Maxine finds some things to like about Matti Joensuu’s To Steal Her Love, but wishes the narrative spent less time seeing the world from the perspective of a deranged synesthesiac burglar.
Yvonne Klein also has reservations about Johann Theorin’s The Darkest Room, finding all the character development and atmospherics of the slow build-up don’t pay off in the suddenly dramatic climax.
And continuing the streak of negativity, I confess to being left cold by Erik Winter in his first outing, Death Angels – which combines a gory plot with a cool and distant hero given to existential moments.
Dark, often crushingly grim, Box 21 introduces us to a world of characters who hate what they do for a living. I count at least two police detectives, one junkie, one doctor, a welter of crooks, and at least one social servant who see the veneer peel off their careers, revealing the shabby, agonized self-deception beneath.
Heroes and heroines are here, to be sure, and in the end the book is a celebration of love. But Box 21 teaches a hard truth, forces us to admire people we cannot like, to see when we’d rather turn away. It holds us still and makes us look. . . . .
Like its Nordic noir fellows, Box 21 is profound, with much to show, much to say, much to set in play, on the human condition. It’s a novel with a heart, even if it’s a hardened heart.
In Betrayal, Alvtegen gets inside the minds of her characters and sometimes even describes the same scene from different perspectives. This technique helps build suspense as it allows the action to unfold gradually. The reading experience is interesting. The reader slowly pieces together the story by collecting impressions, information and important clues, coming at the main narrative from different angles.
Betrayal’s plot is powerful, yet Karin Alvtegen’s novel is as much about individual histories and relationships as it is about what actually happens. The multiple betrayals give rise to dynamics that, as a reader, you just know must end in disaster. How, when, for whom, however, are unknowns. There is little violence, but still the suspense is continuously building. Action drives action. There are no punishments and no rewards, there are only consequences.
Hot off the Rap Sheet – Fred Vargas won the International Dagger, facing a field of Scandinavian heavyweights. She was not my front runner, but then I am a bit biased (and a bit less taken with her eccentricity than most, I suspect). Kerrie had predicted Theorin, Alvtegen, and Indridason for win, place, and show, with Vargas bringing up the rear. Stieg Larsson’s Translator, Reg Keeland, is quite hot under the collar about it, since Vargas has won three out of the past four years. (Evidently he deleted the post once he cooled off.) It certainly doesn’t conform to the “who should win” or “who is likely to win” polls at Euro Crime. C’est la guerre.
Meanwhile, let’s catch up on reviews and news . . .
nancyo (“who never stops reading no matter what”) thinks Hakan Nesser’s Mind’s Eye is brilliant. “I can very highly recommend this one to others who enjoy Scandinavian crime fiction, and to those who have read Nesser’s other books. Mystery readers who want something different than the usual stuff out there will also enjoy this book as well.”
Martin Edwards carries on with his Scandinavian kick, reviewing Missing by Karin Alvtegen, “a tense, atmospheric and extremely readable novel, with a clever and (to the best of my knowledge) original motive. Recommended.”
Peter reviews The Beast by the writing duo Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, a distrubing book that
. . . looks into a warped abyss of the human psyche and discusses a kind of crime that to most of us is one that we fear (if we have children) and are extremely disgusted by. It also illustrates the potentially serious consequences of letting people take the law in their own hands. This is a good book, but it is tough. It is a book you will either like a lot or not like at all. There is no in between with Roslund & Hellstrom’s The Beast.
I find this very interesting because I’ve just finished their other book, Box 21, soon to be released in the US, which deals with trafficking in women and with the corruption that supports it, and am currently reading Karin Fossum’s The Water’s Edge, which deals with the same subject, pedophilia that leads to murder, but in a very understated, pscyhologically sophisticated, and thoughtful way. Quite a contrast to Roslund and Hellstrom, though both good in different ways.
A winter day in Sweden in 2008, a retired officer from the Swedish Navy, Håkan von Enke, disappears during his daily walk in the Lilljan forest. For Kurt Wallander this is a very personal affair – von Enke is the father in law of his daughter Linda and the grandfather of her little daughter.
And even though the case is handled by the police in Stockholm, Kurt Wallander finds himself unable to stay away from the case. And when von Enke’s widow, Louise, disappears as well, and like her husband without a trace and equally mysteriously, Wallander’s interest in the case increases even further.
As he moves back in time and starts connecting the dots, he finds that there are clues in the direction of the Cold War, political extremists on the far right, and a professional hitman from Eastern Europe. Wallander starts to suspect that he has stumbled upon a secret that lies at the core of the Swedish post World War II history.
Knopf is promoting the US release of The Girl Who Played With Fire by involving bloggers in a contest. There are apparently dragon temporary tattoos involved. (I gave away dinosaur tattoos at my library’s birthday party for Darwin last February. They were almost as popular as the toy dinosaurs. And the cake; we definitely didn’t have enough cake to go around.) You can also “friend” Lisabeth Salander on Facebook. Somehow, I can’t imagine her wanting to collect facebook friends. And surely Ikea and Apple computers as interests suggests a doppelganger at work . . . with blond hair? Not sure what to make of this, but I think I will stick to friending charcters within their books for now.
Peter rounds up recent news about Scandinavian crime fiction from Scandinavian sources, including the good news that Jo Nesbo will be publishing another book in the Harry Hole and the unhappy rumor that Hakan Nesser will be retiring from writing after another four books. He also points out that English-language readers will not be too bothered, given the backlog of his books yet to be translated, but still . . .
Ms Textual takes a close look at two Swedish novels, Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked and Karin Alvtegen’s Betrayal. She warns in her blog sidebar that she doesn’t review books, she analyzes them, so here there be spoilers. But she has some very interesting things to say about both books, about translation, and about reading books from unfamiliar cultures. She has particularly high praise for Alvtegen and the structure of Betrayal that she finds has “a textual integrity that is breathtaking to observe.”
If you like your detective heroes/anti-heroes as amoral, alcoholic and contradictory, then they don’t come much more dysfunctional than Harry Hole. This is a superbly-paced thriller, bristling with political comment and whilst Hole is as disrespectful of the law as any of his adversaries, he doesn’t confuse legal justice with moral justice and no matter how low he sinks, we keep on forgiving him and rooting for him, in spite of his complete failure as a human being. There are many great Scandanavian crime fiction writers out there at the moment, butr for me, Nesbo is the one who is constantly pushing at the boundaries.
Matt Rees, a recovering journalist who writes about the reality of the Palestinian situation in the form of crime fiction, doesn’t think much of Stieg Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, saying it makes him “want to throw knives like the Swedish chef on The Muppet Show.” Why? There’s too much of an impulse to bury the reader in infodumps and (worse yet) the Internet is used as a creaky deus ex machina that is too often a crime fiction author’s cheap way out of a crack. Linkmeister also offers his take, which is more positive.
Publisher’s Lunch offered its subscribers some insights into the dispute over Stieg Larsson’s estate and Sarah Weinman offers those of us who aren’t subscribers the highlights. Though actually, that’s not at all the right word for it. It’s a sad tangle complicated by money.
Jonathan Segura offers a profile of Yrsa Sigurdardottir in Publishers Weekly. It provides a charming picture of Iceland – where an informal poll taken in bars (dubbed “research” but resulting in a hangover) finds that not only are her books known to Icelanders, she’s personally known to a great many of them – and some fun tidbits, such as this take on her prep for Last Rituals: “Yrsa ordered witchcraft books from Amazon.com. Now, she gets e-mails from them promoting books on torture equipment. ‘I’m in their psycho database,’ she says.”
I know I rely entirely too much on the FriendFeed Crime and Mystery Fiction room for the tidbits I harvest for this blog. It’s far more productive than the Google alerts I have set up. But really, if you want to know about Scandinavian crime fiction – and every other kind of crime fiction – you should sign up. It’s addictive.
Norm (aka Uriah) comments on Karin Alvtegen’s Shadow, saying. “the sharp use of language and metaphor in Karin Alvtegen’s Shadow to depict a bleak loveless world is quite brilliant. It might have a little bit to do with the translator McKinley Burnett.” A few posts later, he provides a full review.
This is a complicated and complex novel which paints a very bleak picture of humanity with its cast of socially damaged characters . . . The book succeeds on many levels but especially as a lesson that once you take that first shaky step away from the straight and narrow you have no idea where it may lead. This book like the other Alvtegen novel I have read Betrayal is brilliantly written and plotted; but it is very dark definitely not a cheerful read.
He also provides a much-appreciated service by putting Harry Hole in order (particularly useful given the books have been translated out of order – though Harry himself would probably resist anyone trying to organize him).
The Brothers Judd review Henning Mankell’s The Man Who Smiled, pointing out that the hero, Kurt Wallander, is not the subject of the title; they find the story a bit didactic.
The Spectator reviews a handful of mysteries, including My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, saying it is “spooky and gruesome . . . both chilling and witty — an agreeable combination.”
Cathy of Kittling Books reviews an intriguing book that is more speculative fiction than mystery, but it certainly sounds interesting – The Unit by Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist, which deals with biomedical ethics in a dystopian world. (Incidentally, one of the things Cathy does in her review that I love is quote the first line.) She also provides her take on Anne Holt’s What is Mine, saying “this book is an ardent commentary on parenthood and an absorbing mystery with a nice little twist at the end.” She also says, “try as I might, I just can’t ignore these wonderful mysteries that keep coming my way from Scandinavia!” Hey, to paraphrase P.D.Q. Bach, if it reads good, it is good.
Maxine has an excerpt from Matti Joensuu’s To Steal Her Love that includes a rather endearing image of a man apologizing to a rabbit: “each time the rabbit finished eating its dandelion leaf Harjunpää quietly apologised and fetched him a fresh one growing by the wall.” And she adds another excerpt, with a promise of a Euro Crime review forthcoming.
Euro Crime has an update on the Dagger polls – you’d think it was the Booker Prize in the old days, making book on books.
Peter reviews K. O. Dahl’s The Last Fix – a bit pedantic for his tastes, but with some good psychological insights and dry humor, all well translated by Don Bartlett.
DJ reviews Liza Marklund’s Studio Sex, apa Studio 69. She reckons it’s perhaps her best.
With friends like these, I’ll never run out of things to read next.
Thanks to my FriendFeed friends, I was alerted to the shortlist announcement of the Crime Writer’s Association International Dagger for the best book in the realm of “crime, thriller, suspense or spy novels which have been translated into English from their original language, for UK publication.” The winner will be announced July 15. And good heavens, the Scandinavians are dominating, with three Swedes, one Norwegian, and one Icelander on the list; one Frenchwoman rounding out the pack.
Karin Alvtegen, Shadow, translated by McKinley Burnett, (Canongate) Arnaldur Indriðason, Arctic Chill, translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker) Stieg Larsson, The Girl who played with Fire, translated by Reg Keeland (MacLehose Quercus) Jo Nesbø, The Redeemer, translated by Don Bartlett (Harvill Secker) Johan Theorin, Echoes from the Dead, translated by Marlaine Delargy (Doubleday) Fred Vargas, The Chalk Circle Man, translated by Siân Reynolds (Harvill Secker)
Congratulations to the nominees, to their translators, and to the publishers who trust us to be interested in non-English-speaking parts of the world.
It must be spring. News and reviews are springing up all over.
The Seattle Times notices the allure of scruffy Scandinavian detectives as Lit Life editor Mary Ann Gwin previews the Branagh Wallander, soon to appear in the US, and interrogates J.B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookstore.
Glenn Harper of International Noir reviews Camilla Läckberg’s The Preacher – “Part Cain and Abel, part Elmer Gantry.” And a touch of Maeve Binchy in the family dynamics. He finds it’s a northern sort of Southern Gothic.
Maxine reviews Karin Alvtegen’s Missingand recommends you clear your calendar to read it all in one go. It’s “a tensely exciting book with an extremely sympathetic and capable main character.” Alvtegen has been touring the US in advance of the Edgar awards banquet on April 30th. Missing is up for an award, having finally been published in the US.
Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times advises that “writers write about dull subjects at their peril.” Yet Hakan Nesser’s Woman With a Birthmarkpulls it off, turning the murder of a very dull man into a compelling story.
In the annual mystery issue ofLibrary Journal Wilda Williams speculates that US publisher’s infatuation with Scandinavian crime may be cooling off.
Poisoned Pen Press editor Barbara Peters believes the globalization of crime fiction has become a permanent feature of the mystery world. The question today is whether chilly, Nordic thrillers will continue to appeal to American readers seeking to escape their domestic troubles. The verdict so far is mixed.
“We’ve only seen the popularity of Scandinavian crime writers grow since the initial U.S. media frenzy hit in the early 2000s,” says Picador senior publicist Lisa Mondello Fielack. She notes that Icelandic author Arnaldur Indridason continues to do well for the paperback imprint especially after the movie of his Jar City became the highest-grossing film in Iceland’s history. An American remake now in the works may stir further reader interest.
Fielack argues that as new writers such as Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) enter the mix, the Scandinavian crime pool only seems to have grown stronger. Out this month are Håkan Nesser’s Woman with a Birthmark (Pantheon), Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s My Soul To Take (Morrow), and Inger Frimansson’s Island of the Naked Women (Pleasure Boat). Larsson’s second novel in his acclaimed trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire (Knopf), debuts in August. In October, Sarah Crichton Books/FSG will publish Box 21, a Swedish thriller by Börge Hellström and Anders Roslund. Even suspense juggernaut James Patterson is catching the Nordic crime wave by partnering with Swedish crime writer Liza Marklund (The Bomber, LJ 5/1/01) on a thriller set in Stockholm (to be published in 2010 in Sweden).
Other publishers, however, think the field has been saturated. “Our Scandinavian titles received rave reviews in the past, but sales have decreased,” comments Grand Central Publishing assistant editor Celia Johnson. “With any mystery book, the challenge is to produce something that stands out in a crowded marketplace.”
My question: why a remake of Jar City? I haven’t even seen the original one yet.
“Swedish Crime Queens and the Economics of Popular Culture,” Sara Kärrholm, Lund University
“Swedish Crime Fiction and (the Lack of) Science,” Kerstin Bergman, Lund University
“Crime Tourism and the Branding of Places: An Expanding Market in Sweden,” Carina Sjöholm, Lund University
“Out of Place: Geographical Fiction(s) in Håkan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren Series,” Jennifer Jenkins, Pacific Lutheran University
Hat tip to Janet Rudolph for this lovely video about Iceland, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and My Soul to Take.
Peter of Scandinavian Books discusses the phenomenon of the Millennium Trilogy, saying the author had originally planned a ten-book series; he had got as far as drafting the fourth before his untimely death. Peter also links to a brief notice from the Norwegian newspaper Daglbladet saying the family had decided not to have the fourth book, of which about 200 pages had been drafted, finished by another writer. That sounds to me like a very good idea, since the author was not one to come close to completing a book in 200 pages.
Nekkidblogger reviews Mari Jungstedt’s Unspoken and says it’s a “great police procedural . . . crisp prose, steady suspense, and flesh-and-blood characters, as well as powerful descriptions of the dark Swedish winter. The narrative is engaging and twisty, and will fool even the most attentive reader.”
Maxine was deeply impressed by Karin Alvtegen’s The Shadow – “a brilliant and rich book, which has had a tremendous impact on me. I urge you to read it as soon as you can.”
Steph was less taken with it, finding the characters unlikeable and one aspect of the ending a bit of a cliche, but she thinks Jan Costin Wagner’s Ice Moon is great, and gives readers an informative illustrated geographical and historical tour of its Finnish setting. She also gives her review one of the most poetic titles in memory: “a strange and haunting story, cracked through with grief.”
Let me say upfront that I enjoyed this book but it is also one of the oddest I’ve read in a while. It isn’t a book that you can read literally. Amberville refers to one of four districts in Mollisan Town which is populated by living stuffed animals that have the bodily functions you attribute to living creatures. There is no attempt to relate the world of Amberville with our world, it just is.
I first thought that Amberville was going to be a crime story that used stuffed animals in place of humans. While it has noir and criminal element it turned out to be something very different. . . .
Do not think that stuffed animals = children’s book. This is most definitely not a book for children. It is an allegory that uses the Death List to critically examine religious belief and faith and duplicity within organized religion. Related themes include morality, loyalty, and what it means to be family. Viewed as an allegory, the reader can relate Amberville to our world without stumbling over the cast of stuffed animal characters.
But I’m still left wondering . . . why stuffed animals? Maybe there’s a metaphysical answer in there, somewhere, but I doubt it has anything to do with the Velveteen Rabbit.
This blog is part of a project to document and celebrate the amazing amount of high-quality crime fiction coming from the Scandinavian countries and being translated into English.
Start up funding for the project was provided by a Research, Scholarship and Creativity grant from Gustavus Adolphus College, a Swedish-heritage liberal arts college in Minnesota.
