An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed - Helene Tursten

In An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed, Helene Tursten provides the backstory of the 89-year-old killer she first introduced to the world in her five-story compilation, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good. As her victims would attest to if only they could, Maud was most definitely up to no good in that first collection, and in this second book featuring her, anyone crossing Maud is still likely to pay the ultimate price for doing so. This time around Maud, who has decided it’s time to enjoy the money she’s accumulated over her long lifetime, is embarking on a luxury vacation to South Africa. This is the structure Tursten uses to tie the book’s six stories together so that they read more like a short novel than as a collection of short stories.

If Maud has any kind of motto to live by, it’s probably this thought that she has at the end of “Lancing a Boil,” the third story in the book:

“Certain Problems have only one solution. That’s just the way it is.”

In the book’s first story,”An Elderly Lady Begins to Remember Her Past,” Maud has attracted the interest of two police detectives who do not buy her explanation about the dead antique dealer she supposedly discovered in her apartment (in a story from the previous collection). The two cops keep returning for follow-up interviews, and Maud is beginning to fear that she may have finally gone too far in solving her own problems. She decides the best thing to do is to make it impossible for them to question her for a while, and decides that this is the perfect time for a return visit to South Africa. 

It takes a while to get from Sweden to South Africa, though, and Maud, who is determined to get every penny’s worth of what she has payed for her first class ticket, is enjoying more — and better — booze than most of her fellow passengers. She can barely hold her eyes open anymore, and when she falls asleep, it is only to dream vividly about some of the memories she has more or less suppressed over her long lifetime of solving “Certain Problems” for herself. 

In the next four stories, we learn: how Maud dealt with two boys who were bullying her older sister; how, as a fresh graduate, she turned a part-time teaching job into the full-time job she held for the rest of her life; the truth about how she was finally freed from having to be her sister’s caretaker; and how she rescued her only friend from certain financial ruin. But Tursten saves the best for last, a story titled “An Elderly Lady Takes a Trip to Africa,” which comprises just over half the book’s total pages. 

This final story is a blending of two Maud’s, one we’ve seen before, and one we never expected to see at all. Maud has discovered her soft side now that she’s approaching the end of her life, and although she’s not above using her usual solution to solving Certain Problems, she finds herself wanting to keep a family she’s met from becoming homeless in just a few weeks. But because there’s no one to kill to make this new problem go away, Maud comes up with a creative solution that will change their lives — and hers — forever. 

“In Maud’s case, it had taken an unusually long time, but now everything felt right. She’d even gained a little family in the process. Not bad for an elderly lady, she thought. She decided to treat herself to a little dose of Power of Life with her coffee.”

Bottom Line: So are Maud’s killing days over for good now? It remains to be seen whether or not Helene Tursten has more in mind for Maud, but it’s already been one heck of a ride with one of the most memorable serial killers the fiction world has ever seen. It’s been fun. 

Helene Tursten