Carl Hamilton novels

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).

[6][7] 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.

[9][10] 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.

[11][12] 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.

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).

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.

[16] 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.

After his cover has been blown in the fourth novel, Fiendens fiende, he is often used for political PR purposes and becomes internationally famous, even named Time Person of the Year.

[17] When he first starts making a name for himself in the secret world of spies, during the events of the first novel, he is given the international codename Coq Rouge, which has been used as a title of the main series.

After that, Hamilton makes yet another appearance in the novel Men inte om det gäller din dotter (2008), where he is again forced to take up arms.

He owns a Beretta pistol with a grip in nacre, inscribed with the family weapon of house Hamilton, which he got as a parting gift from his American instructors in California.

Throughout the series, he becomes increasingly tormented and troubled by his work experience, and sometimes visualizes his inner demons as "blocks of black ice surfacing in a raging river", and routinely suppresses them.

The conservative Swedish police put their main focus on Palestinians and left wing radicals, but when the investigation takes Hamilton to Beirut and Israel he finds a different truth.

In the shadow of this great threat to the nation, Hamilton is tormented by guilt from a brutal event that his intense military training has caused in his private life.

A Citizen Raised Above Every Suspicion With his private life in ashes, Hamilton is appointed head of the Swedish security service and begins an effort to reshape the organization.

After escaping from Sweden, convicted of murder, Hamilton is now living a secret life as a retired rich man in La Jolla, California, with the name Charles Hamlon under the protection of the FBI.

This novella is written as a draft for an eleventh novel, but the plot was never intended to be solved and it ends with an afterword where Jan Guillou accounts for why the series would not continue.

Guillou states that En medborgare höjd över varje misstanke was the last book and the conclusion of the series, and in order to make sure that Hamilton would never return he was now "banished" from Sweden through a life sentence and eternal exile in California.

But Not If it Concerns Your Daughter After leading the Palestinians to a short-lived victory against Israel, Hamilton is exiled to Russia since the Americans under the George W. Bush regime has declared him an enemy and a terrorist.

Acquitted, he begins a new retired life in the company of new and old friends, but when a small child is kidnapped by Saudi Arabian terrorists he must once again take up arms and lead another military operation.