The Boy in the Suitcase is released

There is much to like about The Boy in the Suitcase by Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl, out this week from Soho Press. In addition to what I wrote here, here, here and here about the book, it avoids what I've come to regard as a wearying trademark of Scandinavian crime writing: the prologue that ends with the victim dead (or with everything going black,  the smell of the damp earth then ... nothing, the rope tightening, the blade approaching,  etc.)

Yes, this book has a prologue, too, but it's gripping without graphic violence, and it involves no death. It's more akin, in a way, to a thriller than to its Scandinavian crime-fiction brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins.

Like many a Scandinavian crime novel, this book has a social/political agenda (which its authors readily admit). But its occasional explicit "message" passages, about missing children or the treatment of immigrants, are so neatly slipped in among shifting points of view that one never minds them. [Declan Burke takes another Scandinavian crime novel to task for message-mongering over at his Crime Always Pays.]

The book's ending is heart-rending and empathetic in a way you might not expect, and the novel even has a few jokes.

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How could I have forgotten this when listing reasons to like The Boy in the Suitcase? A late chapter refers  to a pimp especially brutal toward women as "the man with the serpent tattoo."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon 2011: Friis and Hellstrom on whodunnit?

After a bit of unintentional comic byplay, my first Bouchercon panel finally got around to the question in its subtitle: How important is whodunnit?

Not at all, said Agnete Friis, co-author of The Boy in the Suitcase. Very, said Anders Roslund, one half of the team whose novels include Three Seconds and Cell 8.

The two don't necessarily disagree. Friis maintains that the social predicament of her book's (and her country's) unprotected victims, rather than the solution of a crime, is paramount. Roslund had stressed earlier that the novels he writes with Börge Hellström do not star the Stockholm police detective Ewart Grens, but rather feature him as "one of two," in a kind of dialectic with a different partner in each book.

In Three Seconds, the partner is a police informant working under such deep cover that his government handlers' refusal to acknowledge him very nearly dooms him to a death in which Grens would have been unknowingly complicit. The book's point? Police and informant/criminal are equally actors and victims. So, while "whodunnit?" in the traditional sense of "Who knocked off the duke in the library?" may be unimportant, "Who's doing it?" is the book's moral center.

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Anders Roslund and Agnete Friis were part of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A bit more on The Boy in the Suitcase

Two more quick observations about The Boy in the Suitcase:

1) The novel's occasional explicit "message" passages, about missing children or the treatment of immigrants, are so neatly slipped in among shifting points of view that one never minds them.

2) Though this is a grim tale of high tension (and very nicely executed), authors Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl do nothing to disprove a DBB reader's comment this week that "Danes are definitely the funniest of the Nordics."  There may be just two jokes in the novel's first 230 or so pages, but both are good.

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Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl will be part of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" on Thursday, Sept. 15, 10 a.m.-11 a.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More on "The Boy in the Suitcase"

Either Agnete Friis or Lene Kaaberbøl told an interviewer that their novel The Boy in the Suitcase is about powerless people, those who enjoy no social protection.

I'm not far enough into the book to know how this plays out, but there's a nice bit of foreshadowing early on. I'll avoid spoilers, but the punch line is a woman emerging from unconsciousness, struggling to make out a nurse's face, and seeing this:

"There was something there, in the tone of her voice, in the set of her jar, that was not compassion, but its opposite. Contempt."

Discussions of Nordic crime novels always say the books probe the ugly reality beneath the welfare state's placid surface, and they have been saying it for more than forty years.  Friis and Kaaberbøl here find a fresh way to show it.

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Another early scene has a character recalling a doctor's rage over a rape victim's horrific injuries. The authors handle the subject with commendable restraint that only enhances the horror. The same has not always been said of, say, Stieg Larsson. So, while it's early yet to pronounce judgment on the novel, I'm developing respect for it already. Too bad the title doesn't lend itself as easily to parody as does The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

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Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl will be part of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" on Thursday, Sept. 15, 10 a.m.-11 a.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A good line, and goodnight!

This is an early night, so I'll leave you with just one line from the book I've begun reading along with a thought about what makes it good.

The book is The Boy in the Suitcase, the authors are Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl, and the set-up is a rich man musing upon the obstacles he overcame to have his cliffside house built. Here's the line:

"(H)e had even conquered the representative of the local Nature Society with a donation that nearly made her choke on her herbal tea."

That's not a knee-slapper, but it's a functionally amusing line that keeps the narrative going, hints at the point-of-view character's susceptibility to amusement at his own situation and, at the same time, just hints at the corrupting influence of money. That's not a bad day's work for one humble line.

Godnat!

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A helpful commenter suggests that, given recent events in Norway, I ought to point out that the boy in the suitcase is alive.

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Agnete Friis and Lene Kaaberbøl will be part of my panel "A QUESTION OF DEATH: HOW IMPORTANT IS WHODUNIT?" on Thursday, Sept. 15, 10 a.m.-11 a.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011