the main character, Ulf Varg, is a detective in Sweden, there is actually very little mystery solving involved. What is the opposite of a thriller? A snoozer? A nothing-burger? The Department of Sensitive Crimes is devoid of suspense or puzzle. Mostly it is characters pontificating about various subjects, the plot is a rickety skeleton upon which a ton of aimless dialogue is draped.

The hero of the book is Ulf Varg, both his first name and last name mean "wolf". So Ulf's name is really Wolf Wolf. Ulf works as a detective in the Swedish city of Malmö. He is the lead investigator at the Department of Sensitive Crimes, aided by Anna (a married detective whom Ulf is secretly in love with), Erik - who is obsessed with fishing, and officer Blomquist who goes off on long, immaterial tangents frequently. Indeed, it is not just Blomquist who veers off into lengthy irrelevant topics; McCall-Smith will apparently write a few hundred words about anything that happens to pop into his mind, and so the reader will be led off into a couple of pages about metonyms. Or the importance of vitamin D. Or the magazine Nordic Art.

The "mysteries" are so shallow that they are resolved easily. A man is stabbed in the back of his knee by a knife. A boyfriend of a lonely teenage girl is reported missing. Mysterious noises outside a lodge are scaring away guests, reducing revenue. I won't issue any spoilers here, but the resolution in each case takes almost no effort at all by Ulf Varg. Indeed, at one point in the novel, Ulf and the rest of the team are sitting around trying to look busy even though they have no cases to work on. They fear that if the higher-ups knew about their workload that there might be a reduction in staff.

I have learned that McCall Smith's writings have no appeal to me. I have heard of a subgenre of mysteries called "cozies" - if The Department of Sensitive Crimes is an example of a cozy, then I want no part of them. I will skip any further works by this author, no matter how glowing the reviews are. Some reviews even call The Department of Sensitive Crimes funny, but don't fall for it. This is not a humorous book.