Three Seconds

An Action Thriller That Challenges Perceptions of Right and Wrong

Three Seconds by Roslund & Hellström received worldwide acclaim. At home, it won the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award for Swedish Crime Novel of the Year. It went on to win awards in both Japan and Britain for the best foreign crime novel of the year. Hollywood bought the film rights and turned it into a movie, The Informer.

A gripping account of informants and the Swedish legal system.

Synopsis

Piet Hoffman plays a dangerous game. He runs all the drug smuggling into Sweden for an arm of the Polish Mafia, organising teams of mules to bring hundreds of kilos of amphetamine into Stockholm. Hoffman is also a police informer who has spent the past ten years infiltrating the Polish organisation, winning their confidence and trading their secrets. If that isn’t enough to contend with, he is a husband and father of two small boys.

When the Polish Mafia decided to take their drug dealing into the “closed market”, the Swedish Prison System, they needed a man on the inside they could trust. Hoffman alerts his handler, and they arrange his arrest and send him down, so he can lead the operation. Before starting such a legally dubious venture, the politicians and police officers at the very top of the Criminal Justice System assured his safety. Yet, when events begin to sour, the politicians and bureaucrats scramble to distance themselves from their informant. Hoffman’s life expectancy starts to look very short.

Review

Roslund & Hellström’s Three Seconds is brutal, with a no holds barred depiction of drug smuggling and life inside a Swedish Prison. The authors build tension from the start, flipping through Hoffman’s personas as criminal, informer, and parent. Then they ramp up the pressure when the mafia realise Hoffman is a snitch. The story becomes a headlong rush to the finale.

One of the authors, Börge Hellström, was an ex-convict. The action is propped up with many unpleasant details of prison life that hint at inside knowledge. The central plot — from which the title is derived — is Hoffman’s intricate “life insurance” plan. This plan also reeks of the deep technical knowledge that keeps thriller readers enthralled. Though far too clever for its own good, the authors keep disbelief at bay.

With all that action and technical detail, something has to give. Despite Hoffman’s cunning, he and his dour adversary — Detective Inspector Grens — are a little stodgy and stereotypical.

Whilst the characters may be bland, Roslund and Hellström redeem themselves with a knotty ethical dilemma. When is it acceptable to use convicted criminals as police informants? They reinforce this question at the novel’s end by separating fact from fiction. In a journalistic post-script, they highlight the use of criminal informants and the effect of drugs inside Sweeden’s jails.

What could have been a well-crafted airport read is lifted well above the realm of pulp fiction by its complex moral message.

Excerpt

It was a beautiful flat on the fourth floor of Västmannagatan 79. Three spacious rooms in an old building, high ceilinged, polished wooden floors, and full of light, with windows that faced over Vanadisvägen as well.

Pete Hoffman was in the kitchen. He open the fridge and took out yet another carton of milk.

He looked at the man crouching on the floor with his face over a red plastic bowl. Some little shit from Warsaw: petty thief, junkie, spots, bad teeth, clothes he’d been wearing for too long. He kicked him in the side with the hard toe of his shoe and the evil-smelling prick toppled over and finally threw up. White milk and small bits of brown rubber on his trousers and the shiny kitchen floor, some kind of marble.

He had to drink more. Napij się kurwa. And he had to throw up more.

Pete Hoffman kicked him again, but not so hard this time. The brown rubber round each capsule was to protect his stomach from the ten grams of amphetamine and he didn’t want to risk even a single gram ending up somewhere it shouldn’t. The fetid man at his feet was one of fifteen prepped mules who in the course of the night and morning had carried in two thousand grams each from Świnoujście on board M/S Wawel, then by train from Ystad, without knowing about the fourteen others who had also entered the country and were now being emptied to various places in Stockholm.

For a long time he had tried to talk calmly — he preferred it — but now he screamed pij do cholery as he kicked the little shit, he had to damn well drink more from the bloody milk carton and he was going to fucking pij do cholery throw up enough capsules for the buyer to check and quality-assure the product.

Three Seconds by Roslund & Hellström