RogerBW's Blog

2018 comedy detective audio, four half-hour episodes. Knut Angstrom is a brooding Swedish detective in the Nyarlslund Peninsula.

Which is the main joke; I certainly recognised tropes from the first Wallander novel, as well as from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But what I think makes this work is that it's a parody not so much of those works in their native context but of the English experience of them: it's "adapted from the best-selling Angstrom trilogy by Martin English, writing as Jörgen Swedenssonson".

And of course there's "hot-haired, blue-headed young reporter Mina Oblong", who's determined to get to the bottom of the conspiracy… even if she works for an online portal that mostly does cat videos. (And there's so much brooding that her father bröd himself to death.)

Sometimes it falls back on "har har, Angstrom is incompetent" but there are also some very good sequences, such as when Angstrom realises that he himself must be the killer. So he arrests himself. And then calls his boss to get himself let out. And then arrests himself for false arrest…

At the time of writing, this is still available on iPlayer.