Location. Location? Location! with questions for readers

I'm reading a location-based collection of stories and, by coincidence, the first three stories I read illustrate three approaches to location in crime stories (other genres, too, I imagine).

One of the stories, and not a bad one, laid the tourism touch on a bit heavily, I thought, name-checking well-known locations with just the slightest whiff of the guidebook. A second, a fine story, was a bit more subtle in its invocation of setting but, as good as the story was, it would have worked just as well set in any number of other places. A third story, the best of the lot, to my mind, made superb use of its setting's unique features. The author could have written a similar story and set it elsewhere but, more than is the case with the other two, it would have been a different story.

 Now, your thoughts on setting, please. What novels or stories simply could not be set anywhere else? What novels or stories that emphasize their settings could, nonetheless, work if transplanted to a new location?  What, in other words, does setting mean to you? What constitutes good setting in fiction, crime fiction or otherwise? 

*

The book illustrated at the upper right of this post is Maxim Jakubowski's Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction, to which I contributed chapters on Andrea Camilleri's Sicily and Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland. Arnaldur's novels are more intimately (and literally, in some cases) rooted in their settings than any others I know. What authors do you say are most inextricably bound up with their settings?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

No-nonsense openings then and now

My Nordic kinsman Thjostolf the Thinker is no great shakes as a farmer and too given to moody self-analysis to be a great warrior in the business world. An executive must feign passion where none exists, what most people call lying, and Thjostolf couldn't do it (though when a colleague, in the course of lighthearted office persiflage, called Thjostolf weak rather than morally upright, Thjostolf cleft him in twain, from collarbone to hip, with his great sword.)

One day Thjostolf suggested that similarities existed between the Icelandic sagas and the pulp and paperback-original crime fiction I sometimes read.

"Behold," he said, indicating the opening of Egil's Saga:

"There was a man named Ulf, the son of Bjalfi and of Hallbera, the daughter of Ulf the Fearless."

and "Dig this," pulling out his tattered reprint of Charles Runyon's The Anatomy of Violence:

"Each evening a twilight wind blows through Cutright City."

"And this," voice hushed, as he read from a text we both regard with near-scriptural reverence:

"Kells walked north on Spring.” * 

Thjostolf was right. In each case the author plunges right into the story, wasting no words. Arnaldur Indriðason, the best of the current Nordic crime writers, claims inspiration from the Icelandic sagas, though I edged toward the door as I reminded Thjostolf that Arnaldur attributed their concision to economic necessity rather than love of laconic prose. Ruminations, false starts, lengthy description, useless adverbs, and seventy pages of the hero dipping his madeleine in a cup of tea would have made a prodigious waste of calfskin, the expensive material on which the Icelanders set down their stories.

But Thjostolf just nodded and reminded me, in turn, that Josef Škvorecký once had a character suggest the Nordic sagas had inspired Dashiell Hammett. Škvorecký may have been taking the piss, but Hammett, the sagas, and punchy openings of the kind offered above will appeal to readers who like their stories brisk, their prose clean, and their humor deadpan.

Speaking of clean prose that wastes no words, I reminded Thjostolf, I have to get back to work on the copy desk. Thjostolf, who hates a bad sentence as much as I do, tightened his hand on the grip of his sword but said nothing. Maybe he'll make an executive after all.

======================

* Fast One, by Paul Cain

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Arnaldur's latest, plus reasons to be thankful, Part I

I've just started Arnaldur Indriðason's sixth Inspector Erlendur novel to appear in English, Hypothermia, and I hope you'll forgive me for calling that a very cool title. Here are a few bits of the first chapter:

"She drove over Mosfellsheidi moor where there was little traffic, just the odd pair of headlights passing by on their way to town. Only one other car was travelling east and she hung on its red rear lights, grateful for the company. ... Karen was aware of the mountain Grimannsfell to her right, although she couldn't see it ... The red lights accelerated and disappeared into the darkness ... She had difficulty identifying the landmarks in the gloom ... "

What kind of story does that remind you of? Yep, me, too, and sure enough, after poor Karen discovers her friend's body, here's an investigating detective at the scene:

"He walked over to the shelving unit and noticed the brown leather spines of five volumes of Jón Árnason's Collected Folk Tales. Ghost stories, he thought to himself."

I don't know yet if ghosts will figure in the story, but Arnaldur sure knows how to create atmosphere, doesn't he?

***

On a more earthly plane, the Rap Sheet's J. Kingston Pierce offers a longish list of things he's grateful for as the United States heads into Thanksgiving Day. He saves for last a sentiment with which I agree wholeheartedly:

"Let me voice my appreciation, too, for the authors and critics who have made me feel welcome among them. ... I’ve been looking during my entire earthly existence for what sociologists would call `my tribe,' the folks among whom I fit best. I thought that tribe was made up of journalists, the professionals I trained with and learned from for so many years. But the fact is, I might have been looking in the wrong place. Turns out, where I feel most at home is in a crowd of crime-genre fans, all of whom have traveled the same dark (fictional) thoroughfares over which I’ve trod in my mind for decades. I hope to see you all again next October in beautiful San Francisco."

Amen, Jeff, and thanks, crime guys and gals. You've made my year. Happy Thanksgiving.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Silence of the Grave

This second of Arnaldur Indriðason's crime novels (The sixth book, Hypothermia, has just been released in the UK) is a heartstring-tugger that gradually turns into a hell of a mystery.

It also marks the first consistent statement of protagonist Erlendur Sveinsson's (and his creator's) equivocal feelings about postwar Iceland and their place in it, a preoccupation that has remained through the subsequent novels:

"[Erlendur] had been born elsewhere and considered himself an outsider even though he had lived in the city most of his life and had seen it spread across the bays and hills as the rural communities depopulated."

The novel is a story of domestic abuse in the past and its echoes and consequences in the present, and if you even think of rolling your eyes, then you haven't read the book. Not only is Arnaldur unsparing in his description of the abuse, he has a character remark the woeful blandness of the term domestic abuse, its insufficiency to describe acts of such enormity. (I wonder that the Icelandic term is and what its connotations are.)

Arnaldur also has a way of investing crime-fiction conventions with resonance they lack elsewhere. The protagonist whose personality clashes, sometimes humorously, with a colleague's is one such convention. Here, a human skeleton uncovered under grimly humorous circumstances triggers the investigation. The burial, it transpires, may be decades old. For Erlendur, haunted in his personal and professional lives, the past is a constant presence. His colleague Sigurdur Óli is of no such gloomily poetic temperament:

"`All these people are dead and buried long ago,' Sigurdur Óli said wearily. `I don't know why we're chasing them.'"

Erlendur knows why.

(Here's what the Crime Writers' Association said when it awarded Silence of the Grave its Gold Dagger for best crime novel in 2005.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Voices: Arnaldur Indriðason's parallel inner lives

Yesterday I compared Voices unfavorably to Arnaldur Indriðason's other novels about Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson. Today I'll highlight some of the good things and talk a bit about what I think Arnaldur was up to in that book.

I wrote that the novel's constricted setting (almost all the action happens inside a Reykjavik hotel) de-emphasizes the connection with Iceland and its soil that is usual in Arnaldur's books. But this does not preclude his customary wry observations about his country and, given the hotel setting, about its visitors,

"Tourists who were planning to spend Christmas and the New Year in Iceland because it seemed to them like an adventurous and exciting country. Although they had only just landed, many had apparently already bought traditional Icelandic sweaters, and they checked into the exotic land of winter."

There is Erlendur's spare, pointed retort to a hotel manager more concerned about business than about justice:

"I hope you're not disturbing my guests," he said.

Erlendur took him to one side.

"What are the rules about prostitution in this hotel?"

And there is Arnaldur's delightful deadpan slapstick. Here, Erlendur's investigation has him interviewing a prostitute whose stitches from her recent eye-catching breast-enhancement surgery are bothering her. The manager sees Erlendur and the woman, misinterprets their meeting, and tries to throw the woman out:

"Watch her tits!" Erlendur shouted, not knowing what else to say. The hotel manager looked at him, dumbfounded. "They're new," Erlendur added by way of explanation.

One reader complained here that the victim in Voices was especially pathetic and therefore less interesting. I think this is due to Arnaldur's narrow focus on the victim. Furthermore, he also focuses in more detail than usual on Erlendur, and the two characters form a pair of solitary bookends.

I respect Arnaldur for choosing bravely to turn his back on interaction, the stuff of which most novels are made, and concentrate so heavily on the victim's and Erlendur's parallel inner lives. I just don't think it works as well as his other novels do. It will be interesting to see if he tries this strategy in the future.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Indoors and out in Arnaldur's Iceland

I've been reading more of Arnaldur Indriðason, one book that I think is his weakest, and another that seems likely to be up there with his best.

The weaker book is Voices, and I believe its weakness stems from its reliance to a greater extent than Arnaldur's other books on melodrama. More than usual as well for Arnaldur, the action, the pivotal events especially, happens indoors.

The site is a Reykjavik hotel where an employee has been found murdered and where Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson stays for the course of the investigation because he does not feel like going home. The employee is an ex-hotel doorman and holiday Santa and a former child star with a number of financial, personal and family entanglements.

In The Draining Lake, Silence of the Grave and Arctic Chill, bodies are found outdoors. In the first two, especially, this reinforces the intimate connection with Iceland and its soil that is the most distinctive feature of the Erlendur books. In Voices, everything happens inside, and the melodrama has to carry the book. This melodrama is sharper, sadder and more affecting than most, but I miss the connection with the land.

The connection promises to be present in Silence of the Grave, second of the five Erlendur novels and winner of the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in 2005. As in the superb Draining Lake, Iceland's soil yields up the body that sets the story in motion. Here, its discovery is odder and funnier:

"He knew at once it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it."

=============

At least two of Arnaldur's characters share their names with characters from the Icelandic classic Njal's Saga. Arnaldur has said the sagas influenced his prose style. Perhaps they influenced him in other ways as well.

On the other hand, Iceland is a small, historically homogeneous society. Perhaps it's no surprise that traditional names are especially prevalent. The names Arnaldur gives his characters may be no more significant than those of fictional characters such as Hieronymus Bosch or Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Enough with the jokes

Last week I promised a post on small ways Arnaldur Indriðason articulates big themes. Here's one example, from the opening pages of Arctic Chill, where police are at a loss for information about a murder victim:

"Could be Thai, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese," Sigurður Óli reeled off.

"Shouldn't we say he's an Icelander until we find out otherwise?" Erlendur said.

Later, Arnaldur puts these words in the mouth of a character who is not quite the anti-immigrant yahoo he seems at first:

"I've got nothing against immigrants ... But I'm against changing everything that's traditional and Icelandic just to pander to something called multiculturalism, when I don't even know what it means."

This character expresses revulsion at crimes against immigrants and full support for government programs to help integrate newcomers into Icelandic society.

One character says: "This is all so new to us. Immigrants, racial issues."

Another muses on the problem of immigrant children who refuse to integrate: "Same problem with the Icelanders living in Denmark. Their children refused to learn Danish."

Finally, any number of crime writers might have delivered lengthy exposition on the dreary conditions under which immigrants live. Here's how Arnaldur does it: "Erlendur was astonished there was no lift in such a tall building."

No diatribe, no ringing indictment. Instead, Erlendur and his creator, in their customary manner, making a heartfelt effort to understand their country.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Icy jokes

Let's put to rest for good the base canard that the Nordic peoples are dour. Sure, they commit suicide a lot, and those long winter nights let them do so under the cover of darkness. ("`It was about eight o'clock,' she said. `Still pitch black, of course,'" runs one off-hand but telling bit of dialogue in Arnaldur Indriðason's Arctic Chill, italics mine.)

There are no knee slappers in Arnaldur's novel, but there is plenty of wit from this artful Icelandic crime writer. Here's the closest the book gets to a bawdy nudge in the ribs, protagonist Erlendur Sveinsson and his girlfriend, discussing whether two formerly married partners can find true love:

Perhaps, says the girlfriend. "Yes," says Erlendur, "but what if one of them finds this true love at regular intervals?"

In a similar vein is another joke that may not even be a joke in the original Icelandic but works nicely in English. A well-dressed colleague of Erlendur's is knocking on doors questioning neighbors the killing that has set the story in motion. One of the neighbors mistakes him for a Jehovah's Witness and politely but firmly closes the door in his face. He knocks again and, when the woman she opens the door a second time, says "You haven't heard the news, have you?"

"The news" is the killing, and "You haven't heard the news?" is a sly, amusing reproach to a woman who thinks she has just shut the door on a Christian proselytizer.

More tomorrow, perhaps, on small ways Arnaldur articulates big themes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Significant names plus a question for readers

Yesterday I awarded a copy of Arnaldur Indriðason's The Draining Lake to a reader who knew that the name of Arnaldur's protagonist, Erlendur, is also an Icelandic word meaning foreign.

The coincidence struck me and not just because Arnaldur occasionally writes about Iceland's uneasy accommodation of its recent immigrant population. More to the point, Erelendur is not always at ease in his own country. Thus, I thought, his name may be thematically significant.

Imagine my excitement last night when I read the following, in Arctic Chill, about a boy named Niran:

"`Niran,' Erlendur said to himself, as if to hear how the name sounded. `Does that mean anything in particular?'

"`It means eternal,' the interpreter said.

"`Eternal?'

"`Thai names have literal meanings, just like Icelandic ones.'"

Niran is nowhere to be found at this point in the story, and his brother has just been found dead, likely the victim of a stabbing. Eternal is a bitterly ironic name for a child who at this moment may be anything but, just one more piece of evidence that a name is more than just a name for Arnaldur.

(Arctic Chill was short-listed for the 2009 CWA International Dagger Award for best translated crime novel. The award went, as this award often does, to Fred Vargas and translator Sîan Reynolds, for The Chalk Circle Man.)

==================

And now your question: You've just met characters whose names mean foreign and eternal. Both these names are at least partly ironic. What other characters have significant names?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More awarders recognize crime beyond borders

With a hat tip to Crime Always Pays comes news of the Macavity Award nominations. CAP is excited that his fellow Irish crime author Declan Hughes is up for a best-mystery-novel Macavity. This follows on his short-listing for the best-novel Edgar Award.

I'm pleased that 3½ of the seven best-novel nominees are from beyond U.S. borders: Hughes' The Price of Blood (called The Dying Breed in the U.K.); The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriðason (Iceland); and The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny (Canada). The half is for Trigger City by Sean Chercover, who has divided his time between Toronto and Chicago and who blended in beautifully with the natives at the recent Noir at the Bar: TO Style in Toronto. This follows a short list for the best-novel Edgar that was 50 percent non-American authors.

Visit Mystery Readers International for a complete list of nominees for the Macavitys, which are to presented at Boucheron 2009 in October.

In other award news, Bob "I'm not Roger" Cornwell of Crimetime sends notice of nominations for the Glass Key prize, the top crime-fiction award in the Nordic countries. Crimetime announces the nominations here in a wrap-up that spins off into a look at other Nordic awards plus all kinds of neat stuff about the several languages involved as well as links to more sites on Nordic crime prizes and organizations. The article deserves an award of its own.

Read (in English) about the Glass Key nominees here, on a blog operated by the Skandinaviska Kriminalsällskapet, which awards the prize.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

A belated best of 2008

In December, my newspaper solicited staff members to choose the best of what they'd read, watched or listened to over the course of the year. The editor, accusing me of being "an expert on the international crime novel," put me on his list. Here were my choices for some of the best international crime fiction published in 2008:

Canada: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, by John McFetridge

England: Second Violin, by John Lawton
Iceland: The Draining Lake, by Arnaldur Indriðason
Ireland: The Big O, by Declan Burke; Yours Confidentially, by Garbhan Downey
Italy: Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous, a great little novel that made book critic Carlin Romano wonder: "Do we have an Italian Camus on our hands?"
Switzerland: The Chinaman, by Friedrich Glauser.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Draining Lake and the exceptional crime

I have a full review coming elsewhere of The Draining Lake, so for now I'll restrict myself to a wry observation that Arnaldur Indriðason makes in the book about his native Iceland.

Arnaldur lamented a few weeks ago at Bouchercon that "The biggest difficulty for an Icelandic crime writer is that we don't have much crime in the country." In The Draining Lake he has his narrator muse that the novel's three main police officers

"were more accustomed to dealing with simple, Icelandic crimes without mysterious devices or trade attachés who weren't trade attachés, without foreign embassies of the Cold War, just Icelandic reality: local, uneventful, mundane and infinitely removed from the battle zones of the world."

That passage comprehends both wistfulness and rueful, ironic observation. The novel itself reminds me a bit of Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast, with its excursions decades into the past for the roots of an event in the narrative present.

Is that sort of novelistic excavation more common in Nordic crime fiction than in crime writing from elsewhere? Does brutal crime so shock the placid, civilized surface of life in the Nordic nations that its crime writers are driven more than those elsewhere to probe the past for answers where, say, American authors might seek roots in the present?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

The Draining Lake and its unique setting

Arnaldur Indriðason wrote this novel well before Iceland's financial crisis, but it shares concerns aroused by the bank crashes about Iceland's vulnerability as a small, isolated nation:

Kleifarvatn is both the name of a real lake in Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula and the novel's title in its original Icelandic. The lake is (or was), in fact, disappearing after an earthquake, and the book's stark, one-word title must have resonated strongly with readers in Iceland.
The vulnerability is not just physical. Iceland's small size also makes it harder for its people to hide, should they choose to do so. This quite naturally will play a large role in police investigations, perhaps complicating them:

I'd thought Arnaldur's Jar City (Tainted Blood in the U.K.) took better advantage of its setting than any other crime novel I'd read. Now I'll go one step further and say that Arnaldur has Iceland in his bones and that no crime novelist I can think of has ever written books so inextricably tied to their setting.
I'll also invite you to disagree with me, or at least to name your candidates for stories that could not have been set anywhere else.
© Peter Rozovsky 2008

"`Can you get away with bigamy in Iceland?' Sigurður Óli asked.
"`No,' Ellinborg said firmly. `There are too few of us.'"

"`You remember the big south Iceland earthquake on the seventeenth of June 2000?' she said, and they nodded. `About five seconds afterwards a large earthquake also struck Kleifarvatn, which doubled the natural rate of drainage from it. When the lake started to shrink people at first thought it was because of unusually low precipitation, but it turned out that the water was pouring down through fissures that run across the bed of the lake and have been there for ages. Apparently they opened up in the earthquake. The lake measured ten square kilometres but now it's only about eight. The water level has fallen by at least four metres.''

That's a wrap: Bouchercon in words and pictures

Arnaldur Indriðason's cheerful demeanor belies his country's financial meltdown. That crisis also came up during my discussion with Arnaldur's fellow Icelandic crime writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I asked her if it could become Iceland's JFK moment, a counterpart to the murders of Veronica Guerin in Ireland and Olof Palme in Sweden and a comparable spur to crime fiction. Could economic unrest spark social unrest if vanishing credit makes basic commodities hard to come by, for example?

Her verdict? Too early to tell, though she and her companion said a banker friend of theirs had been harassed in the streets. And, they added, Icelanders lack a tradition of social protest: "We don't demonstrate well."

(Arnaldur Indriðason and your humble blog keeper. Photo courtesy of Ali Karim)

==========================

Jason Goodwin's Edgar-winning novel The Janissary Tree contains tasty, unobtrusive and believable scenes of his protagonist, Yashim, preparing meals. No surprise, then, that Goodwin's Web site discusses the Ottoman culinary tradition, complete with recipes, to which Yashim would have been heir in nineteenth-century Istanbul. No surprise either that Goodwin says the book is "all about cookery," including – well, let's just say for purposes other than preparation of meals.

(YHBK and Jason Goodwin. Photo courtesy of Ali Karim)

==========================

A seafood restaurant near the convention hotels – call it Fishnet – and a brew pub next door were evening resorts of choice for a floating group that included a number of folks you've read about in my Bouchercon reports and elsewhere on this blog (me, Declan Burke, John McFetridge, Donna Moore, Christa Faust, Angie Johnson-Schmit, Stacia Decker, Scott Phillips, Duane Swierczynski, et al.) and some you haven't. (Hi, Anita.) Prominent among the group was Philly Poe guy Ed Pettit, who has made it his mission to get Edgar Allan Poe back to Philadelphia.

I can't reveal what plans were hatched at the pub and restaurant – call it the Bucket o' Bait – but had I been able to score a doggie bag big enough, Poe's body would be back in Philly now.

Hasta Indianapolis!

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Bouchercon I: Drinks with ice

Arnaldur Indriðason had just made the intriguing statement that “I am heavily influenced by the Icelandic sagas.” This blog having several times cited the greatest of those sagas, I thought I'd ask him about this.

Arnaldur's presence just a short walk from the main convention hotel here in Baltimore at Bouchercon 2008 made the inquiry painless, and its answer was disarmingly practical. Those medieval sagas, he said, were set down on calfskin, an exceedingly dear commodity at the time, which dictated terse prose style, a style he says he strives to imitate.

His first novel to be translated into English, Jar City (Tainted Blood in the U.K.) took advantage of the peculiar qualities of its setting like no other crime novel that I can think of has (to reveal the details would be a spoiler). It was nice to hear that he uses his country's brilliant literary tradition as well as its geographic isolation in his fiction. It was nice, too, that his publicist or publisher paid for the drinks.

Some other highlights of Day One:

Martin Edwards' account of his introduction to crime fiction at age 9, when was around for the premiere of Murder Most Foul: "Margaret Rutherford arrived by helicopter," Edwards said. Between the clues and the red herrings, he said, he fell in love with the idea of a detective. "That night" -- and he was 9 years old, remember -- "I decided I would one day like to write an Agatha Christie-style mystery." The man is now a Dagger-winning author of two crime series. Would that the rest of us held as true to our ambitions as 9-year-olds.

Ken Bruen's citation of Luke Kelly when asked who he admired among writers who had been bedeviled by alcohol and alcoholism. That superlative, scary talented, demon-possessed, late and much-lamented Irish singer was a superb poet who could have made a career of that pursuit had he chosen to do so, Bruen said.

Beyond that, the event has been a rush of old friends encountered anew as well as face-to-face meetings with a long list of accomplished individuals whom I'd known previously online: Janet Rudolph of Mystery Readers Journal, J. Kingston Pierce and Ali Karim of the Rap Sheet, Gerald So, plus a number of others I will likely remember once I've got some sleep.

The Baltimore Sun has been offering a blogging forum to select guest Bouchercon authors. Click here.

Tomorrow: How in God's name will anyone manage to get up in time for the panels?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Screen chills from Iceland

From the Reykjavík-based Another 52 Books blog, by way of Petrona, comes news of a movie version of Arnaldur Indridason's atmospheric novel Jar City (also known as Tainted Blood). The novel is a creepy excursion through warped minds, hidden pasts, and a resolution that could only have happened in Iceland.
The movie has won high praise in Iceland, according to Another 52 Books, who adds that it also works around a logical flaw that one reviewer found in the novel. I cited the book as a fine example of a story's use of its setting. I'll look forward to an English-language release of the movie. Either that, or I'll learn Icelandic and read some sagas while I'm at it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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