Two Suspicious Persons

Abstract

In Norway, one of the best examples for examining cultural narratives of murder is what is known as the Lensmannsmordersaken, i.e., ‘the case of the county police officers murder’. After summarising the key events of this sensational 1926 case, this article will consider its presentation in the Norwegian press, the impact of contemporary debates around the death penalty, the influence of scientific understandings of criminality, and the case's subsequent reimagining in literature and film. This article shows how inter-war criminalistic fantasies reflected a broad variety of fears, notably those related to ethnic otherness and anxieties related to Norway's then recent achievement of full political independence. A literary version of the case from the 1930s—one of Norway's first ‘true-crime’ novels—is also considered, as is a post-war feature film based on the murder that was banned (for privacy reasons) in 1952 and not released again until 2007.

KEYWORDS:

• crime
• Norway
• press
• stereotypes
• homicide
• policing

Acknowledgements

I thank Kristin Hobson, Per Ole Johansen, Nicole Rafter, John Carter Wood and Paul Knepper, for valuable help and comments on this article. In addition, I thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful advice. Some paragraphs of this article were published in Norwegian in the law journal Lov&Data.³⁵ Besides being longer, this article also has undergone extensive revisions in the light of further research.

Notes

1. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 15.

2. Lensmann is in Norway a leader of a police district known as lensmannsdistrikt. A lensmann is a public servant.

3. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen, 16.

4. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen, 20–21.

5. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen, 37–38, 50, 384–85.

6. For example, Müller, Auf der Suche; Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen; Herzog, Crime Stories; Elder, Murder Scenes; Brunelle, Murder in the Metro.

7. Bing, ‘To mistenkelige personer’.

8. Bech-Karlsen, “Norwegian Nonfiction Novel.”

9. Oppdagelsespolitiet is the part of the police force today known as Kripos, the National Criminal Investigation Service (Norway). This department has undergone a number of name changes since it was founded in 1866; however, the unit has always investigated what have been seen as the most serious crimes.

10. Throughout the entire twentieth century only 26 police officers were killed in Norway, many of them in traffic accidents and not necessarily in the course of criminal investigations.

11. Johansen, “Forbudet mot det jødiske slakteritualet.”

12. Hvinden, Romanifolket.

13. Kohn, Dope Girls; Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News; Shore, “Criminality and Englishness.”

14. Bastiansen and Dahl, Norsk mediehistorie.

15. Rowbotham, Stevenson, and Pegg, Crime News; Williams, Murder.

16. Bing, “To mistenkelige personer.”

17. The last public execution in Norway was in 1876.

18. De Quincey, Murder.

19. Christensen, Det Hendte i går, 219.

20. Christensen, Det Hendte i går, 190–93.

21. Christensen, Det Hendte i går, 219–20.

22. Larsen, To mistenkelige personer.

23. Tancred Ibsen (1893–1978), the grandson of the playwrights Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, was a pioneering film-maker of Norwegian cinema.

24. Finess, Gunnar Larsens roman.

25. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen.

26. Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 2.

27. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal; Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal.

28. Siemens, Metropole und Verbrechen, 26.

29. Herzog, Crime Stories.

30. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.

31. Ystehede, “La Scandinavia.”

32. Vyleta, Crime, Jews and News, 15, 18, 218.

33. The strained relationship between the police and the press was also a topic covered in the newspapers during the Lensmannsmordersaken. On 15 September 1926, Dagbladet reported that the Director of Prosecutions had arranged a meeting with the press with the aim of improving that relationship.

34. Sveen, “Lensmannsmordet,” 5.

35. Ystehede, Lov&Data.