The Thirty-First Floor

The Thirty-First Floor, Peter Wahloo, Alfred A. Knopf, 1967

Here is a police novel set in a near-future world where the police/welfare state is fully established.

A powerful combine, called The Concern, has bought up all the magazines and newspapers in this unnamed northern country. The people are fed a constant diet of bland, meaningless nonsense. Anything that could cause people to be concerned or upset is removed. Whether it is a children's comic book or a women's magazine, there are lots of bright colors everywhere. Sometimes, the same pictures of children or puppies are used in different publications. Everything is edited and printed in the same thirty-floor skyscraper.

The building receives an anonymous, mailed bomb threat, and those in charge don't know what to do. After worrying that the disruption will be too costly, the decision is made to stage a fire drill, and the building is evacuated. When no explosion happens, Inspector Jensen of the Sixteenth Division is given the task of finding out who sent the bomb threat. His boss, the Chief of Police, intentionally does not want to know what's going on. Jensen has one week in which to crack the case, and he cannot let anyone in the skyscraper know what he is doing. That might cause them to become nervous or fearful, something which is practically a criminal offense. His investigation leads to the nearly-mythical thirty-first floor of the building, which few have seen, home to the Special Department.

I can only give this a rating of Pretty Good. It has some really good utopian ideas in it, but I guess Swedish police novels (where this was first published) are a lot different than American police novels. It reads like a cross between "1984" and an episode of the police show "Dragnet"; Inspector Jensen is a person of very few words.