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The Carl Hamilton novels is a book series by Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou centered on the fictional Swedish spy Carl Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton. The main character is an…
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Investigate this subjectThe Carl Hamilton novels is a book series by Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou centered on the fictional Swedish spy Carl Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton. The main character is an elite intelligence officer working for the Swedish Security agency and Intelligence agency during the end of the Cold War, residing in Stockholm but active internationally.
The Carl Hamilton novels is a book series by Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou centered on the fictional Swedish spy Carl Gustaf Gilbert Hamilton. The main character is an elite intelligence officer working for the Swedish Security agency and Intelligence agency during the end of the Cold War, residing in Stockholm but active internationally.
Carl Hamilton has been called "Sweden's James Bond", but the plot of Guillou's novels also has a heavy focus on politics and journalism. One commentator said the books "... place [Guillou] besides John le Carré and Len Deighton" (famous British spy novelists). The first novel was published in 1986 and the series is a best-seller in Sweden, with more than 10 million sold copies. The character of Carl Hamilton has also appeared in a number of film and television adaptations.
While working as a journalist in the early 1970s Jan Guillou had been convicted of espionage for exposing an illegal secret spy organization inside the Swedish military (see the IB affair). During his prison sentence in 1974, he read the crime novels about Martin Beck, written by his friends and fellow left wing writers Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, and this inspired him to write his own political crime novels. But instead of writing about the police he would write about the world of intelligence and counter-intelligence from the viewpoint of a Swedish spy, making use of his vast research and journalistic experience in this field.
Guillou had published his debut novel "Om kriget kommer" (If the War Comes) in 1971, some years before the IB affair, where the main character is also an officer in the Swedish military intelligence. But he didn't begin writing on the new spy project until the mid-1980s, when a personal encounter with Norwegian security police in Oslo inspired him to the plot of the first novel. Many years after the IB affair, Guillou had also befriended the former chief of the Swedish military intelligence, who came to serve as a sounding board for the plot of the novels and be the inspiration for the character of the retired spy chief DG.
The inspiration for the main character Carl Hamilton was a left wing speaker that Guillou had seen giving a speech during a political manifestation in Stockholm in the late 1960s. This person was named Oxenstierna, an old name from Swedish nobility, and was referred to as 'Comrade Oxenstierna' during the manifestation, which greatly amused Guillou since he found the idea of a Swedish Count who was also a Socialist to be very entertaining. The reason he changed the name to Hamilton, another old name from the nobility, was because there were so few living people from the family of Oxenstierna and Hamilton was more common and easier to use anonymously.
Jan Guillou uses an intended journalistic style for his prose, making the series serve as a contemporary chronicle for Sweden and the end of the Cold War. Each novel in the series has its intended political theme, often depicting the use of un-democratic methods to protect democracy.
Several characters in the books are based on actual people, often slightly disguised. For example, real life Swedish spy Stig Bergling becomes 'Stig Sandström' and real life intelligence chief Ulf Samuelsson becomes 'Samuel Ulfsson'. Many real life politicians feature such as Carl Bildt, Yasser Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev. Jan Guillou himself is the basis of a character named Erik Ponti, which was the alter ego he used in his autobiographical novel Ondskan from 1981 (literal translation: The Evil).
As a teenager from the Swedish upper class in Stockholm, Hamilton was an active member of the intellectual Maoist organisation Clarté and pro-Palestine groups. When entering Sweden's compulsory military service as an attack diver for the Navy, his political intent was to infiltrate the system in order to strengthen it against the threat of Soviet imperialism and at the same time reduce the traditionally right wing tendencies of the armed forces. While being trained by the Navy, at 22 years old, he is recruited by the spy chief DG ("The Old One"), with an offer to become a new kind of secret field operator for military intelligence. Instead of attending the Swedish Naval Academy, Hamilton is sent to the US to be secretly trained by the CIA and the Navy SEALs. The cover story for his additional time in the USA was that Hamilton was studying computers at University of California, San Diego. He spent five years in California, completing both college and his secret military and intelligence training in the Mojave Desert. He returned to Sweden in 1981.
A young version of Hamilton also makes brief appearances in the novels De som dödar drömmar sover aldrig (2018) and Den andra dödssynden (2019) that takes place in the 1970s and 1980s.
At the beginning of the first novel, Coq Rouge (1986), Hamilton has been misplaced to a desk job at the Swedish security service, SÄPO. Because of changed political policies and military union rules, and not least his radical past, his old mentor and recruiter DG has not been able to get him into the military intelligence as was intended. Only after the events in the second novel does he actually get to join the military in
Source: Carl Hamilton novels (CC BY-SA)
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