coming soon, or recently arrived

Catching up on a backlog of reviews and other things … I thought this time I would be geographically organized.

Nordic countries in general

Break out your wallets; Simon Clarke provides a tempting list of recent and forthcoming translations.

Norm has a poll going at Crime Scraps on which women crime writers from Nordic countries are most popular, his first entry in the Sisters in Crime 25th anniversary book bloggers’ challenge.

Denmark

At Crime Segments, NancyO reviews Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes  (apa Mercy), which she enjoyed tremendously, particularly for its characters and all-around originality, concluding it’s “amazingly good.”

More praise for Adler-Olsen in the Winnepeg Free Press, with a shout-out to the translator.

Dorte offers some intriguing commentary on the background of a book in the Department Q series, not yet translated into English. Fascinating stuff, and something to look forward to.

Violette Severin visits Denmark on a Europass challenge.

Finland

I review Jarkko Sipila’s Nothing but the Truth, which I enjoyed quite a lot. Maxine reviews the author’s Against the Wall and finds it a pretty good police procedural.

Maxine also reviews Sofi Oksanen’s Purge and sparks off a debate about whether it should be considered crime fiction or not. The paperback release is trending that way, though it’s more of a historical saga. Whatever it is, she found it extremely good.

—– not a thing for Iceland at the moment, sorry —–

Norway

At How Mysterious! Karen Miller Russell finds her patience with Karin Fossum running out, being particularly unhappy with The Water’s Edge (which I liked a great deal). The author’s focus on crimes involving children has made her lose interest – though Maxine, in a comment, may have coaxed her to give The Caller a try.

Jose Ignacio Escribano takes a look at K. O. Dahl’s police procedural series featuring Gunnarstand and Frolich to remind himself that Lethal Investments will be released soon.

Sweden

Jose Ignacio Escribano reviews Sjowall and Wahloo’s The Locked Room (in both English and Spanish), the eighth in the Martin Beck series.

Lynn Harvey reviews Camilla Lackberg’s The Preacher at Euro Crime, enjoying the contrast between the main character’s loving home life and the convoluted (perhaps too convoluted) troubles of the family embroiled in tragedy. Incidentally, Philip reports in the FriendFeed Crime and Mystery Fiction room that Lackberg is getting involved in a television series and feature films and will be slowing down her book publishing schedule as a result.

Bibliojunkie (who is not looking for a cure) is impressed by Hakan Nesser’s Woman With Birthmark, saying it’s “very well constructed and elegantly told” in a thorough and insightful review.

The Sunday Business Post (Ireland) has a lengthy and interesting interview slash profile of Liza Marklund exploring her motivation as a writer and a politically-involved journalist and documentarian.  And oh, look who wrote the interview – Declan Burke! No wonder it’s so well done.

can’t get no instant gratification

Books to the Ceiling (what a charming image) has a thorough and thoughtful review and appreciation of Karin Fossum’s The Water’s Edge.

Bernadette reacts to Don’t Look Back, also by Karin Fossum. This is the first in the Sejer and Skarre series, but you don’t have to read them in order. Both books have the same quiet but intense suspense that comes from the slow fuse smoldering in a very believable situation. “Without car chases or guns blazing,” Bernadette says, “the story managed to be suspense-filled and captivating from beginning to end as Sejer and Skarre teased out important details about village life from its inhabitants . . . Don’t Look Back has all the things I love most in crime fiction: interesting, believable characters, a puzzle-like plot, a setting I can get lost in and a tangible credibility that sometime somewhere that exact scenario has played itself out in reality. Or will one day.”

Norm (aka Uriah) has been trying to put off reading the last chapters of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest because, well, they are the last. Period.

And Harvill Secker will release an e-book version of Henning Mankell’s The Man From Beijing before they release the hardcover. The prices will be the same, though – no deep discount  for the e-book as Amazon has been doing.

I find myself wondering about the old practice of expecting people (in the US, at least – not sure what the practice is in the UK) to wait a year for a relatively inexpensive  paperback edition of a book to be published. That once made some kind of sense; it was generally timed to promote a new hardcover title of the same author. If you wouldn’t pop full hardcover price, you could indulge in the mass market younger sibling. But books have a notoriously short shelf life (Michael Korda said it was shorter than yogurt many years ago – it’s certainly no longer now) and inexpensive editions are available online almost immediately because of the ubiquitous used book market. When to release the e-book is a new dilemma – early on, for early adopters? A few weeks later, so traditional booksellers will have a slight edge, briefly? From the reader’s perspective, it would make much more sense to have a choice of formats right away. I know a lot of older readers whose wrists hurt if they have to hold a hardcover. I, on the other hand, don’t much like mass market because I have to wrestle the books to stay open and the type is often too small. Then again, a lot of new books are being released in trade paper only, which annoys people who are serious about buying books. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have not only a format choice, but a price-point that suits you? Right now?

Telling consumers to wait a year to have a choice of formats seems unlikely to be sustainable in an era of purchasing songs one at a time,  Tivo-ing your television so you aren’t tied to a network’s schedule, and streaming films to your computer just as soon as the popcorn has popped. Maybe it’s time to give readers some control over their timing and preferences, too.  Really, wouldn’t it be wise to make your audience happy? Right now?

reviews and comparisons

Marilyn Stasio provides reviews of The Girl Who Played With Fire and Karin Fossum’s The Water’s Edge. She advises impatient readers to cut to the chase and skip the first 124 pages of Girl, when the story really starts, and admires Fossum’s ability to examine every character touched by a crime with humanity in this “exceptionally fine story.”

At Euro Crime, Maxine reviews Ake Edwardson’s Frozen Tracks, the third Erik Winter novel to be translated though it is the sixth in the series. (The first will be published in a couple of months.) This is a very long book – over 500 pages – but she finds it overall a satisfying procedural involving two seemingly unrelated sets of events.

I managed to miss an interesting review posted last month by crimeficreader of Yrsa Sigurdarsdottir’s second novel, My Soul To Take. She thinks there hasn’t been much accomplished in the character development department from the first in the series, but finds it the plotting and tone to be very successful:

There are so many red herrings it’s like being asked to locate the one whitebait in a fish market.  Sigurðardóttir doesn’t just wrong foot the reader, she has you in the wrong footwear to deal with the terrain.  We again have the dark balanced with the light, pulled off in a rather unique and skilful way.  Watch out for a sex therapist and her tools of the trade as this element covers both those aspects.

If that isn’t a hook, I don’t know what is.

And finally – Seamus Scanlon, a guest on Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays blog, offers an overview of the “Story of Crime” – an overarching title for the Martin Beck series by Maj Swowall and Per Wahloo. The ten books are “all written with aplomb and honesty and set the standard for all police procedurals that followed.” The Swedish series is able to write about crime and society in a way that reflects the authors’ Marxist views without becoming overly didactic.

Scanlon mentions a debt owed to Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series; in fact, the athors translated McBain into Swedish, but weren’t yet familiar with his work when they started writing about Martin Beck and his colleagues. This seems more like a Liebnitz/Newton moment, when people in two countries working with similar materials happened to invent something very similar – calculus and the Hogarthian police procedural that reflects the urban experinece in all its grimy glory – at roughly the same time. (McBain started his series nearly a decade before Roseanna was published.)

Scanlon also points out the ways in which Mankell and those who followed him into the crime writing trenches owe a debt to Sjowall and Wahloo. “Mankell’s Inspector Wallander, an existential warrior battling crime and his own melancholia, closely resembles Beck.” But that suggests a tonal similarity that, I think, is not entirely true. Martin Beck would probably be taken aback to be called a “warrior” and while he has a dose of melancholia (as well as frequent colds) the books themselves are hardly gloomy – they’re shot through with humor and irony. Which is another way in which they resemble McBain more than Mankell.

This photo from Flickr’s Creative Commons pool was taken by Jickel, who comments “The tape seems to be the kind the police use to mark out crime scenes.”

post-vacation review round-up

Martin Edwards has a lovely quote from Hakan Nesser on the essence of crime fiction, at his blog, Do You Write Under Your Own Name? Go read it.

Bernadette finds much to like about Camilla Lackberg’s Ice Princess.

I reviewed Inger Frimansson’s Island of the Naked Women for Reviewing the Evidence. The author delves deep into psychological suspense in a hardscrabble setting. The title sounds like a hedonistic ClubMed destination but shows a different side of traditional Scandinavian attitudes toward sex: in the old days, unmarried women who became pregnant or otherwise offended public morals were abandoned there to die of exposure.

Euro Crime finds an interesting trend – many first books in series are getting published (though maddeningly out of order) and this time it’s Ake Edwardsson’s Erik Winter series.

Crimeficreader reads Johan Theorin’s The Darkest Room. Though she isn’t planning a winter visit to Oland anytime soon, she thought the book was original and compelling.

The wonderfully original aspect of The Darkest Room is that the suspense comes from finding out what really happened from a myriad of obscure routes, with the reader not fully comprehending the extent of issues to be resolved at the outset.  The wonderfully brilliant aspect of reading The Darkest Room is the feeling of satisfaction on reaching the end and the sense of time well-spent with an author who knows how to entertain, whilst exploring the darker recesses of the mind; for The Darkest Room in Theorin’s novel is in the mind.

Rob Kitchen reviews Yrsa Sigurdarsdottir’s Last Rituals and, after weighing its strengths and weaknesses concludes it’s a “mildly enjoyable first novel, but nothing startling.”

Bookwitch takes a look at Jo Nesbo’s writing for children which sounds rather fun but nothing like the Harry Hole books.

And of course The Girl (which scored #1 on the New York Times bestseller list)  is getting a lot of attention. Here are some of the reviews:

• January Magazine – “oddly epic love story, ultra-violent crime thriller and classic buddy novel all at once”
• Entertainment Weekly – “another gripping, stay-up-all-night read, but it’s also a bit sloppy”
• Philly Enquirer – “What Larsson has done is akin to enlisting two huge, enticing stars, then keeping them separated for much of the action, united only through e-mail.”
• San Francisco Chronicle (Alan Cheuse) – “The books are so good, in fact, that I have to keep reminding myself that they are genre novels, not mainstream fiction” (ouch!)
• Seattle Times – “The troubled, brilliant Lisbeth is unforgettable.”
• USA Today – “Larsson makes the reader love and worry about his heroine as though she were real.”
• Washington Post – “Here is a writer with two skills useful in entertaining readers royally: creating characters who are complex, believable and appealing even when they act against their own best interest; and parceling out information in a consistently enthralling way.”

The Seattle Times also reviews Karin Fossum’s The Water’s Edge –

The book has several sterling qualities, including a concise, crisp translation and a terrifying portrait of the fragmenting couple that discovers the body — especially the husband and his creepy fixation with the case.

AND – for bonus points – interview Reg Keeland, the Girl’s translator, who explains how “Reg” was born and how he keeps up with current Swedish slang.

two reviews – and a contest (!!!!!)

Glenn Harper of International Crime Fiction reviews Johann Theorin’s second book, The Darkest Room, which follows on his debut,  Echoes from the Dead, and won the Glass Key award. Deservingly, it sounds, based on his assessment. It’s a complex story with elements of folklore/ghost stories, mystery, and thriller with mulitple characters and some historical vignettes.

The novel is interesting from the beginning, naturalistic but spooky as well as well written, but as the threads of the tale begin to converge, along with the Christmas blizzard of the original Swedish title, the pace picks up to that of a thriller (and the translator, Marlaine Delargy, deserves a lot of credit for maintaining that pace in lucid English)—you’ll find yourself ripping through the almost 400 pages . . . And where a number of Scandinavian novels have dealt with the new immigtion problems, Theorin looks toward a different kind of “intruder” into the calm, uniform surface of Swedish life: the continuing presence of those who are gone but not quite forgotten.

Sounds excellent. I’m impatient to read it.

Dorte reviews Karin Fossum’s The Water’s Edge, saying “This thriller is two stories in one: the solution of the crime, but also the story about the ripples which are caused by little Jonas´ death: the reactions of his relatives, friends and the couple who found him.” I agree – and this is typical of Fossum, it’s all about the people around the crime and how they are implicated or are affected. I thought very highly of this book.

win this book!

And finally –

A CONTEST!

Knopf, Stieg Larsson’s US publisher, may have made us wait too long to get our hands on the books that everyone else in the world has already read, but they have been kind enough to send me a copy of The Girl Who Played With Fire, which I reviewed here earlier. (And no, I’m not palming you off with a used copy; this is a pristine copy that has never been read.) If you would like to put your name in the hat, send an e-mail message to fister @ gac.edu with the subject line CONTEST. In the message, please answer this question: Which international (non-US) crime fiction author do you think deserves a wider audience – and why? Be sure also to include your name and mailing address. I’ll put all the names in a hat and draw one winner. And if you don’t mind, I will also post a list of some of your responses so that all of us can discover yet more books to read. You know how terrified we are that we might run out.

I’m afraid I’m going to limit this contest to people living in the Western hemisphere – US, Canada, Mexico, and points south (at least until you bump into Antarctica). I would normally be open to a world-wide competition, but hey, we were the last kids on the block to get this translation, so nanner nanner nanner.

Update: I forgot to mention, I will not keep your addresses after the drawing, and I won’t use them for any other purpose.

more authors to watch for

Tonica, our Scandinavian talent scout, profiles two more favorite writers who have not yet been published in English.

Leena Lehtolainen is a Finnish mystery writer, who writes about female cop Maria Kallio. Maria is married and has a little daughter (and a cat), but sometimes glances at other men . . . Finland is in many ways like Sweden, but in other ways different and it’s those differences that fascinate me. [Note: me too!]

Anna Jansson is a nurse who turned to writing mysteries. Her books are set on the island of Gotland. The setting is one reason I find these books so interesting. Gotland is a very special place, with a fascinating history. Her heroine is female cop Maria Wern. She seems quite intelligent, but not particulary tough, not like the tv version, played by Eva Röse, who is an excellent Swedish actress.

Thanks again for the heads up on books we’d like to read if only we read Swedish (or Finnish).

Reg takes a break from translating to give us the backstory on Stieg Larsson’s titles.

Meanwhile, John Dugdale rounds up summer “thrillers” in the Times (UK) and is disappointed in Karin Fossum’s The Water’s Edge.

Fossum is usually ranked with the best of the Scandinavian crime invaders, but here it’s a little hard to see what the fuss is about. Sejer is almost parodically colourless, the writing is merely functional, and The Water’s Edge is only half-heartedly a whodunnit. But if you’re in search of an ­antidote to the in-your-face energy of ­American crime fiction, this quiet, ­slender, bracingly bleak tale could well be it.

Er, well, that’s actually the point. It’s about the most shocking and hot-button issue, the ultimate crime, pedophilia. But rather than indulge in Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare or putting us Face to Face with Pure Evil, this book is about ordinary people and the way that evil isn’t pure at all. I take issue with the claim that “the writing is merely functional.” It’s understated on purpose in contrast to the usual “let’s throw more fuel on.” There’s a place for expressive prose and in-depth character analysis, but not if you’re telling this story, this way.  It’s an artful choice, and it’s carried off skillfully.

more bits and bobs

A travel feature on visiting Stockholm while on a Stieg Larsson pilgrimage appeared in The Mail.  Apparently Larsson’s local geography is spot-on. Sadly, his financial/family affairs are still in muddle, as reported in the Guardian. Bookwitch also has some thoughts on the sad mess.

Peter tiptoes up to The Water’s Edge by Karin Fossum and concludes it is “a well written, sober book dealing with a very difficult subject in a sensitive and enlightening fashion.” The subject is pedophilia and she does a phenomenal job of handling that dynamite with care. It’s a brilliant book that I expect will be on my top ten of the year.  (I am reviewing it for Mystery Scene.)

The Bookseller has a little bit more about the next Wallander book (as well as three more BBC adaptations coming next year). Hat tip to Euro Crime.

The Troubled Man tells the story of a retired naval officer who disappears during his daily walk in a forest near Stockholm. It is described as a “deeply personal” case for Wallander, because the missing man is the father-in-law of Wallander’s daughter Linda. Clues point back to the Cold War, and to right-wing extremist groups, said the publisher.

Mankell said: “I really thought that I had written my last novel about Wallander, but then I had this distinct feeling that there was one more story to be told.”

The Bookseller is also reporting the upcoming publication of a new financial thriller by Quentin Bates set in Iceland by a UK journalist who has just finished a masters in creative writing and reports on deep sea fishing.  Creative writing and journalism: how do you keep them sorted? Oh, never mind.

Martin Edwards has good things to say about the Swedish television version of the Wallander books recently run on UK television, as does Norm aka Uriah. Sigh . . . ooooh, wait, my library has one of the episodes . . .