Abstract: Mysteriet Balderson. En deckargåta

Bo Gräslund, Litteratur och samhälle 36 (2002):1

During the years 1968-1990, the pen-name Bo Balderson published eleven detective novels. The quality of the detective mysteries can be said to be average, but the easy and elegant style, the farcical action, the witty metafors and the wicked satire upon Swedish politics and cultural life resulted in great selling successes.

Over the years, more than eighty different persons were pointed out as the author, but the identity of Balderson has never been revealed nor convincingly clarified. One of the main ideas has been that the author was a conservative person with some relation to Swedish politics or political administration. However, no thorough comparative analysis has ever been carried out wich sets out to relate Balderson's works to these of any other author.

In this study it is maintained that Bo Balderson was identical with the novelist Sven Delblanc (1931-1992), one of the most prominent Swedish novelists of the 20th century. The reasoning is based on stylistic comparisons between Balderson's and Delblanc's works. The arguments can roughly be assigned to general circumstances and similarities, unusual and odd expressions and linguistic features together with common personal and cultural frames of reference.

Keywords: Bo Balderson, detective novel, pseudonym, Sven Delblanc