“novels of conscience and reflection” – yes!!

Larssa Kyzer writes a thoughtful and well-documented response to Nathaniel Rich’s essay in Slate that I reacted to not long ago – in an article in L Magazine titled “Why Scandinavians Really Write the Best Crime Fiction.” I think she nails it. In response to Rich’s equating of Scanidavia with Ikea, wholesomeness, and a peaceful society, she documents the stresses and subtle fractures going on in Scandinavian countries as immigration challenges basic assumptions about social identity. She also points out that the current wave of crime fiction is very much in tune with the critical turn Sjöwall and Wahlöö set in their seminal Martin Beck series. It’s a bit disturbing, really, to consider that readers not familiar with Scandinavia (beyond visits to Ikea) have so totally missed the undercurrent of frustration and rage in the Millennium Trilogy that comes directly from Stieg Larsson’s lifelong struggle against racism and the rise of neo-Nazi groups. Kyzer sums it up well:

Scandinavian crime novels are not set apart from similar traditions simply because of the consistent contrast between peaceful settings and “the tawdriness of the crimes,” but rather, that the genre is unique because it tends to hold its society up to itself and take an unflinchingly honest stock of its failures. So often, these are novels of conscience and reflection. Novels which, in their own small way, take responsibility for a social system which makes earnest promises of inclusion and protection, but continues to fail so many of its constituents.

At its heart, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not so very different. It is a book about the failure of Swedish society to effectively respond to social ills at all levels. White-collar criminals are treated like celebrities and the press turns a blind eye. Women suffer inordinately at the hands of men in power — government officials, family members, even lovers — and have no recourse but to become vigilantes, protecting themselves where the social system has been utterly impotent. Larsson isn’t reinventing the genre here, he’s tapping into what really sets Scandinavian crime fiction apart. If his take on these themes has brought anything particularly new to the field, it’s misanthropy and cynicism, where there is usually at least a modicum of hope that welfare societies might face their own shortcomings and eventually, overcome them. “I made a lot of mistakes,” Wallander laments at the end of Faceless Killers, guilt-ridden even after a successful investigation. “You kept at it,” his colleague encourages. “You wanted to catch whoever committed those murders… That’s the important thing.”

By the by, her review, published some time ago, of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is extremely perceptive. There’s no question that Lisabeth Salander is the gripping focus for the book, the chief reason why it has struck such a chord with millions of readers, but she questions the way in which a victim of sexual violence is depicted (or as someone said on a discussion list, how odd that a man who is writing about men who hate women creates a heroine who is essentially a male fantasy).

If, instead of highlighting the fact that “apart from the tears of pure physical pain she shed not a single tear,” Larsson let Salander experience shock and trauma after being assaulted — if Salander overcame, rather than stifled, the myriad emotional consequences that result from sexual abuse — her triumphs would be far greater. As it stands, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo resigns itself to a world in which covert, unpunished sexual crimes are the norm, and vigilantism is a woman’s only possible source of justice.

Wow, that’s exactly what I thought – only I couldn’t put my finger on it until I read this paragraph.

reviews and reactions

Peter gives us a preview of Johan Theorin’s next book, The Darkest Room (or, as they say in Sweden, Nattfåk, which means something quite different, but then so it was for the title of his first book, Echoes from the Dead; I like his Swedish titles better). Peter recommends it highly, concluding

The Darkest Room is well written, full of mysteries, and told in a style that evokes a feeling of that there is something mystical, perhaps super-natural, going on. The plot is rich and has lots of neat features, and Theorin very skillfully shows his cards one at a build while gradually build more and more suspense. As well, this is book which displays a deep understanding of human vulnerability and grief.

Maxine thinks The Preacher is a ripper of a yarn, and an exellent followup to Camilla Lackberg’s Ice Princess. Word on FriendFeed is that Patrick is less of a drip, causing relief all around. She concludes:

The Preacher is a good mystery story, very well translated. Although there are too few characters to make the ending a complete surprise, Camilla Lackberg (pictured) keeps all the balls juggling in the air to keep the reader guessing as to the details almost right to the finish. Although the ending of the book is exciting, it is also very bleak, and I found the details of the motivation of the criminal not all that convincing. These are minor disappointments, though. In the main, the book is a great read: as well as tight plotting, the author is particularly strong on her depictions of small-town dynamics, the interactions among the police, and the domestic story of Patrick and Erica, which is left nicely balanced for the next novel in the series.

What she says about the ending is intriguing; our copy just arrived in my library, so I may have to pick it up, particularly if the drip-factor is ameliorated.

Bernadette reacts very well indeed to reading Karin Alvtegen’s Missing and finds the heroine, a resourceful but troubled young woman who is homeless in a semi-voluntary way (and the layered timeframe of the narration explains why).

One of the things that struck me was that, unlike so many books these days, it didn’t delve deeply into every minute detail of Sybilla’s life and in fact left quite a few things up to the reader’s imagination. This is such a contrast from some of the detail-laden books the size of house bricks that I’ve read lately that I had almost forgotten that great stories can be told in less than 600 pages and that blood and gore aren’t necessary to create atmosphere . . . Missing is wonderfully sparse, genuinely exciting (I don’t stay up into the wee hours for just any old yarn) and quite thought provoking at the same time in the way it dealt with the issue of life’s outsiders.

I must say that while I felt the same way about Missing, I found Alvtegen’s Shadow, which I have just finished, to be entirely too detail-laden and without enough action at the front end  to make me care much about the unhappy and deeply introspective characters. My imagination twiddled its thumbs wondering when the gripping opening scene would pay off. While the theme of the novel – that the desire for acceptance and for recognition can drive people to squander their creativity and their humanity and creates competition and jealousy that devours writers and those around them – I think I’m much more interested in life’s outsiders, especially when they involve murders before page 10,000. (Well, that’s how it felt . . . sorry.) It does pick up toward the end, but I’m afraid I’d already taken a deep dislike to all of the characters and had repeated urges to smack them silly. All except for the patient social worker who, once again, makes me think moving to Sweden would be a very good plan. Like anyone official in the US would take the trouble to arrange a nice memorial service and look for friends and family when an elderly person dies alone. If we can’t find someone to make arrangements and pay the bills, we have a few square feet in a potter’s field for you. You’re welcome.

I will adopt the Australian mob’s excellent practice of linking to other reviews here, especially since I am a minority of one on this book. Everyone else found it brilliant. So look for more appreciative reviews from Maxine at Euro Crime (who found it compelling and brilliant)  kimbofo (who says “psychological crime thrillers don’t come much better than this”) and Kerrie (who likens it to a orchestral concerto and says she’s “staggered by the power of this book”). Not to mention the CWA panel that nominated it for an International Dagger. So don’t mind me. Just not much for psychological thrillers with quite this pyschology-to-thrill ratio. I’m shallow that way.

the girl in the New York Times

Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times provides a detailed review of The Girl Who Played With Fire ahead of its US release date, finding the memorable heroine the main attraction: “Lisbeth Salander, the angry punk hacker in Stieg Larsson’s 2008 best seller, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” was one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller: picture Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft endowed with Mr. Spock’s intense braininess and Scarlett O’Hara’s spunky instinct for survival.” She says the book suffers from an excess of coincidence, but “boasts an intricate, puzzlelike story line that attests to Mr. Larsson’s improved plotting abilities, a story line that simultaneously moves backward into Salander’s traumatic past, even as it accelerates toward its startling and violent conclusion.” Though some of the elements of the book are over-the-top and melodramatic, in Kakutani’s estimation, the main characters’ originality makes it all worthwhile. And given she isn’t the Times’s usual reviewer of popular fiction, she finds originality to be a surprise and uses the dreaded “transcend” word:

As he did in “Dragon Tattoo,” Mr. Larsson — a former journalist and magazine editor — mixes precise, reportorial descriptions with lurid melodramatics lifted straight from the stock horror and thriller cupboard. . . . The ending of “The Girl Who Played With Fire” — like the revelation about Salander’s past, which gives the book its title — comes straight out of a horror movie: it’s gory, harrowing and operatically over the top. The reason it works is the same reason that “Dragon Tattoo” worked: Mr. Larsson’s two central characters, Salander and Blomkvist, transcend their genre and insinuate themselves in the reader’s mind through their oddball individuality, their professional competence and, surprisingly, their emotional vulnerability.

c’est dommage

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.”

Kerrie reviews The Girl Who Played with Fire and points to several other reviews and Dorte’s investigation of sources posted to her blog previously.

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.

Peter also reports that a new Wallander is soon to appear in 2009, Den Orolige Mannen (The Worried Man) which he describes thus:

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.

be reassured – utopia repels invaders! (not)

Slate has an article by Nathanial Rich titled “Scandinavian Crime Wave: Why the Most Peaceful People on Earth Write the Greatest Homicide Thrillers.” After reviewing a few highlights – Nesbo, Sjowall and Wahloo, Mankell – the first answer he proposes is that crime sells. But then, thank goodness, he asks the underlying question: why do Scandinavians, who live in the “happiest countries on earth” by some measures, want to read about mayhem and disorder at home when they could continue to read popular English imports?

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. There is a good reason why Mankell’s corpses tend to turn up in serene, bucolic settings—on a country farm, on a bobbing raft, in a secluded meadow, or in the middle of a snow-covered field: A dark bloodstain in a field of pure, white snow is far creepier than a body ditched in a trash-littered alley.

Er . . . maybe it’s because I’m reading Roslund-Hellstrom’s 21, which is about as grim as it gets, but I think fundamentally that’s not at all what’s going on. The world that Sjowall and Wahloo and those who followed in their footsteps depict is not sublime. On the surface, it’s relatively orderly and neat, and the social services available are enough to make an American want to pack up and move, but it’s clear that things are not that tranquil, that evil isn’t an abberation that comes to disturb what is otherwise a peaceable kingdom.

Take Karin Fossum, for example. Her small towns are populated by people who carry good and evil in varying measures within them. Criminals aren’t invaders from Planet Nasty and when the crime is solved, things don’t go back to nice and normal. What makes them so creepy and so effective is that nothing is that neat, that you know arresting one confused and unhappy person won’t change the society that leads to people being confused and unhappy. Sjowall and Wahloo were critics of society, not defenders of tranquility. There’s not a whole lot of happiness going on no matter what team the characters are playing on, and solving a crime doesn’t restore order; it merely gives us insight into what makes us all tick.

Where you see the kind of “happiness and tranquility interrupted by violence” theme is in the pure-entertainment thriller in which a monstrous serial killer (clever, twisted, utterly alien) or the corporate Team Evil (nasty developers, businessmen who run sex rings, secret cabals that plan to destroy the world) are pitted against angst-ridden Dudley Dorights, usually in settings that portray “normal” society as wealthy, white, successful, and happy – until the aliens arrive.

There’s no critique of society in these kinds of books because the bad guys are invaders from another planet. Though the tortured heroes have to “enter the mind” of the bad guys so they can give us the full tour, the deluxe set of thrills, there’s no question that law enforcement is good, society is good, and people are good; it’s just the bad guys who are bad. No shades of gray. We only have to be uneasy because, like pod people, the evil characters look just like us – until they are unmasked, at which point we can recoil in satisfied disgust, knowing that we’d never be involved in that kind of nastiness, that we are not implicated in things that go wrong. The reason these books focus on unusual crimes (the more unusual, the better) is that we can enjoy ourselves without ever connecting what we’re reading to our own lives, our own communities, the problems we’d rather not think about. It’s all in good fun, and the good guys always restore order, until the next, regularly-scheduled alien invasion.

I don’t see that tendency in the Scandinavian crime fiction I’ve read, and I certainly don’t agree that these books have “reassuringly mechanical, ticktocking plots.” Well, the plot of Jo Nesbo’s The Devil’s Star reminded me too much of the typical American serial killer unified field theory of evil, but I forgave it because the protagonist’s struggle with himself and with his own police organization was so gripping. But even books like Camilla Lackberg’s Ice Princess, which is highly conventional, probed more deeply into the psychology of its messed-up characters (if not of its protagonists) than the typical racing-against-the-clock serial killer story. The bad guys were human, not aliens.  And the place where they lived wasn’t  magically restored to peace and tranquility once they were captured and removed.

The reason I like Scandinavian crime fiction is that it values both character and plot; it doesn’t rely on easy answers; it doesn’t portray evil as an abberation but as part of the human experience, an outcome of our social structures, something in which we are all implicated. And it makes me think.

Save reassuring and mechanical for those who want to think things are basically fine, so long as we can recognize and contain the evil Other. But if that’s what you want, don’t bother picking up Scandinavian crime fiction. It probably won’t be all that reassuring.

out of order

Maxine, aka Petrona, reviews Jo Nesbo’s The Redeemer which she finds not perfect, but still top notch. As she puts it, “the Harry Hole books comprise one of the top police-procedural series being written today. Although the books have flaws, they are flaws of ambition – the plots are very clever, and if perhaps they are sometimes a bit too clever, that’s better than the opposite. These novels are thoughtful, intelligent, exciting and above all, have a great central character.” This astute comment comes on the heels of a Nesbo binge. She recommends reading the series in order, which is difficult unless you read Norwegian or have a lot of patience waiting for translations. Which brings me to our next item . . .

In her “Dark Passages” column for the L.A. Times, Sarah Weinman says what we all have been thinking: what is up with publishers issuing translations out of order, often causing appalling spoilers for series fans? She starts by analyzing the Scandinavian scene:

Lately, English-language publishers have developed an unfortunate habit with crime fiction in translation: Instead of starting at the very beginning of a series — as Pantheon did in bringing out the 10-book “Story of Crime” opus by Swedes Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in the proper sequence — books appear out of order, in haphazard fashion.

Heads are still being scratched over why “The Man Who Smiled,” the fourth outing of Henning Mankell’s popular detective, Inspector Kurt Wallander, was the last to be published in America. Because Jo Nesbo’s Norwegian sleuth, Harry Hole, first showed up on British soil with “The Devil’s Star” — book five in the series — it spoiled important plot points in “The Redbreast” (book three) and “The Redeemer” (book four), published in subsequent years. And I can’t help but wonder if Stieg Larsson had lived to complete all 10 books he allegedly envisioned for his series characters Lisabeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” would have been published in English long after some mythical fifth or sixth volume took the entire world by storm.

Publishers choose the nonlinear approach for all sorts of reasons, such as commercial viability and what book in a series may grab reader attention best, so they will seek out earlier installments. “Jar City,” for example, was a smart choice to introduce Iceland’s undisputed crime-writing star Arnaldur Indridason because it was a major step forward, creatively and sales-wise, from the first two books featuring Inspector Erlendur (which remain untranslated). But readers who want to commit wholesale to a new series character and follow him or her through all manner of delightful and dangerous adventures are understandably frustrated at the disregard for series order.

Then she goes on to discuss the work of French writer Fred Vargas, also translated out of order, but with less unpleasant results for the reader. “Adamsberg himself is such a bizarre character, so off-the-charts in what he would deem logical deductive reasoning, that it makes perfect sense to meet him at different, random stages of the series.”

Maxine is also rather taken with Vargas, who’s up against a lot of Scandinavians for the International Dagger this year, and now that she’s read all the books on the shortlist she’s having trouble deciding where to place her bets.

And finally, Euro Crime offers an excerpt from Karin Fossum’s new English-language release, The Water’s Edge.

a review of Jarkko Sipila’s Against the Wall

Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall by Jarkko Sipila, translated by Peter Ylitalo Leppa (Ice Cold Crime, June 2009)

Though Finland’s literary scene is a lively one, not very many Finnish writers have had their crime fiction translated into English. A small publishing start-up in Minnesota is setting out to change that. Ice Cold Crime has just published its first title, Jarkko Sipila’s Against the Wall. I was lucky enough to get a copy from the publisher, who happens to be the brother of the author. I admit to having slight misgivings about that all-in-the-family relationship, but the fledgling publisher is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and is taking an all-business approach. The first volume hot off the press is nicely produced, very affordably priced, and the translation is as straightforward as the story (though noticeably Minnesotan – “hot dish” is served up in one scene, and a housing style is described as a “rambler” – which would be casseroles and ranch houses in other places; not that I object, being fluent in Minnesotan myself).

Against the Wall is a no-nonsense gritty police procedural that gives equal time to the crooks and the cops and rather more time to plot than to character development. Pitted against an ensemble cast of police, with an undercover officer who plays both sides taking a lead role, there is a ragtag group of cons, ranging from a low-level junkie who runs errands and tries unsuccessfully to avoid getting in over his head, to a businessman who lives in an expensive Art Nouveau buliding, his luxurious lifestyle paid for by arranging deals with Russian partners to fudge shipping manifests, turning a truckload of rubber gloves into a profitable shipment of large-screen televisions.

The story begins with a man being lured to an isolated garage where he is executed in cold blood; a second man is similarly lured to the site, where he is told to dispose of both the weapon and the body. He doesn’t have the stomach for this kind of violence and he panics, later trying to get out of the crack by tipping off the undercover cop, though for a time he becomes their prime suspect.

For a relatively short book – coming in at just under 300 pages – there’s a lot going on, with the scene shifting from seedy parts of Helsinki to prisons to wealthy neighborhoods, the point of view roving from one perspective to another. Though Sipila doesn’t indulge in the meditative character analysis of so much Scandinavian crime fiction – we see little of the home life of the police, and they are too busy knocking heads and following leads to indulge in personal introspection – there are some quick sketches that make a vivid impression: Juha Saarnikangas, the hapless addict who gathers crumbs at the fringes of criminal tables, and who can deliver an impromptu lecture on Finnish architecture; Markus Markkanen who is always on the lookout for ways to skim a percentage off of whatever scam is going down; Jouku Nyholm, a depressive customs inspector who is trapped in a meaningless job with a viscious boss; and Suhonen, a cop who is totally at home among criminals. It is he who pulls together the threads of the plot, tying the murder, the black market dealings, and the criminal rivalries together in a . . . well, if it’s in Helsinki, can it be described as a Mexican standoff? At any rate, the book begins and ends with violence, and in the middle shows criminals trying to score a few extra points against each other, as the police work together to solve the murder.

The author, a journalist who has covered crime for both newspapers and television, has written eleven books, most of them entries in this series. He has also written scripts for a televised version, and it’s easy to see how well this story, which won the 2009 Clue award for best work of Finnish crime fiction, could translate to the screen.  Though chances are Finnish readers are well familiar with the police characters, from the squad room clown, Mikko Kulta, to the lieutenant in charge, there’s no missing backstory to confuse the new reader. The large number of characters and their unfamiliar names can be a challenge, but luckily there’s a character list in the front of the book to help keep them straight. And though a map might have come in handy, too, the author provides a good sense of place, showing Finland as a borderland between a typically orderly Scandinavian state and the new Russia, between law and disorder, a country that has a a unique language but which has changed hands between Sweden and Russia over the years, a place where Western Europe rubs up against the wild frontier of Eastern Europe. A good place, in other words, to spin tales about crime, corruption, and cops.

For more about the author, see an nterview at finpop. Juri Nummelin has the backstory to the new publishing endeavor at pulpetti; Peter Rozovsky discusses the book at his invaluable Detectives Beyond Borders. And Glenn Harper reviews it at International Noir Fiction.

It looks as if we’ll see more Finnish crime fiction from Ice Cold Crime, and I am looking forward to it.

photo courtesy of lasi.kurkijarvi

good company in the pyscho database

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.”

ProfMike thinks Jo Nesbo’s The Redeemer rocks:

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.

maryb (mindtraveler and appreciator – what a great job description) found Karin Alvtegen’s Missing to be a winner: “pinpoint sharp and tightly focused” with a compelling and original protagonist.

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.”

random round-up

Peter beat me to reviewing a new English translation of Jarkko Sipila’s Against the Wall, just published this month by Ice Cold Crime, a new small publishing house in Minnesota that promises to bring more Finnish crime fiction into English. I am about halfway through it and hope to post a review next week, but so far agree with Peter that it’s a gritty procedural that doesn’t mince words but gets on with the story of petty criminals caught up in a dangerous trade – and the team of police who track them down.

An anonymous Australian bibliophile at The Genteel Arsenal samples Swedish crime fiction after reading about the BBC Branagh version of Mankell’s series and is favorably impressed when reading Sidetracked. She(?) picks up on several features that make it unique: a vulnerable hero who is dismayed by crime and has family issues, its insight into Swedish society as the police try to come to grips with the kind of violence they think only happens in America, and complex rendering of victims and criminals.

Wilda Williams of Library Journal has an interview with Sonny Mehta, publisher of the US edition of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Paul Bogaards, Knopf’s executive director of publicity.

Norm (aka Uriah) has now read all of the International Daggar contenders and is wondering how the judges will make their choice. He has so far winnowed Vargas and Arnaldur Indridason from the list, arguing the current nominees are not their strongest work, but is making us wait as he ponders the remaining four excellent Scandinavian contestants. Meanwhile, you can read his reviews of them all.

UPDATE: I’ve taken so long preparing this round-up that Norm has posted his hot tip. Or perhaps its a properly cold one. In any case, you must read his rationale, which manages to make all the contenders sound good.

Kerrie reviews Jo Nesbo’s Redeemer and gives it (and the translator) high marks. I especially liked this bit: “You can almost feel Nesbo building this book, layer on layer, investigating how events that took place over a decade before, can have consequences in present time.” What a great description. No wonder I love his stuff.

More on K.O. Dahl’s Last Fix from International Noir Fiction. Sounds like an unusual structure at work.

Martin Edwards talks about Hakan Nesser at his blog with the great title, Do You Write Under Your Own Name?

John Baker reviews Peter Høeg’s Borderliners, calling it “a difficult and inspiring novel, rich in meditations on the human condition.” Not exactly crime fiction, but mentioned because so many of us know the author via Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

And finally, my somewhat Scandinavian crime fiction-related news: I just signed a contract with a Finnish publisher, Nemo, who plans to publish a Finnish translation of my mystery In the Wind. I couldn’t be more pleased to have a chance to be part of the Scandinavian crime fiction scene, even if the book is set in Chicago. A great big kiitos to the Finnish reader who brought it to their attention.

links from friends

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.