The Armpit Artillery Case

From the Swedish press last week came clear evidence that Swedes are too easily impressed by the hard-boiled school of American detective fiction. Reporting on Tourist Margaret Truman's visit to Stockholm, Swedish newspapermen gave the impression that the President's daughter was being escorted around Europe by Sam Spade and Mike Hammer.

Margaret's Secret Service guards, charged Stockholm's Expressen, have manhandled Swedish photographers and newsmen. Worse yet, one of them had "placed himself with a revolver at the [Stockholm] city hall gateway and refused to let Swedish citizens enter." The Yankee coppers, declared Swedish journals, were "gorillas," just "three tough guys with their left armpits bulging with artillery." The gravity of this last charge can be appreciated only if it is remembered that Swedes (like Britons) consider one of the keystones of their culture the fact that their police do not carry guns.

Under close examination, the reporting of the Stockholm papers proved to bear just about as much relation to reality as a Mickey Spillane novel. The Swedish Foreign Office at midweek denied that any Swedes had been manhandled. The city hall incident fell apart when Officer Hans Melin, a Swedish policeman assigned to Margaret's party during her visit, testified that the U.S. Secret Service men had not brandished a pistol and had not forbidden anyone to enter. Said Melin: "The American police officer was not armed on the occasion. I myself was . . ."

To add to the week's embarrassment, the usually well-behaved Swedish police had one of their worst publicity breaks in years. Discharged from the police force for assault & battery, one Tore Hedin successively murdered his parents, his fiancee and the matron of an old folk's home. Then he set fire to the home, burning five of its inhabitants to death. Just before he drowned himself in a lake, Hedin wrote out a confession in which he admitted being guilty of another murder--one which he had been assigned to solve during his tour on the force.

At week's end, with the Hedin case to chew on, Stockholm's newspapers had lost some of their interest in American "gorillas" and the Armpit Artillery Case.

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