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Showing posts with label Scandinavian crime fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scandinavian crime fiction. Show all posts
Anthony McIntyre đź”–A transnational dimension is not a new feature to the life of Harry Hole who after the losing a finger to the The Snowman has given the finger to the Oslo police and decamped to Hong Kong. 


Among other far off places investigations have drawn him to are Australia and Thailand. Although great crime drama, the feeling lingers that Scandinoir is more authentic when anchored in Scandinavia. Most of The Leopard was played on home turf.

Not that life was much less stressful for Hole on a compact and congested stretch of land close to mainland China. The grizzled investigator has taken to gambling and owes the Triads money as a result of Harry's luck. Moreover, knowing his drink addiction could not be overcome, his way of dealing with it is to find a new addiction – opium.

In the midst of his self induced haze he is visited by an Oslo cop, Kaja Solness, Her becoming his lover takes a while but for now her task is to entice him back to Norway to help trap a serial killer whose method of murder is a spiked ball placed in the victim’s mouth. Any attempt to free oneself and the spikes erupt. It is a fiendish device causing a painful and terrifying death. The type of thing most people would expect never to come across in the course of their lives unless they find themselves in a Stalinist or fascist torture chamber.

Harry, despite his legendary expertise, is not enticed by the lure of catching Norwegian serial killers: let the Oslo cops do their own work. Police authority doesn't much appreciate him anyway. They will claim his successes while sneeringly regarding him as one of life's losers. But the news that his father is seriously ill is too great a temptation to resist. With a heavy heart he departs Hong Kong for the wintry streets of Norway.

The first two victims are young women, each with dozens of puncture wounds in their mouth. The pressure really mounts when a member of the Norwegian parliament too is murdered. The media really sniff blood and it is not that which the victims excruciatingly drowned in. The hunt for police inefficiency is on.

All the victims have spent a night in a mountain retreat. Apart from that one common thread there is little else to go on. But as ever, the mind of Harry Hole is as penetrating as any spike from a serial killer's ball. 

The killer is not the only nemesis Harry has to contend with. Mikael Bellman of Kripos is a constant irritant. An ambitious and covetous pursuer of others' turf, he wants his own agency to take charge of the country’s homicide investigations which leads to friction with the normal police. The battle between him and Hole is persistent but predictable. There really is only going to be one winner from these clashes. Lesson is: big shovel or not, don't dig a Hole - the kickback is worse than that from a horse. And that is without Harry having had much luck on the horses in Hong Kong. 

The transnational dimension sees the narrative shift to the Congo. The murder weapon is of African origin. It is in the African state that the simmering tension eventually reaches boiling point.

This is the eighth in the Harry Hole series. Some readers might have tired by this stage, feeling perhaps that things have gone a bit stale. And there have been complaints that this outing has been a tad long, with one reviewer suggesting it needs clipped by around a third of its content. Yet for the aficionado, this is sacrilege for which a blasphemy law suddenly sounds not such a bad idea. At no point in the book did the feeling arise that it was a drag. Nesbo tackles the challenge of length with pace and suspense.

Next stop - The Phantom.  

Jo Nesbø, 2012, The Leopard. Vintage. ISBN-13: ‎978-0307743183

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The Leopard

Anthony McIntyre đź”– With Scandinoir, the reader is spoilt for choice. 


There is just so much high quality material out there, with the Department Q series authored by Jussi Adler Olsen holding its own in the front line, invariably scaling the heights of the Danish best seller list, with many being made into movies.

Redemption is the third in the series which has Carl Mørck in the lead investigator role. What demotivation might have insidiously intruded on his investigative skillset is more than compensated for by the combined if not coordinated efforts of Rose Knudsen and Hafez el-Assad, neither of whom is a detective but without whose input cold cases would never lose their chill.

Two young brothers, Tryggve and Poul Holtare, are tied up in a boathouse but they have no idea exactly where. The location was knowledge their kidnapper was careful not to share with them. All they can hear are some frequent noises from outside their confinement which is of no help whatsoever . . . to them. One comes up with an idea. He cuts himself and uses his blood as ink. And so the time honoured message in a bottle requesting help is launched. As a form of SOS it moves at a glacial pace.

Many years elapse between 1996 when the bottle left port and the moment when a report comes through from Scotland where the vessel eventually completed its journey, its contents faded and in parts indecipherable. The bottle had lain in a Scottish police station for years, the sergeant who was its recipient had not even bothered to open it. After his death it ended up broken and only then when the contents spilled out was the matter passed to Copenhagen.

Danish authorities now aware, after much deliberation as to the authenticity of the message, toss the case down to  the basement with the cold case team. With no children reported missing in 1996, the enthusiasm for finding what might never have been lost was not exactly brimming. Such was his scepticism, but for the gun attack in which he survived and saw a colleague die with another left paraplegic, Carl too might have been 'another promising career that had ended up in the traffic department.'

A cold case but one which is linked through the perp to a live hot one. More children are kidnapped. Solving these abductions are made no easier by the less than cooperative attitude of the parents of the child abductees. Their immersion in religious cults throws up a secrecy problem, even to the extent of denying that their children are missing: 'the members of the church will shield each other against the world by whatever means. Also with lies.' Not unlike communist parties in the secular world.

A husband too goes missing periodically but for different reasons and who invariably returns to his deeply unhappy and suspicious wife. While not a hate theologian he emulates one in that his word allows no dissent. He becomes the nemesis of Carl throughout the investigation. The pursuit leads to some edge of the seat stuff, the tension holding right to the end fuelled by the deadlines of the chase.

Even were the reader not to be drawn in by the plot, the characters and their complicated relationships, either between those in Department Q, the department itself and the police hierarchy or an acrimonious clash between the lead investigator and his ex wife, Vigga, make it hard for readers to avert their gaze from the inviting wink,  perfectly cast to hook the perusing eye. Unlike some other character development from elsewhere in Scandinoir, Jussi Adler Olsen does not allow his creations to go stale. Following the characters alone makes the effort worthwhile, as is evident from Rose and her twin sister Yrsa who provides cover when Rose appears to take time out. Unfortunately, when a character has great pulling power but is restricted by death to a standalone outing, the reader feels they have been deprived of something.

Did reaching the denouement need to take so long? Probably not, but in a world 'of new religious movements and sects, all absolutely certain that they alone possessed the definitive solutions to the tribulations of man' this was never going to be an easy religious nut to crack.

Jussi Adler Olsem 2013, Redemption. Penguin. ISBN-13: 978-0141399997


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Redemption

Anthony McIntyre đź”– The bridge between the novel and novella or other forms of short story telling is not always crossed adroitly by those more attuned to long form writing. 


Perhaps it is akin to a marathon runner not being equipped to meet the challenges of the 100 metre sprint. Stephen King managed to straddle both quite successfully. But it is rare that the heights of a work like Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx are ever scaled by those whose writing style is more comfortable with something other than the long haul.

Having been a fan of Jo Nesbo’s work on those occasions when he has wandered off the beaten track of Harry Hole and into standalone novels, I opted to explore his odyssey through the world of the short story. Foregoing the written word, I opted for the audio book, a  format I only picked up with the onset of Covid. Always a great way to absorb the contents of a book while walking.

Years ago while Cage 11 of Long Kesh, while I still had some faith in priest craft, I noticed one of the Redemptorists, who had been in for Novena week, pacing up and down in the cage between events while reading a bible. I later tried it, not with the bible, but found it never worked for me. Apart from me feeling pretentious, the text appeared far too unstable, my eyes unable to synch with the jerky movement of the page, the undulations being anything but smooth.  Occasionally I have seen people, usually women for some reason, read a book as they stroll. Apart from the hazards of not being alert to what is going on around them I was always puzzled as to how they could synchronise. In any event, it is an art that is pretty useless in the rain.

Earphones in, and whether walking the dog or skipping dog poo on Dublin streets – harder to do when reading – via audio I slip into the type of serenity that only books offer.

Jealousy Man, despite its darkness and brooding sense of violence, is so brilliantly narrated that the equanimity effect kicks in rapidly. So good in fact, that when delving into the narrative last thing in the evening while in bed, it is rare to reach the end of the five minute time limit the listener can manually set. On occasion, having forgotten to set the timer, I have awoken to find the book many stations down the line from where I had anticipated disembarking 

Jealousy Man is a twelve story walk through the mirrored halls of murder, intrigue, alternative universes, vengeance, suicide, betrayal, fratricide, filicide, passion and morbid twists, all accompanied by an endless procession of deeply flawed characters.

The first out of the traps, where two people seemingly meet by chance on a plane only to discover otherwise, sets the stage for those that follow, each delivering a performance which can often seem like an audition for a role as the Grim Reaper.  Spreading its wings further afield than his Norwegian homeland, Nesbo never glides close enough to the sun for the wax to melt. Conrad’s heart of darkness that endlessly serves up Scandinoir stays firmly in place. 

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Jealousy Man

Anthony McIntyre đź”– A Swedish housewife vanishes in 1993. 


She seemed to live a predictable existence with her focus on her husband and family. It is out of character for her to go on a solo run and there was no history of her playing away from the matrimonial home.

Within days her body is retrieved and even more shocking to those who knew and loved her, she was the victim of murder.  Lacking the wayward forensic feature of a ricochet or crossfire, a shot to the forehead bore the hallmarks of a clinical execution that suggested gangland. To police minds, whoever took the shot had taken it carefully. But why? Her error seems to have been nothing more than to have lost her way on a journey through woodland.

The investigation develops with Kurt Wallander assuming the lead. While the victim had no interest in extra marital activity someone outside the marriage had an interest in her. A stalker figured and lent itself to the cops concluding they have their man. He too has gone missing which makes the cops even more suspicious and certain that their suspect has a story to tell. Turns out he was only on holiday and his alibi is watertight. Suddenly, their man is not their man after all and so the hunt for the killer widens. 

What at first seems an unrelated incident acquires a different complexion linking Sweden's yawning Ystad to South Africa's Pretoria. Political intrigue causes the narrative to open up like a flower to reveal at its heart a racist hatred and desire to kill. In some of the Scandinavian crime fiction covered in these reviews, the storyline does not always restrict itself to the host country. When it crosses borders it tends to separate the noir from scandi. This dilution runs against the grain of the Scandinoir purist, particularly as Wallander does not actually travel to South Africa as part of the investigation. 

Yet Mankell knows his territory well, having spent much time in Africa where he worked as a theatre director. Particularly endearing is the ongoing dialogue between the dead and the living, providing as it does considerable insight into native African cultural traditions. The irreligious mind might resile from such constructs but they are so real to those who have culturally imbibed them alongside milk from their mothers' breasts, that while their presence can be regarded as myth, the power of myth should never be understated. 

Wallander's journey takes him abroad but not geographically. He crisscrosses the terrain of his own mind which is not the terra firma he might have hoped for. He ventures off the radar during the manhunt. The flaws in a truly mercurial investigator are breaking through. In most Western police forces the path he took would have led to the exit door.

The character development is top notch: Menkell has the reader feeling the malevolence of Wallander's foreign adversaries, who are not all from the same nation. The Ystad detective finds himself pitched against a hybrid force formed from dying but competing ideologies: their death rattle no less dangerous than their lives' work in the dark arts.

Wallander shares with Harry Hole and Harry Bosch that obsessive devotion to catching killers. Such characters hardly exist in real life if for no other reason than their phenomenal success rates. How many murders can there be for these guys to solve?

Of the three Wallander novels read so far Faceless Killers remains the best. White Lioness comes with a great plot, political intrigues, merciless operatives who worship at the altar of dictatorship, while drilling down into the methodical intricacies of police procedure when working a murder case. Its drawback is that it stretched on beyond what was necessary to make it brilliant. 

Henning Mankell, 2003, The White Lioness. Published @ Vintage. ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099464693


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White Lioness

Anthony McIntyre  đź”– As a devotee of novels featuring the booze addled detective, Harry Hole, I am never dismayed when his creator, Jo Nesbo, creates a hole of a different sort which he then adroitly plugs with characters other than Harry.
 

Nesbo’s standalone novels are invariably worth picking up. For the vintage reader, they should never be reason for disappointment.

The Kingdom is longer than previous departures from Harry Hole, which is perhaps its one weak spot although by no means an Achilles Heel. Just that it takes a bit too long to warm up. For those who persist - and it is recommended that they should - this is quite the story.

The Opgard family is well known in the locality of Os, a fictional small town to the West of Oslo. The idea for the setting seems to have come from the author having parents who hailed from a background that resembled the type of existence described in Os. Nesbo as a youngster often visited the villages and breathed in the culture.

Roy Opgard narrates the story. He has remained at home, situated in a Norwegian mountainy region, working in a roadside service station, while his younger brother Carl had opted to go to the US to study. The boy's Cadillac besotted father had lived in the States for some years while a child. This adds a US twang to the tale although not as pronounced as that in Headhunters. Many residents from Norwegian villages have over the decades emigrated to the States, so the awe with which townsfolk and villagers have viewed the seemingly low hanging fruit across the Atlantic if they can only make it to the Big Apple seeps into the narrative.

Roy had always felt it his duty to look out for his younger sibling when they had lived in the same home, sleeping in a shared bunk bed set. Distance does not always make the heart grow fonder. So when Carl returns from Canada with his wife Shannon, much to the surprise, even the mild irritation, of Roy, he has ideas for building a state of the art hotel on family land. The brothers had inherited the land when their parents died in a car that had plunged over the cliff beside the family home. An accident only for the fact that a number of other cars had taken a similar downward spiral. 

Carl's wife is very much a woman of set ideas. She is the architect and is not open to alternative design plans. Her presence introduces a tension, but not between her and Roy. Where tension exists between them it is of the chemical type. 

Before long, the dark side emerges. There is history here. A sheriff had drowned many years earlier - Sigmund Olsen. His car had veered off the road. His son Kurt, now wearing his late father's badge, is a thorn in the side of Roy, sniffing around places the elder Opgard would rather see off limits. Attired like a US rancher he is as persistent as Shannon is obstinate, particularly when it comes to the death of his father. He feels Roy has created a wall of impenetrability behind which lurks some truth that Kurt intends to extract.

A journalist took to asking questions due to misgivings he harboured about Carl's motives. But there is a relationship factor at play - best described as complicated. The plans for the hotel inevitably create tensions with some locals but is torched before construction is complete. There is a lot of burning in this novel, the result of smouldering passions, easily sparked.

While Roy comes over as an all round likeable guy, the type to pull your car out of a ditch in the small hours during a blizzard, there lurks a suspicion that he might just send your car careering over the side of something deeper than a ditch. While Carl as a child unintentionally shot the family dog, it was Roy who cut its throat to end its misery. To boot, he has form for using his fists. While he no longer goes for the gratuitous violence of his youth, he does uses it, or the threat of it, for a very specific purpose and is ruthlessly calculating while never alienating the reader. In his standalone works Nesbo has a tendency absent from the Hole series of soliciting sympathy for the perpetrators of bad acts.

A tale like this situated in a community thrown together by proximity without being close knit, invariably brings out the skeletons. Familiarity does not just breed contempt, it peels away the protective film that people wrap around the more clandestine aspects of their lives. There is a pulsating tension which when ignited can bring out all the old but never quite forgotten hillbilly hatreds. Murder and child rape have a home in Os.

When Roy becomes as protective of Carl’s wife as he was of Carl, the reader is invited to anticipate the possibility of yet another car joining the junk yard at the bottom of the cliff.

This is The Kingdom of love and murder, themes that weave their way through Nesbo's writing. When the end comes it is quintessential tragedy, where those who win do so only to the extent that they minimise their losses. By the time the curtain closes, amongst those left standing, there are no winners. Everybody loses.

Jo Nesbo, 2020, The Kingdom. Publisher: ‎Harvill Secker. ISBN-13: ‎978-1787300798

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The Kingdom

Anthony McIntyre - Snow invariably adds that crisp atmospheric touch to the quintessential Scandi Noir novel. 


The genre succeeds quite well sans the white stuff, but when added, it beckons the reader to many wintry graves. Murder in the snow hits the high note that murder in the sun strains to reach.

None have done it better than Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow. Written almost thirty years ago, long before Stieg Larsson set the literary world alight with works like The Girl Who Played With Fire, Høeg was burrowing into the untapped mine of rich minerals.

I discovered it by pure chance. A journalist was leaving the house one day and we were chatting about my love of Scandi Noir. As he opened the door to his car he recommended Ms Smilla. I noted it, and got around to reading it a few years later. Stunning. It is as good as anything else in the genre, perhaps even better. But that is a hard call as there is so much good stuff, leaving the aficionado spoiled for choice.

Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen, while a child growing up in Greenland, came to understand snow. In later life she worked as a scientist and her specialty was snow. There was little about it that she did not understand: its composition, its power of resistance and destruction. No shift was undetectable to her. She knew snow like a native American did the prairie.

Each step through the novel is accompanied by the imagined sound and feeling of snow crunched beneath the feet. It is wonderfully and winterly constructed.

Smilla is self-contained and not socially outgoing but she reaches out to a child, Isaiah Christiansen, who lives in her Copenhagen apartment lot. He hails from a Greenland family, so there is common cause. His mother has alcohol addiction problems, so the boy does not get the care and love he needs. Smilla helps to make up the deficit. The friendship she develops with the boy is tender and at one point invites questions as to the fluidity of boundaries. 

Unexpectedly, Isaiah plunges to his death from a roof. For the Copenhagen police it is an open and shut case: a tragic accident – the boy was simply playing, lost his footing and stumbled over the edge. Smilla suspects something else. She sees beyond the flat bland whiteness of the snow, a substance she is so adroit at comprehending, and feels the boy’s shoe tracks suggest he was chased or was running desperately to avoid something. Besides, he had a fear of heights and would not willingly have ventured to the edge of a high building. Something drove him there. 

Shooed away by the police, Smilla, with the help of a neighbour with whom she has a fling, sets out on her own investigation. She finds out that the boy's father had died on a furtive project in Greenland. The compass points north. As the drama unfolds it relocates and ultimately the final battle to establish how Isaiah died is fought out on a ship named The Kronos amid the icebergs and snow floes of the North Atlantic.

A great thriller, this novel by Peter Høeg sits on a bedrock of incessant cultural friction between the affluence of Denmark and the poverty of Greenland. It is anthropological and sociological commentary that in ways gently touches on the concept of a clash of civilisations, with the Danes feeling that the Greenlanders are less than civilised while failing to accept their own responsibility for the historically induced disparity that exists. 

Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow has been compared to Gorky Park which I read almost 40 years ago and was less than impressed by despite all the hype and its long stay at the top of the best sellers list. Smilla is a much better read.

Peter Høeg, 1992, Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow. Harper Collins. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0002713337

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Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow

Anthony McIntyre ✒ In Midnight Sun Jo Nesbo follows through from Blood On Snow. So, the inimitable Harry Hole is absent. 



The principal character Jon Hansen is determined to escape Oslo, and so makes his way by bus to Finnmark at the northernmost tip of Norway – where “everything is South of here”. It is a remote plateau upon which the sun refuses to set and under which the Sami culture pulsates.

Jon ends up in the local community of KĂĄsund, where he immediately becomes Ulf, the name he pulled out of his head on meeting his first acquaintance when disembarking from the bus, Mattias. The village is much under the influence of a fundamentalist religious cult. It preaches the usual biblical hellfire and brimstone. An atheist, the remoteness and quaintness of the village appeals to Jon. It holds out the offer of the most propitious cover available, despite the religious bunkum, maybe even because of it: who after all might think of looking for an atheist among religious nutters?

The cover is what he is in need of most. A hitman who failed to hit, he is no longer the predator but the prey, being hunted by his former boss from Blood On Snow, the Fisherman. Although determined to escape he is up against a person as determined to kill him, a vicious gang boss who “always finds what he is looking for.” He should have stayed in the debt collecting and fixer line of criminal work in the nation's capital. He had messed up a contract killing and now those who hired his services are about to terminate the contract with extreme prejudice.

As a hit man, he can expect little in the way of sympathy but is fortunate to find it in the person of Knut, a ten year old who introduces him to his mother, Lea. Both are members of the community's religious cult. Lea allows him to stay in her husband's cabin and provides him with a rifle and ammunition. Lea’s circumstances are not as healthy as she might wish. Daughter of the local preacher, she should be the village vicar - just that the Church in Finnmark would never allow a lowly woman to attain such a lofty pulpit. Ulf falls for her but the husband is a local hood who has violently abused his wife.

Jon had also ridiculed Christianity: "thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, no doubt." He concluded much as Augustine of Hippo had more than 1600 years before him that some Christians were so stupid that they took the bible literally to the point of being a laughing stock. Edwin Poots is not a peculiar North of Ireland phenomenon: the type can be found everywhere. And as Christians do not like being mocked, this could be a source of potential tension.

Yet the Christian community is the only refuge available when the inevitable moment arrives in the form of human devils.

Like other stand alone novels by Nesbo, this is a work that did not meet with the same approval ratings as Harry Hole narratives. The plot is not as complicated but is probably easier to follow for that. At the end of a Hole book there is the temptation to revisit the plot just to put everything in its place. Not with the free standing works. Once finished there is no reflection, just satisfaction. Currently reading a much longer The Kingdom, it is to state the obvious to say that there is refreshing simplicity to following a well written uncomplicated plot.

While I love the Harry Hole series, in the wise words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “every hero becomes a bore at last." So before letting it get to that stage I opt for the switch every so often.

A tale of redemption, revenge and remoteness, this is a book of such brevity that the bus journey made by Jon from Oslo to Finnmark would be more than enough time to read it in one go.


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Midnight Sun

Anthony McIntyre has been catching up on an old friend from the Oslo Police Department.


Another chilling thriller from the Jo Nesbo stable, not merely for the title alone. The Snowman is the best yet in the Harry Hole series, where the flawed yet mercurial detective applies the brilliance of his mind to melting the most formidable of icebergs.

As ever with Harry “the thought of a drink came from nowhere”. Alcohol is his nemesis: not exactly a bĂŞte noire, he is too enamoured to it for that description to work. The juice is the only adversary ever to have won every battle with him. “Christ how he needed a drink. Just one to take the edge off the pain, off this day, off this night.” While Harry might always be willing to give people “another chance to wind up on his blacklist”, the booze doesn’t mind how he feels about it as he will remain a perennial customer, regardless.

Harry and Rakel are no longer an item. She has moved on and into the life of another, Mathias, to whom she will will be married later in the year. His expertise becomes crucial as the narrative rolls from murder to murder and suspect to suspect.

By this point if the reader is surprised at what Harry brings to his line of duty they alone carry the can, seeming susceptible to goldfish syndrome – perpetually condemned to forget that they swallowed the same thing just six seconds earlier. This is the seventh in the series. Harry Hole should by now be an open book. 

The story opens up in 1980. Sara Kvinesland goes to visit her lover for a final tryst as he is about to relocate. On her return her young son reveals something to her about a snowman and predicts their own demise.

24 years later Birte Becker fails to return home. The ground lies covered with a blanket of snow from the first fall of the year. A child wakens to discover his mother is not at home, her scarf flutters around the neck of a snowman in the family garden, not built by someone in the household.

By that point the investigation switches back to a Snowman related death eight years earlier. Then the investigating cop, Detective Rafto, mysteriously vanished during the course of the investigation in circumstances that were never explained and never look like being explained as Rafto is still missing. The one tenuous thread is that both women had the same doctor. Not much to go on.

As the investigation progresses Hole is stretched like never before. He is primus inter pares in the Oslo Police Department in terms of solving murders but this time the killer is more challenging than before. Clever and adaptable he will change the modus operandi in an instant to throw his pursuers off the scent. Harry's mind is forced to dig deep in order to bring the curtain down on what is now a spate of killings which had been going on for at least a decade. It would always start out in the same manner: women would inexplicably go missing just as the first snow arrived on the streets of Oslo. As the investigation progresses it becomes evident that the women had all been involved in secret relationships outside of marriage, the result of which children are born with a hereditary disease.

In his pursuit of the Snowman he comes across a self portrait of Frida Kahlo; “a woman who suffered, Harry thought.” There are quite a few portraits of Kahlo in this house, my wife being a huge admirer. Hole doesn't come across as a campaigning feminist, just someone who deals with so much violence against women in the course of his duty, invariably inflicted by men.

Assisted by a no nonsense female detective, Katrine Bratt, who immediately gels with Harry because she has little difficulty seeing what he does: a serial killer - who is also primus inter pares - is stalking the streets. Harry is determined not to despair or make excuses. As ever, cynical about police bureaucracy he caustically remarks, “I’ve thought about how we’ll catch this guy, not how I’m going to justify not catching him.”

For some reason I worked out who the perp was early into the story. Saying "worked out" isn’t exactly true. It was more a guess.

There is a great philosophical turn of phrase which makes the book memorable for it alone. More like Camus than Nesbo, one of the characters asks "what is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die?"

With that tantalising invitation to ruminate, pick up the trail in this brilliantly worked novel and see where on the wintry streets of Oslo, the trail leads you. If you like your crime fiction to send a chill down your spine as you peer into the mind of a serial killer, this is it.  

Jo Nesbo, 2017. The Snowman. Vintage. ISBN-13 : 978-1784704759

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Snowman

Anthony McIntyre shares his view on a procedural crime novel from Scandinoir.


The Swedish capital, 1975, two years after the city had given its name to Stockholm Syndrome. Kidnappers have returned, this time targeting the West German embassy. While a work of fiction, the story is built upon a real-life embassy takeover in 1975 by the Holger Meins Commando, an active service unit within the left wing German Red Army Faction. Meins had died on hunger strike in late 1974, leading to left wing protest across Europe.

This was an era when the Italian Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction, more commonly known as Baadar-Meinhoff, were waging urban guerrilla war against their respective states.

For quite some time there had been warnings coming through the intelligence system that “German terrorists were planning some form of action on Swedish soil.” Yet the Swedes failed to step up their game. The press would not let them forget it.

The central demand of the kidnappers was for the release of Red Army Faction prisoners held in Germany. Less than three years after the Black September operation against Israeli Olympians in Munich, the West German government, scorched repeatedly for a softly softly approach, was now taking a hard line. It was a zero sum game which resulted in a shootout, leaving two hostages dead. Hard to think of a less fertile ground for nurturing the Stockholm Syndrome.

Guerrillas injured and captured, the investigation never really made it out of the traps as the kidnappers were sent back to Germany for the authorities there to deal with in Stammheim Prison.

Fourteen years later a civil servant, Kjell Eriksson, is killed and the investigation into his death seems to be sucked down by the quagmire of red tape and corruption. The investigating detectives, Anna Holt and Bo Jarnebring, are instructed to look at the victim’s gay life as the real motive, which seems an evidential red herring. Their superior DI Backstrom as well as being a bent copper is also contemptuous of gays.

This is a familiar theme whereby the Swedish police do not come across as knights in shining armour, being inefficient as well as thick - “the three younger idiots from the uniformed police.” There is room to wonder if at some level Leif Perrson, a former professor in criminology at the Swedish National Police Board, is settling scores. Equally conceivably, he is telling it as it is.

Move on a decade, and Lars Johansson from Between Summer's Longing And Winter's End steps into the breach. Now with the Swedish Security Police, SAPO, the name Helena Stein comes across his desk. She has to be given a security clearance before she can assume a senior ministerial role in the government. Stein is found to be linked to the murdered Kjell Eriksson. Further investigation suggests a link to the embassy incident as well. Like a skimming stone, the leaps are made and the stone is not allowed to sink out of sight. With SAPO involved, the investigation becomes unencumbered by police incompetence or corruption. The ingredients are all there to cook up a good political thriller. 

Leif GW Persson writes what are called procedural crime novels. They can be slow but never release their grip on the reader's interest. Another Time, Another Life is a tale that spans a quarter of a century which, moving methodically, is not one of those fast moving thrillers of the Jo Nesbo kind. Unlike Nesbo, Perrson complements police procedure with political intrigue.

Much of Swedish crime fiction is social commentary and too often is moulded from a right wing perspective that has a jaundiced view of the welfare state: 

Suppose one were to take the opportunity to get the trip to the liquor store over with before lunch, to avoid getting varicose veins by standing around half the afternoon along with all the welfare recipients who don’t have anything better to do.

The unemployed are the flotsam whereas the true anchors of society are revealed in the form of an old police chief who is described as:

the one who had ended his life by his own hand and with the help of his service revolver to save society unnecessary nursing expenses and himself an undignified life.

Immigration is a bugbear also:

Do you remember those days … when you could spell the crook’s name? And understand what he said?

In a review of the first in the trilogy I expressed the hope that the same players would be retained into the sequels, given the room for further character development. The biggest disappointment in this book is that one of the most intriguing personalities plays no part. This seemed to be a waste of a central character whose exit was like something that flowed mundanely from a bureaucrat's pen. Perhaps it is this character knowledge that prevents me from agreeing with other readers that this is a stand alone work that can be read without reference to the first in the series.

Perrson's work has been compared to that of James Elroy’s where the US author used a factual event to write a fictional account. The comparison is limited. Elroy is a much more pacey and colourful novelist, writing in a different environ. 

Leif GW Persson, 2012, Another Time, Another Life. Vintage, ASIN: B004Y89SCA.

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Another Time, Another Life

Anthony McIntyre has discovered a new Scandinoir series.

 
This was the first I had read by Inger Wolf, author of the Daniel Trokic detective series. Given that there is only so many cases Harry Hole can be involved in it seems prudent to have on call a new detective to turn to before picking up the next in the outstanding Jo Nesbo series. Not that Trokic is the literary equivalent of a continuity presenter, something to help smooth the breaks. Just that currently in Scandinavian crime fiction the character of Harry Hole is primus inter pares. Inger Wolf even had a dog at home named after the aloof but alcoholic Danish detective.

The combination of the name Inger Wolf with a title like Dark September, is so possessed of its own mystique that it can become tempting to judge a book by its cover. An invite to peel open the first page and look into the enchanted forest.

This particular Danish forest is the site of a gruesome discovery - the disrobed corpse of a young woman. Readers familiar with The Killing TV crime drama will immediately visualise the Danish forest where a terrified Nanna Birk Larsen met her end as she failed in her desperate attempt to outrun her killer.

The autumnal season has arrived and Anna Kiehl has been running most evenings up until that fateful night when she ran into the arms of her own killer. A dog walker had chanced across the body of the single mum and university student, a bunch of hemlock placed upon her naked chest: “the white poisonous plant lay fanned out over the woman's exposed breast.”

The investigation revolves around two main police characters: Daniel Trokic and Lisa Kornelius. Each invites curiosity as much as the other and it will be interesting to see how character development progresses throughout the series. Trokic, from the Aarhus Homicide Bureau, Denmark's second largest city, has Croat blood in him. If we are to infer from that his brooding nature, the supposition goes AWOL. Scandinavia produces enough of its own broodiness without seeking an import license to being it in from abroad.

A highly regarded neurosurgeon in Denmark ends up dead and the search for the connection is on. When it becomes apparent that the woman from the forest had been earlier questioned about his disappearance, lights start flashing. Through him travels a vein of social critique: society's attitude to depression and the medications used to treat it. Scandinavian crime writers often use their narrative to address a wider societal issue.

There wasn’t the usual Scandinoir feel to this work. It could as easily have been London, Glasgow, Dublin or Munich. Aarhus, while not the Danish capital, would nonetheless be expected to retain the Scandinor feel. Maybe even more so, presumably not being overlain with the same cosmopolitan mores as Copenhagen. But Wolf travels widely in search of inspiration for her novels. Nevertheless, without that peculiar Scandinavian ambience there is something missing. Like nonalcoholic beer it might taste the same as the real thing but there is just something not right about it. Aficionados of the genre are drawn to it precisely because of the cut of its jib, not down to its emulating of another's.

Not a brilliant book despite it having picked up the Danish Crime Academy's Debut Award in 2006. Still, it is better than average and anything but mundane. It resonates of the Swedish crime writer Mons Kallentoft with its emphasis considerably less on shock than it is on plodding and procedural police work.

The end when it comes is not the end - well not of Daniel Trokic and Lisa Kornelius. More from them to follow.

Inger Wolf, 2017, Dark September. Publisher EAN. ISBN-13 : 978-8771809015

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Dark September

Anthony McIntyre has been back in Scandinoir.

 
It is deep wintertime in Oslo, the ideal setting for Scandinavian crime fiction. The atmospheric vibrancy of the snow that imbues a novel with climatic chill renders the mortgage paid in full. Permanency of residence is thereby secured for it deep in the banks of memory. Think a good Scandinavian crime thriller, think snow. None better than Ms Smila, but that is for another day. 

It is an auspicious point to attempt a review, having last evening just finished watching DNA, a reasonable Danish-based eight part crime drama, paced perfectly to end as the last droplet of wine vanished from the goblet. Were it not for that, Redeemer would have waited a while longer for reviewer's redemption. Not because of any quality deficiency - Nesbo via Hole makes for gold standard Scandinoir. There is simply always other things to be getting on with. But once the mood music places the tune firmly in your head, it stays firmly in place until loosened with the lubricant of ink.

I don't recall other novels where the Salvation Army centrally featured. Unlike the violent armies the world has been all too familiar with, their mission is the saving of souls, even if it is akin to chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A shooting takes place at one of its Christmas events in downtown Oslo. When silence resumes and the gun smoke evaporates a senior officer in the Sally Ann lies dead, and Harry Hole is back in business. His skills will be needed. An unmasked killer has successfully plied his trade, yet none in the crowd of onlookers can describe a face.

A writer in search of hypocrisy as a theme need look no further than religion. It abounds in the world of fiction and without, presenting itself as an easy target largely because of the size of its mouth in contrast to the minimum amount of space the brain occupies. Long on piety, short on practice, bible bashers are a magnet for sceptics. Add child rape and embezzlement to the mix and the spectacle of a feeding frenzy is soon hawking its wares. When the question was put to him in conversation with one of the elders if he was a Christian, Harry’s terse response was “No. I’m a detective. I believe in proof.” Religion never much bothers itself with anything like proof. Mark Twain was on the money with his observation that faith is believing what you know ain’t so. Harry Hole senses from the outset that there is a lot which ain't so and with typical singlemindedness he is determined to bring proof to it.

The alcohol that Hole has managed to consume, in particular the Jack Daniels, seems to have gone for his liver rather than his brain. His acute investigative skills remain unimpaired no matter how often he stumbles off on a bourbon journey with Jack.

A young Croatian man earned his spurs during the civil war that ravished Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. He became a sort of moving spirit amongst the fierce fighters of Zagreb resisting the Serbs, where he became known affectionately amongst Croat fighters as "little Redeemer." In that line of work there is always much that needs redeeming. Given the skillset the trajectory is pretty uncomplicated. Croatia and Norway, it is a matter of joining the bloodstained dots.

At work Harry straddles a time of change. His boss is going. Bjarne Moller was often the only thing standing between Harry and the sack. But Harry has exhibited enough sobriety that Gunnar Hagen, the new superior, feels no reason to show him the door. Yet. Before Moller departs for the wilderness, Hole realises something odd about the gift his retiring boss gave him as a parting gift. An expensive watch suggests that there is something worth the watching. Suspicion is ingrained in his police psyche, at one point leading him to reflect that it is not possible to be a cop for twelve years without becoming infected with a virus of contempt for humanity. It sort of goes with the turf. He was not convinced that crime paid, just that it repeats itself.

Nesbo never lays out an easy plot. There is always a temptation at the end to retrace the steps and unravel the threads. Complex and labyrinthine, all rivers nevertheless lead to the sea where the net of Harry Hole invariably snares the perp. There is a slight difference here. Zagreb is far removed from Oslo.

Jo Nesbo, 2016, The Redeemer. Vintage. ISBN-13 : 978-1784703172

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Redeemer

Anthony McIntyre reviews a Scandinoir novel, a signature theme of which is the baleful influence of a man of god. 

This is a tale that reunites the reader with Patrik Hedstrom and Erica Falck, although Erica, by this stage heavily pregnant, assumes a much less prominent role than she did first time around. The setting is once again Fjallbacka, what in normal circumstances should be a somnambulant town. Situated about 150 km from Gothenburg, in 2010 it had a population of 859.

The climate in the second series has switched from the chilly atmosphere of the Ice Princess to a very hot summer. Maybe men of god need that fiery heat to inflame their hellfire and brimstone passion, and with a book titled The Preacher, the scorching weather creates the ambience of the furnace.

Because the detective and his partner are nervously anticipating the birth of their first child, Patrik is at home with the mother to be. At the same time and not too far away, life’s cycle is working itself out. As birth is about begin a life, murder is busy taking it away. A child out playing has the misadventure of finding the body of a young woman, Tanja, at Kings Cleft in the back of Swedish beyond.

When Patrik, wrenched from his home and the aura of new life expectancy, reaches the scene he quickly discovers that unlike at home death is now in the ascendancy. The bodies of two teenage campers, Siv Lantin and Mona Thernblad, who had not been seen since the late 1970s, lie beneath the corpse of the latest victim, Tanja, whose disappearance had been reported a week earlier by a friend. An autopsy on the two teens reveals evidence of torture. On Tanja's body there were semen deposits. As the suspected kidnapper of the missing couple had taken his own life twenty years earlier, the cops are presented with a conundrum.

As is sometimes the case with Scandinoir, a close eye has to be kept on the characters otherwise the reader risks losing track of who is who. This labour could be avoided if less attention was given by authors to the home life of the central character. It is what made The Arc Of The Swallow a good read rather than a great read. Immersion in family is where potentially good novels can have the pace ripped out of them to the point where they are pulled into a chicane and their speed reduced to pedestrian.

Patrik and Erica live close to the sea and that leads to extended family members inviting themselves to stay free - avoiding the  normal charges were they to book a hotel room. This introduces its own tensions but is not crucial to the unfolding murder narrative. Nor are readers presumably interested in the side shows of the customary family strains. Fortunately here, Lackberg managed through a range of interesting characters to keep the plot moving. The ongoing marital difficulties faced by her sister Anna and carried over from Ice Princess  have at their heart two characters sufficiently interesting to halt a downward spiral into ennui.

As it works out, Tanja was not a local woman, but a German who was in Sweden to carry our some research into the disappearance of the couple, above whose corpses she had been unceremoniously dumped.

Of course matters are not helped by the casual approach to investigation that has characterised the Swedish police of crime fiction. There remain the usual office tensions fed by the ego of superiors who really do believe they are superior in matters other than rank.

The Hult family come onto the investigation's radar. No surprise - the late son of the late Preacher had long been suspected of having kidnapped the campers. Additionally, his grandson was the last person to to see Tanja alive. It becomes clear to Patrik that the solving of these killings will take the investigation there. 

Ephraim Hult, the Preacher and faith healer, is long since dead but not so his legacy. The family is made up of hoods and religious whackjobs, while split down the middle in a typical class divide. As the investigation progresses another young girl goes missing causing it to be ramped up in what might be a race against time. If time succeeds so too does torture, rape and certain death for the missing girl.

Dysfunctional families, religious nutters, serial murders, Lackberg mixed her ingredients well and served up a tantalising mystery.

Camilla Lackberg, 2011, The Preacher. Harper. ISBN-13: 978-0007416196.

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The Preacher

Anthony McIntyre reviews the fifth book in the Harry Hole series.


Harry Hole is drunk again. While that is not news to those familiar with the staggering Oslo detective, it would be deeply disappointing for fans were it to cost him his job. An entirely dry Harry Hole of course would be a much less compelling character, his magnetism stripped away. It is the flaws that make it all work, adding to the grit while honing the suspense: Harry is unpredictable apart from the one certainty – that he will hit the bottle again. Well, there are two - he will also solve any murder case that comes before his eyes, rather than across his desk. Harry is not the type of cop who is cut out for desk work. When he takes to the chair he likes it placed in his local in front of whatever culinary special is on offer, and where he could have "a drink, one drink, a moment without torment."

If Harry hated pubs they were only "theme pubs, Irish pubs, topless pubs. novelty pubs or, worst of all, celebrity pubs, where the walls were lined with photographs of regular customers of some notoriety."

Bjarne Moller has reached the end of his tether and fired Harry. The long suffering superior grew tired of acting as a guardian angel for "the lone wolf, the drunk, the department's enfant terrible". Not so much saved by the bell as the star, he evades the sack when at the last minute he is called back to work on a fresh Oslo murder case. It is summer, many cops are on holiday including the chief who would sign his termination of contract but had not yet got to the paperwork sent by Moller. Harry avoided the drop but is a long way from becoming disentangled from the the noose that sits loosely, for now, around his neck.

A return to the land of the living is not entirely without problems as it reminds Harry too much of the dead, in particular a murdered colleague he had worked closely with. The new investigation puts him close to the person he suspects of being behind his fellow cop’s death. While avoiding the sack he misses being in the sack with Rakel who has pulled away from him, taking her son Oleg with her. Harry and the boy had formed a comforting bond, so when it dissolves it hurts.

The new investigation is kickstarted by the discovery of the body of a young woman in her bathroom. Camilla Loen is 23 and one of her fingers had been hacked off: not a macabre souvenir but more for the purposes of posting to the cops. Another feature was the insertion beneath the eyelid of a stud diamond in the shape of a star with five points. Five days later a stage actress is reported missing. When one of her fingers arrives at the National Crime Investigation Service, more than just the cops take notice. Then a third victim is found in her place of work. The star again. A sadistic serial killer is on the go and Harry is the one detective with experience of successfully confronting the phenomenon.

Harry is to work with Tom Waller but readers familiar with the history of both men will know why Harry neither likes nor trusts Waller, the origins of which go back to Redbreast. If Harry was considered good at the job, it was in Waller that he found his equal and whose philosophy of policing was summed up as:

that's how we deal with the human detritus we're surrounded by. We don't clean it up, we don't throw it away, we just move it around a little. And we don't see that when the house is a stinking rat infested hole, it's too late. Just look at other countries where criminality has a firm foothold ... That's where we come in, Harry. We take the responsibility. We see it as the sanitation job that society dare not take on.

Running parallel with the serial killings is the problem of corruption that has plagued the Oslo police force. Beate Lønn can prove crucial here but needs to leap over some psychological hurdles from her own past which can seem much larger than they actually are when magnified by apprehension. If Harry was not Homicide he would have the motivation for Internal Affairs. The corrupt have an animal like instinct to protect themselves so So Harry the hunter becomes Harry the hunted.

Because so much in the book has a past story it is best to read the books in sequence. While the fifth in the Hole compendium it is the third located in Norway so the new reader might get away with giving the first two a miss. But there is no compelling reason to do such, just that the storyline of this one will not be affected if the first two are skipped.

The Devil’s Star is aptly positioned in the timeline of Harry Hole books. The five points of the star are laden with symbolism and teasers. The novel is the fifth in the series. For those who prefer their Scandinoir in cold climes, The Devil's Star might throw them a bit. Oslo bakes as the summer sun grips it. Snow rather than sun creates the mood music for Scandinavian crime fiction.

Still, a five star read.

Jo Nesbo, The Devil's Star. Publisher @ Harper. ASIN: B014TAGP00

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The Devil's Star

Anthony McIntyre reviews the second in a series about a Copenhagen cold case unit.

Readers of the first Jussi Adler Olsen novel in the Detective Carl Mørck series will be familiar with the troubled head of Department Q, ostensibly assigned the task of solving cold cases but really more for the purpose of giving a traumatised detective something to do and keep him away from spoking the wheels of police bureaucracy.  If he clogged up rather than cleared up, no big deal for the Copenhagen police chiefs who had been siphoning off the government funding for the cold and diverting it into more immediate and hot cases.

The department’s cramped and spartan office – a cupboard - was situated in a basement, symbolising its lowly status and weak priority for Copenhagen police: the bottom of the pile really, with little resources to make the ascent out of obscurity.

Mørck was never going to rest on his laurels, having previously been the only one of three detectives to emerge physically unscathed from a shoot-out where a colleague had been killed and another paralysed for life. Morose and difficult, he has a female psychiatrist, an idea which his creator might just have  borrowed from Tony Soprano. He started as he meant to go on: determined to make a success of the project. His first case had been so remarkable and unexpected that  it had stirred interest  in high places. Consequently, prior to avisit from the police breass, there had to be an injection of  decorum into Q. The Mørck-Assad duo was usurped by the addition of a secretary cum administrator. And then there were three. In a Mick Herron novel Rose Knudsen might have been regarded as a slow horse but she adds edge to the Q Team.

Having overcome the first challenge in the claustrophobic surrounds of Mercy, Mørck was up for it when, in Disgrace, a new case lands on his desk. The nose starts twitching as he reviews a 1987 double murder of a brother and sister in a cottage. Lisbet Jørgeneon and her brother Søren had been stabbed to death while seemingly playing a board game.

Bjarne Thøgersen,A school pupil confessed and was subsequently sent down. Case solved … but only partially and maybe even wrongly. That the file landed on his desk invited wonder if there was more to it. Nobody in the wider police department took responsibility for moving it into Mørck’s space, enhancing the suspicion that Q was b being nudged and steered.

In rummagging for a lead, the hunters are drawn to perhaps the book’s most intricate character, Kirsten-Marie ('Kimmie') Lassen or Kimmie as she goes throughout the novel. a woman living on the streets and toughened by them. Having watched the movie before reading the book, the image of Danica Curcic’s brilliantly played character, crystallised the mental image of the Kimmie.

Her difficulty was not just that the police were in search of her but that others eager to protect themselves from the consequences of the police search had secrets to protect. Those who have a secret about a killing will not find it too great a moral leap to resort to killing to protect the secret.
Power, status, privilege and wealth all figure as blocking tackles in the investigation. A designer, a private hospital founder, a financial shares analyst with a Hooray Henry background are prepared to go the extra mile on the basis of what we have we hold. 

The novel thematic is the hunt, with the often-used themes of the hunter becoming the hunted. Even the game that the teenage victims were playing when slain was Trivial Pursuit. Department Q was not in pursuit of trivia but a gang of privileged and  ruthless killers.

If anything the book could have been shorter. I read it while evading the heat of a Catalonian sun and it seemed a long journey. Even allowing for my previously having viewed the film and knowing how the plot unfolded, with the heat an added irritant, 550 pages was gratuitously long. For those looking a murder mystery, this might not be for them There is murder but no mystery. The killers are revealed from the outset so the reader is not led through a choice of who done it but how solve it. A trail is blazed. The end when it comes is incendiary.
 
Jussi Adler-Olsen, Disgrace. Penguin. ISBN-13: 978-1405912662

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Disgrace

Anthony McIntyre reviews the opening novel by Swedish writer Camilla Lackberg.


In her debut novel Camilla Lackberg shows her potential for being in the genre for quite some time. This has long since been proven, via a range of crime thrillers from the Swedish author.

Erica Falck moves into the family home in Fjallbackae upon the death of her parents, both victims of a road traffic accident. She takes up occupancy with the view of attending to her parents' personal possessions but also to use it as a writer's base from which to pen a biography of a Swedish Nobel prize winner for literature. All this is disrupted when she is alerted by one of the townsfolk to a macabre discovery.
 
A friend from her childhood, Alexandra Wijkner, is found dead in a frozen bath tub and becomes the Ice Princess. Wrists slashed, the suggestion that it is suicide soon gives way to a wider investigation. Her business partner was not convinced that Alex had become the Ice Princess of her own volition: happy and pregnant she had everything to live for. Self-induced death seemed out of the question.

Patrik Hedström is one of the detectives assigned to the case. The parents of the late Alex have asked Erica to write something in memory of their daughter, which she in turn considers turning into a novel based on the life of her childhood friend, who had made her reputation in the town through work in an art gallery. No surprise that Erica's path should cross with that of Hedström, whom she had known from childhood. Before long romance is in the air, a natural progression from the designs and desires Hedström had harboured in his teenage days.

Nordic Noir invariably works best in the cold, as this one does: when the characters are wrapped up to protect them from the chill, the biting wind, the invasiveness of the blizzard, when the streets of Copenhagen, Oslo or Stockholm are snow swept and the sun is a distant unseen planet in the dark recesses of the universe. Viewing a Danish series yesterday evening, Darkness: Those Who Kill, the sun stroked motorways tended to detract from the atmospherics.

Fjallbackae is changing. No longer the remote fishing village it once was, there is a more cosmopolitan air to it as it ambles into the resort business. In a seller's market, money is to be made if owners can read the market and cash in at the optimum moment. Erica faces pressure from a brother-in-law who wants the family home sold off so that he can acquire the financial means to resettle back in England with Erica's sister, Anna. Abusive and domineering, his hold over Anna needs to be frustrated just as urgently as his appetite for easy money.

Bertil Mellberg is the cop in charge of the town but this is the result of a demotion after he had messed up elsewhere. For him the opportunity to solve the mystery might be his way out of exile. His bumptiousness, invisible only to himself, should not prove a roadblock. Bumbling Bertil is the clown of the carnival whose character adds colour to the mosaic.

All these sub-narratives feed into the main story like tributaries to a river in full flow to a yet unspecified destination. To add to the meandering course, Alex is not the uncomplicated person of childhood. Secrets and lies, the answer is to be found in the past of Fjallbackae. The future with Falck and Hedström, based on this first outing, seems promising.

Camilla Lackberg, 2017, The Ice Princess. Harper Collins. ISBN: 978-0008264444

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Ice Princess

Anthony McIntyre revisits Scandinoir.


I tend to prefer Scandinoir located in Scandinavian countries. The atmosphere is never quite the same when it is transported outside its own territory, making me anti-open border at least for this. Harry Hole in Australia or Thailand was the stuff of good novels but there is still that little atmospheric ingredient missing, the thing that makes the difference. The Dogs of Riga for the same reason didn't work quite as well as the first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers.

A raft is discovered floating and unmanned, in a manner of speaking, despite there being men on board. Two dead males with bullet wounds to their chests. The autopsy suggests an East European origin and the investigation subsequently ends up in Latvia, although morphs in the process. Prior to that Riga comes to Sweden in the person of Karlis Liepa, a major in the Latvian police. On return to his home country Liepa is confronted with a serious problem that needs further investigation and Wallander feels compelled to assist.

Wallander operates in a world he has difficulty comprehending. 1991 is witnessing a lot of turbulence in the Baltic region. The USSR has not yet imploded and its satellite states are still in the grip of party place seekers, state bureaucrats and secret police.

All at once he could understand what oppression and fear did to people. They put their hope in some unknown saviour who would spring from nowhere and save them.

A universal truth that oppressed people the world over ,since time immemorial, have discovered to their cost when putting their hopes in self proclaimed revolutionaries.

It is a Eurocentric book but it requires an Olympian leap of imagination to see how it might be anything else. That Wallander is a Ystad detective rather than a Stockholmer, compensates to some degree in that Ystadt is not as close to the metropolitan centre as the Swedish capital.

The wave of immigrants into Sweden was already proving challenging in Faceless Killers and the otherness of the foreign carries over into Dogs of Riga also. The author interrogates the new world through the eyes of Wallander whose night spent freezing in a Latvian church:

made him look deeper into himself than he had ever done before. He realised that thee world at large bore very little resemblance to Sweden.

Yet Sweden too bore its own dark secrets, which for the most part seem to involve the political police and security services, and which rarely see the light of day outside of fiction.

Wallander was only too aware:

of the many scandals involving justice in recent years., which had exposed the network of tunnels linking the basements of state organisations ... a large proportion of the real power was practiced in dimly lit secret corridors , far beyond the control regarded as essential in a state governed by the rule of law.

Perhaps The Dogs Of Riga would have been much better had I have not read what preceded it, Faceless Killers. Not that it is a bad book, just not as methodically plotted as the opener in the series.

In general terms writers licence is all very fine but unless works of science fiction or horror the licence is not a free pass to ridiculously explore the absurd. Fortunately, the second in the Wallander series escapes that harsh characterisation, despite the culmination of the book clashing with the consistency the reader comes to expect from Scandinoir. Overegg the plot and it just doesn't work as well.

Henning Mankell, 2012, The Dogs Of Riga. Vintage. ISBN-13 : 978-0099570554 

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The Dogs Of Riga

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