The Agaton Sax series by Nils-Olof Franzén was one of the major literary touchstones of my childhood.
Yet another Scandinavian author who reeled me in hook, line and quirky sinker, Franzén crafted a protagonist in the short, round Swedish detective I grew to love, who was intelligent, resourceful and just quirky enough to appeal to the left-of-centre reader in me (he was, for instance, a master of underwater ju-jitsu; isn’t everyone?).
He was also surrounded by a cast of loyal allies such as Chief Inspection Lispington, modelled apparently on Inspector Lestrade of the Sherlock Holmes series of books, and beset by baddies with names that delighted me like Octopus Scott and Julius Mosca.
Trips to the public library, which I loved more than life itself when I was younger (and for many years afterwards of course), were wonderful regardless of which books I borrowed, but how much richer were the excurions when I was able to bring an Agaton Sax book home with me.
I think the appeal lay not simply in Franzén’s highly original plots and vividly realised full-of-life characters, but the quirkiness infused throughout such as Lispington’s outrage in Agaton Sax and the Lispington’s Grandfather Clock when he discovered that the criminals laying siege to his home had crammed nine people into a four-seater car “right under the nose of Scotland Yard”.
Hardly what most people would be worrying about at that point but Lispington did, an endearingly skewed perspective on events shared to a greater or lesser extent by all the characters in the books.
They even made the books into a movie and limited TV series apparently , which I can’t really remember seeing, assuming they reached Australia at all.
And by limited episodes, I mean limited.
A four episode cartoon series was made in 1972 based on Agaton Sax and the Max Brothers, along with a 3 episode Sweden-only TV series (Agaton Sax and the League of Silent Exploders, Agaton Sax and the Scotland Yard Mystery and Agaton Sax and the Colossus of Rhodes) that followed on from the 1977 animated film Agaton Sax and the Bykoebing Village Festival (source: Wikipedia).
But while I would loved to see the movies and those TV episodes, the real joy for me lay into accompanying Agaton Sax on his many grand adventures which always ended with good triumphing over evil – while I am much more happier to read stories that exist in the grey zones of life, I loved the fact that Agaton’s world was black and white, and good was good, evil was evil and that was that (although to be fair the criminals were more comical than diabolically evil).
Agaton Sax gave me the greatest gift anyone can give a reader – the chance to escape into other worlds not your own – and that’s why I have spent quite some time, and in some cases, money tracking down the hardcover books so I could relive, just for a moment, the wonderful, moral upstanding, and quirkily delightful world that Nils-Olof Franzén gave me way back when.
just finished my father’s day post on facebook, reminiscing on all the records my father and i listened to, and on the books we both loved. agaton sax was one of them, and your post was perfect for introducing him to my facebook friends. thanks! looks like we have some childhood memories in common 🙂
It does indeed! Most people have never heard of the books but I adore them. Glad you got to share something so wonderful with your father.