Münster's Case, my review

My review of Münster's Case, sixth of Håkan Nesser's Van Veeteren novels to be published in English, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"Håkan Nesser has long disproved the stereotype that Scandinavian crime writers aren't funny," the review begins. "His humor is observational and quiet, however, rather than slapstick or outrageous.

"In Münster's Case, Nesser carries the quiet amusement further than ever before, at least in his novels available in English, making of it a major plot point that I won't give away here. But you'll get it as soon as you come to it."

(Read all my blog posts about Håkan Nesser, including an interview with him from 2008.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nordic not-really Noir: The BBC documentary

(Cheerful blogger with non-
gloomy Icelandic crime writer
Arnaldur Indriðason)

Hat tip to Adrian McKinty, who posted a link to the BBC documentary Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction. A few comments:

First, the title. Alliteration to the contrary, none of the authors interviewed or discussed really writes noir, not Stieg Larsson, not Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, not in the books of hers that I've read, Karin Fossum. The central characters are not losers. The books are about anger, compassion, isolation, or resignation. They don't encompass the essentially noir emotion of depair. Gloom, yes. Doom, no.

*

Val McDermid noted the cold, gloomy landscape in Nordic crime writing and suggested this makes a wonderful stage for crime.  She gets no quarrel from me. Here's some of what I wrote about Arnaldur Indriðason in the book Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction:

"People disappear in Arnaldur Indriðason's Iceland, but the soil has a way of yielding them up again. An earthquake cracks the land, drains a lake, and uncovers a body; a victim turns up on a construction-site excavation; in spring, corpses come to light in a lake, where winter ice had concealed all signs of their disappearance. ... The landscape swallows up victims, whether of murder, accident or natural disaster; geological disruption lays them bare again."

Iceland, says one expert interviewed for the BBC piece, is "a place where people can disappear." Rozovsky said it first.

*

I was glad to hear McDermid note that Arnaldur's books are shot through with "these dark and awful bits of humor." And I loved a remark from Håkan Nesser, always amusing in a way not normally associated with Scandinavians, that "We're not supposed to talk like I do, we're supposed to just sit there and stare blankly out into the, whatever, darkness."

*

The program offered lots of Larsson but also a bit of Ibsen, intriguingly citing the nineteenth-century Norwegian playwright as a prototype for Scandinavian crime fiction's tendency to explore the outward, social manifestations of inner trauma. Jo Nesbø, among the program's featured authors, numbered Ibsen among his influences when he spoke with Detectives Beyond Borders last year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Who is the hero in a Sjöwall and Wahlöö novel?

Sure, Alan Blair's translation of The Man on the Balcony (1968), third of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck mysteries, includes several instances of the word society and one of the welfare state, but much of its social observation is homelier than that:

"Kvist ... inhaled the smell of fresh-baked bread, thinking that these small bakeries were getting rare.

"Soon they'll vanish altogether and you'll be able to buy nothing but mass-produced bread in plastic wrapping and the entire Swedish nation will eat exactly the same loaves and buns and cakes."

These days Kvist might have added "... and drink the same coffee, talk on the same phone, and read the same book on the same e-reader from the same company," but the sentiment remains pertinent today.

***

The novel gives the thought not to Martin Beck or even to his close colleague Lennart Kollberg, but rather to Kvist, a low-ranking officer who makes an important discovery in the scene and plays no role otherwise. Later in the book, two similarly low-ranking officers make an even more important discovery purely by accident.

What is a reader to make of the juxtaposition of serendipitous breaks by underlings and the lengthy, draining, sometimes heart-rending work put in by their superiors? Is this merely a more realistic account of how investigations work? A polemical attack on the convention that a novel must have a central figure? A raspberry aimed at authority by a pair of mischievous leftists?

Whatever the reason, other Scandinavian crime writers, Karin Fossum and Håkan Nesser among them, followed Sjöwall and Wahlöö's lead, dispersing the focus away from a central figure and distributing it among a larger cast.

Why do they do this? What other authors focus more on a cast of characters than on one central figure? What effect does this have? (Please remember to write your name on your blue books before you hand in your test papers.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

John Buchan on disappearances and returns

The introduction to this 2008 Penguin Classics collection of John Buchan's stories (You may know Buchan as author of The Thirty-Nine Steps) offers some incisive thoughts on disappearances and returns. Here's the opening of Buchan's story "The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn":

"Any disappearance is a romantic thing, especially if it be unexpected and inexplicable. To vanish from the common world and leave no trace, and to return with the same suddenness and mystery, satisfies the eternal human sense of wonder."

Buchan wrote adventure and espionage stories, but the themes of disappearance and return have attracted spinners of all kinds of stories almost forever, crime novelists among them. (Brian McGilloway's novel Gallows Lane begins with a return, as does Håkan Nesser's The Return, to cite two recent examples.) It's a hell of a way to begin a story, fraught with mystery, wonder, and—

But you tell me: What's the appeal of tales of disappearance and return? And what are your favorite such tales?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest, Day II: The spirit is willing, and the flesh makes a pretty good go as well

My own highlight from Crimefest 2009, Day II? Perhaps it was Jo Nesbø's English translator, Don Bartlett, relieving me of anxieties about how to pronounce Nesbø's name. If "Joe Nesbow" is good enough for the man who translates his books, it's good enough for me.

Or maybe it was L.C. Tyler's professed admiration for Allan Guthrie. Tyler writes comic cozy mysteries; Guthrie's work is anything but cozy. One author's respect for another who writes fiction of a different type is one of those salutary, mind-opening reminders that make events like this a joy.

Another was Leighton Gage's answer that his books begin with plot. If my memory serves me well, he was the only one of eight writers on two panels who gave that answer to the "Plot or character?" question.

Stephen Booth offered the disarming admission that "I didn't want to write about middle-aged alcoholics because other people had done it better" and the warning that too faithful a portrayal of procedure can be deadly in a police procedural.

Ros Schwartz, Dagger-winning translator of Dominique Manotti, offered shocking assessments of the miserable working conditions of literary translators in much of Europe and contrasted these with the far better environment for translators in the Scandinavian countries.

Håkan Nesser, in answer to a question about Nordic authors' reputation for dourness, noted their penchant for social criticism: "If your mission is to criticize society, you can't be very comical." (Editor's note: Your humble blogkeeper is author of an article on humor in Nordic crime fiction, including Nesser's. I believe that the general seriousness of crime fiction from the Nordic countries throws such humor as there is into especially sharp relief.)

Declan Burke, Chris Ewan, Steve Mosby and Kevin Wignall made up a panel on writing about villains. An observation of Mosby's neatly encapsulated the way the line between hero and villain can blur: "Every villain is the hero of his own story."

See the day's complete program here. And Burke discharged his bar debt in a prompt, gentlemanly manner.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009