What Book to Read?

The immense and I think on the whole well deserved popularity of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy made me want to read some more Scandinavian crime stories. Larsson’s work deserves greater space than I can give it here, so this will just be a brief outline of some other crime writers from Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

Next in popularity outside Scandinavia to Larsson is the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. His books have been given a boost by the creation of a BBC TV series starring Kenneth Branagh as Inspector Wallander. Filmed in Sweden with Swedish and English actors, the series has the same dour quality as the books. Inspector Wallander is a dogged policeman, but has otherwise a dysfunctional life – divorced, difficult relationship with his daughter, too much booze and junk food and not enough exercise. There is a somewhat neurotic quality to Wallander; he is always going on about how he is not getting anywhere with his investigation, but without much result. His cases always involve murder; a bit too often there is a serial killer. They are big on atmosphere rather than motive, though the resolution is usually satisfactory. I most recently read The Man Who Smiled (2005), but I can’t get excited about it. To me, the denouement was unsatisfactory; at the end villain reveals all to detective when he could easily just have killed him – a device I particularly dislike. Overall, however, the Wallander books are well worth reading.

Karin Fossum has a series featuring Norwegian policeman Inspector Konrad Sejer. I read Calling Out For You (2005) a title which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story. An Indian woman is brutally killed in a small town. Anyone could have done it. There are lots of points of view given, some of which are silly. Overall I didn’t like it much because I found the structure self-indulgent. It does hide who is the criminal – but then just about anyone could have been, for all the motive that was established. I got no real sense of it being set in Norway, rather than anywhere else. The writing is adequate but not compelling. I’d certainly read another of her books if I came across it, but I probably won’t seek one out.

Karin Alvtegen has won prizes for her crime stores in both Denmark and Sweden. I read Shadow, (2009), a psychological thriller rather than a detective story, set in Sweden. It is about the unravelling of a family secret – a crime whose existence is gradually revealed after the death of the family’s housekeeper. The family is already full of dysfunctional people who become more so as what really happened emerges. Because it is relating the past to the present, there is quite a lot of back story to be told. This is done through the recollection of characters – and, as is often the case, the past is remembered with unrealistic clarity – even when it has been suppressed by the person. The plot fairly predictable – though I didn’t see all of it coming. The story relies on the writer presenting a realistic and/or engaging picture of the characters in the drama but I found them a bit too simplistic. And as almost none of them is likeable, I didn’t much care what happened to them. Just as well, as it isn’t really made clear in the end. I found some of the motivation – for both action and inaction – quite unconvincing. And why should the person who caused it all get a vision of paradise when he dies? Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine writes similar stories – but to my mind she does it better.

I also read Arnaldur Indridason’s Hypothermia (2009), a story set in Iceland, featuring Detective Erlunder. He has misgivings about a death that looks like suicide, and undertakes his own unofficial investigation. Along side this he obsesses about the fate of two young people who simply disappeared some years earlier. His own brother had also disappeared in a storm, and this seems to be the cause of his obsession. He is another gloomy character with a failed marriage and dysfunctional children. The reader is privy to more of what happened than the detective through flash backs giving the view of the dead woman, which I found a bit artificial. The idea for what actually happened is quite clever, but again, I found the way the story unfolded unconvincing; most of the denouement is told to him by characters who would have had every reason to stay silent. Also, he is told exactly what he needs to piece the story together, and only that, so it all seems a bit convenient. The link he finds between the suicide case and the missing persons case is also pretty tenuous. As for the setting, the landscape and the weather are important to the story, and I got some sense of the beauty and the bleakness of Iceland.

 All of these books are of course translated, and I wonder if it is this that sometimes makes the writing seem a bit thin, or lacking in resonance. I read that Larsson’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, objected to the most recent translation of his work, giving the following example. One of the main characters, Blomkvist, has been wrongly convicted of defamation and someone asks him how he feels. ‘This is the worst day of my life’ he replies. In the original Swedish, he said ‘Like a sack of shit’. Gabrielsson says that ‘the sound, the essence, the colour, the character of the dialogue’ have all been changed. And maybe some of the life has gone out of these other stories too.