Hard Headed Woman, Mean Mean Man

by

Andrew Hislop with Tomas Norström

With Hard Headed Woman, Mean Mean Man the Swedish detective goes Country. A Swedish/English psychological thriller, it is set partly in London and Stockholm but also in the Swedish province of Dalarna

FRANK, fifties, a divorced Swedish detective, originally from Dalarna, is made to resign from the police force after he shot dead a man who had just murdered a prostitute – a girlfriend of Frank’s. Broke from gambling, a heavy drinker, Frank returns to his family’s old disused house in Dalarna to renovate it and to renew himself.

He meets up again with some Rockabilly musicians he played with as a teenager and then meets again SANNA, a striking-looking singer, forties, who is a sort of Swedish Wanda Jackson, singing Rockabilly, country and gospel, and now, like Wanda herself, a committed Christian in later life.

Years before, Frank had been in love with Sanna, but it was unrequited apart from a drunken one-night stand and Sanna had then had a brief tempestuous marriage to a wild Rockabilly singer, LENNART, with whom she had a daughter, MARITA, now in her early twenties.

Sanna had become estranged from Marita after she had joined a female punk band and she tells Frank that she had been phoned by another band member, KATRIN, who said that Marita has left the band and has disappeared after moving to London...the British police can find no trace of her...Sanna asks Frank to find Marita...

Frank tracks down Katrin who reveals that Marita after leaving the band had been working as an illegal escort girl before going to London with another escort girl, an American called AMY, to work in a club/hotel there owned by a Swede called MAGNUS...

Frank goes to London and, pretending to be a client, meets Amy in the club, a haunt for Swedish men combining sex tourism with football tourism...

Eventually Amy reveals that Marita had left the club after a bad experience and Amy had got her job as an au pair with the family of LAWRENCE, Amy’s previously estranged English father whom she has recently been reconciled with...only for Marita, to Amy’s irritation, to run off with Lawrence...

The search for Marita leads Frank back to Sweden and, after the murder of Magnus, he is accompanied by Amy on his quest which leads them back to Dalarna and to Sanna and to Lennart before it is resolved...