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

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 III, Part I: Interviews

Håkan Nesser, interviewed by Ann Cleeves, shed light on that recurrent question of Scandinavian gloom and Scandinavian authors. Scandinavians, he said, are dour; their authors are not: "I wanted [my protagonist] to be, at least to start with, depressed. ... Happy people don't need their humor."

Dour Swedes may be, Nesser said, but not cripplingly so: "We're not that depressed, but we don't talk a lot. That's good for a crime story. You keep things inside for thirty years," and then they just come out.

Ten of Nesser's twenty-two novels have featured Inspector Van Veeteren; four of these have been translated into English. The remaining six would likely change Nesser's image in the English-speaking world. The books translated thus far have featured villains with whom the reader may sympathize deeply. But that changed: "There are two really bad guys in numbers nine and ten." After the fifth in the series, Nesser said, Van Veeteren retires from the police and opens a bookstore instead.

Nesser also discussed his series about a character with the whimsical name of Gunnar Barbarotti, a series as yet untranslated into English, a series whose premise seems an odd mix of whimsy and Ingemar Bergman: "It's a thing between [Barbarotti] and God, and God has to prove he exists. ... If the prayer is fulfilled, God will get one point, or, in more important cases, one or two points."

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

Two interviews with authors I have not yet read offered insights I found especially pleasing. Andrew Taylor told Peter Guttridge that he loved Jane Austen, and Simon Brett told Gyles Brandreth that Austen was the one person he'd like to meet in Heaven, Taylor also cited P.G. Wodehouse as an early love.

So I'll take a tentative stab at charting some tendencies of British crime writers: They love Austen, they love Wodehouse, and they have a decided position, yes or no, on whether their novels have fundamentally moral concerns. At least this was true of some writers here, and the penchant for Austen and Wodehouse is by no means restricted to writers of what Americans call cozies or to any other type of mystery. Not should it be. Austen and Wodehouse are towering giants, a Hammett and a Chandler of English writing.

One remark was sufficient to get me interested in reading Taylor, who is English and this year's recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement: "Until ... 1934, it would have been utterly possible for us to slip gradually into being a Fascist state."

Oh, and he offered a valuable tip for beginning crime writers: "With the first novel, I had a corpse, and I went on from there. Corpses are good."

Click here for the full CrimeFest schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

CrimeFest blogfest III: Interview with Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser will be a featured author at CrimeFest 2009. (I'll be there, too, as a humbly worshipful paying customer.) Nesser's appearance coincides with the publication of Woman With Birthmark, the fourth of his novels about Inspector Van Veeteren to be translated from Swedish into English. The original version won the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy's prize for best novel in 1996, the second of Nesser's three victories in that category.

In the third of a series of posts about CrimeFest authors, here's an interview I did with Nesser last spring, upon publication of the Van Veeteren novel Mind's Eye.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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

Readers of translated crime fiction know that series are often translated out of order. Håkan Nesser's is no different. The newly published Mind's Eye, third of Nesser's ten Van Veeteren novels to become available in English, after Borkmann's Point (second in the sequence) and The Return (third), is the first of the series, published in Swedish in 1993.

The novel tells the story of a high school teacher named Janek Mitter who wakes up hung over and finds his wife dead in the bathtub. He struggles to recover his memories of the fatal night, cracks jokes and makes a mockery of his trial, and finds himself confined to a mental institution. Then Mitter himself is murdered, and the investigation and mystery begin in earnest.

The book contains much that will be familiar to Nesser's readers: deadpan humor, sympathy even for unsympathetic characters, and delightfully true-to-life oddball observations. Since this was the first in the series, a reader might naturally wonder if the novel is more autobiographical than those that followed, in the proverbial manner of first novels everywhere. I did, so I asked Nesser a few questions.
===========================================

What have English readers missed by having only three of the Van Veeteren novels available in their language?

You’ve missed seven books, but hopefully Pantheon will make up for the loss. Next one is published next April. Woman with Birthmark (Kvinna med födelsemärke) got the award for best crime novel in Swedish 199-something. (Note to readers: The year was 1996, when Nesser beat a field that included Åke Edwardson and Henning Mankell.)

You were a teacher. To what extent does Elmer Suurna, the headmaster in Mind’s Eye whose only ambition was “to keep his handsome red-oak desktop clean and shiny,” reflect your own disillusionment with that profession?

My disillusionment is not that big. The main problem with Swedish schools is too much administration, too little money. Most headmasters are good. I have seen one or two like Suurna, though.

You named your protagonist, Van Veeteren, for Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and De Gier stories. What do you find attractive about Van de Wetering’s work? How is Grijpstra and De Gier’s world view similar to Van Veeteren’s?

Not sure. I enjoyed De Gier and Grijpstra a lot, of course, perhaps the way they sort of look in the wrong direction most of the time, not really concerned about their work. But perhaps Van Veeteren is different in this respect.

Minor characters in Mind’s Eye are named Joensuu, Mankel and Kellerman. Why those particular crime writers? And what other writers have I missed?

Well, most people like to have a name, and it doesn’t cost a lot to give knowledgeable readers some meaningless hints.

Both this book and The Return display strong sympathy with characters who have been in prison or otherwise institutionalized. What are the origins of this sympathy?

With different circumstances the good guy would have been the bad guy. It’s important to understand the motive, and to not demonize the criminal. Some murders are more understandable than others, and those are also more interesting to write about.

The great Swiss crime writer Friedrich Glauser also showed special sympathy for institutionalized or otherwise downtrodden characters. Do you know his books?

No, never read Glauser. Heard of him though.

What plans do your U.S., U.K. or Australian publishers have for issuing more English translations of your work?

See 1). Also I believe they’ve bought a fifth title from the series.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Coda: A note on musical references in crime stories

Enthusiastic response to last week's post about Crime songs has had me thinking about music, crime fiction and music in crime fiction.

One of my complaints about the last is that a given song or musician, usually of the rock and roll variety, too often serves as nothing more than a brand name or a label. The song or the performers are simply too popular to serve as a meaningful indicator of a character's uniqueness.

Håkan Nesser uses music in his recently published Mind's Eye, where he has his protagonist, Van Veeteren, slip into his car and put on some Francisco Tárrega. The reference to the great classical guitarist is, like many musical references in crime novels, a label. Nesser does not make music an important part of Van Veeteren's makeup. But at least it's a distinctive label. Not many fictional detectives favor classical guitar.

The music references that really caught my eye recently, though, were in Mehmet Murat Somer's The Prophet Murders. In the scene in question, the manager of a transvestite nightclub insists that the club's record spinner account for his choice of music:

"`What's this music you're playing?' I demanded.

"`Adiemus. New Age. It's a new group. Great, isn't it?'

"To add insult to injury, he was poking fun at me. New Age is one of the forms of music I simply don't comprehend. Paul Mauriat, Franck Pourcel, Francis Lai and even Fausto Papetti have been playing this kind of music for years. The only difference is that they perform with an orchestra, not synthesizers and the piping of a flute. Nowadays, intellectuals have elevated this sort of music into an art form. Why the double standard? What have the others been doing wrong all these years? A succession of critics has slammed them. All right, I don't think much of their work either, but I don't see the difference, do you?"

Now, that's a good string of musical references. The scene is funny. It tells us something about the protagonist's personality. It packs an amusing, self-satirical punch line. The mention of instruments may help you imagine the music. If you know the performers, you may smile (or wince) to memories of soaring, sappy, minor-key string passages. Somer's passage is a hell of a lot more than just a label, in other words. Most important, the scene could work just as well for a reader who has never heard of the performers in question.

And now readers, what are your favorite musical references in crime novels or stories? What makes the references work?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Mehmet Murat Somer
Turkish crime fiction

When one crime writer honors another by name

My favorite tribute to the late Janwillem van de Wetering, author of the Grijpstra and De Gier mysteries, came years before his death. Håkan Nesser named the protagonist of his long-running Swedish crime series Van Veeteren in honor of Van de Wetering. Nesser told me last month that he "enjoyed De Gier and Grijpstra a lot, of course, perhaps the way they sort of look in the wrong direction most of the time, not really concerned about their work."

I take his comment as a neat encapsulation of the duo's unorthodox crime-solving techniques, of their seeking answers through contemplation and indirection as much as, if not more than, through forensics. In any case, Nesser's own work has something of the sly humor of Van de Wetering's, and the tribute is apt.

In a post last summer, I discussed other such tributes, including Andrea Camilleri's having named his protagonist, Salvo Montalbano, in honor of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, author of the Pepe Carvalho novels. Readers cited other authors who had offered creative tributes, including Stuart MacBride, Ken Bruen and more from Camilleri.

What other authors have paid tribute in print to their own favorite writers? Who did so in paticularly creative ways? Sara Paretsky has named streets and hotel banquet halls in her V.I. Warshawski books for favorite crime writers, and I believe Carolyn G. Hart gave books by her favorite authors roles in her own work. Add to this list, please.

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

On Van de Wetering, here's what the Telegraph wrote in February when it included him on its list of "50 crime writers to read before you die" (complete with a minor misspelling of his name) along with a comment I posted on this blog in reaction:

Janwillem van de(!!) Wetering (1931-): "The capers of Grijpstra and de Gier, aka The Amsterdam Cops, are oddly appealing. One plays the drums; the other the flute. They frequent canals. There's a cat. Unique and very Dutch. Read: Outsider in Amsterdam (1975)" (Detectives Beyond Borders says: Outsider in Amsterdam may exemplify the "very Dutch" side of van de Wetering. Hard Rain highlights the "unique" side, delightfully reflecting the author's experience with Zen Buddhism and my favorite in the series.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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What's so funny about Scandinavian crime fiction?

My article about humor in Nordic crime fiction, "Dry Humor in a Cold Climate," appears in the Fall 2007 issue Mystery Readers Journal, now available from Mystery Readers International. The issue is devoted to Scandinavian mysteries, and it includes Håkan Nesser's thoughts about writing, contributions from several other top Swedish authors, a roundup of contemporary Finnish crime fiction, and quite a bit more in addition to my piece.

You'll also find articles about Danish crime fiction, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Karin Fossum, and the Scandinavian touch in American crime writing and one by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir that bears the intriguing title "A Depressing Lack of Crime." See a complete table of contents, full versions of selected articles, and information about the print version of the magazine at the Mystery Readers Journal link in the above paragraph.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Denmark Crime Fiction
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... and, alas, another checklist of untranslated (into English) crime fiction

Krimi-Couch offers a list of crime fiction to be released in German this month. Among the new releases is Mensch ohne Hund, a translation of Håkan Nesser's Människa utan hund. That will bring to something over fifteen the number of this Swedish crime writer's books available in German. This compares with the two available in English.
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Another question for readers: What crime authors would you like to see more of in English? Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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international crime fiction
Hakan Nesser

How does one crime author pay tribute to another?

A few minutes ago, I posted about Andrea Camilleri's having named his protagonist, Salvo Montalbano, in honor of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, author of the Pepe Carvalho novels. A few months ago, Håkan Nesser told me he named his protagonist, Inspector Van Veeteren, in honor of Janwillem van de Wetering, the humorous and philosophical author of the Grijpstra and de Gier ("Amsterdam Cops") stories.

What similar tributes can you think of? How do authors honor their own favorite authors?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A postscript to "Synergy and Swedes"

An April article in the Toronto Star, one of three(!) competing daily newspapers in that civilized city, offered thoughts on current Swedish crime fiction and its position in Europe and the wider world.

"We're riding the waves of Henning Mankell," says Håkan Nesser, whose name readers of this blog will know well.

"Germany is the door-opener to the rest of Europe," says Nesser, citing Mankell's earlier penetration of the German market as a key event in the ensuing proliferation of Swedish crime writing. "Between Germany, Switzerland and Austria, you have potentially 100 million readers in German. And, also, if you want to get published in Spain, the first thing they ask is, `Is he out in German?' That's when things can start rolling."

The article also traces the current wave of Swedish crime writing to a traumatic national event: the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot dead in Stockholm while walking home from a movie with his wife. Anyone who dismissed crime fiction as trifling might be intersted in this passage about the Palme assassination:

"In a way, Sweden has never recovered," says Swedish author and critic Marie Peterson. "Sweden changed, brutally, on almost every level, but this change was nowhere to be found in literature. No one explored it, analyzed it or wrote stories about it. Except the crime writers, starting with Mankell."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Synergy and Swedes

Proof that print and blogging can co-exist, my article about four Swedish crime novelists appears in today's Philadelphia Inquirer.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Swedish Crime Fiction
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Clive James on international crime fiction, part II

He’s a sharp and funny guy but prone to overly sweeping statements.

Here’s an example of the former, from his New Yorker article Blood On The Borders: Crime fiction from all over:

Here’s one of the latter:

“ . . . there are only so many storylines and patterns of conflict. The only workable solution has been to shift the reader’s involvement from the center to the periphery: to the location. In most of the crime novels coming out now, it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guidebooks.”

Simenon, with the organization and instincts of a Colombian drug runner, got the whole world hooked on Maigret. Not only did Maigret sell by the million in every tongue and in all media; literary critics praised his author’s stripped-down style. … the Maigret novels acquired such prestige that Simenon’s action novels without Maigret in them started counting as proper novels, the absence of the star turn being thought of as a sign of artistic purity.

Well, no. I’ll cite Swedish crime writers again, since that’s who I’m reading these days. Håkan Nesser and Kjell Eriksson shift point-of-view characters frequently. In Eriksson’s case especially, the numerous shifts create multiple sympathies on the reader’s part, for cops, killers, victims and bystanders alike. I think of the technique as an objective correlative of Swedes’ proverbial social concerns: everybody has his reasons. It’s something distinctively Swedish, a reason other than setting or guidebook-style exotica to read Swedish crime writing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007
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An evening with Inger Frimansson, Kjell Eriksson, Håkan Nesser and Helene Tursten, Part III (The funny part)

Is there such thing as a New Wave in Swedish crime fiction? "All of us are so different," Håkan Nesser says.

In one respect, at least, Nesser's work is different from what I'd known of Swedish crime writing previously, which is to say Henning Mankell, Helene Tursten, and a bit of Liza Marklund: It's shot through with playfulness that can break into raucous, slapstick humor. Chapter II of The Return, for example, is a droll account of a chaotic school outing that would have been hell for its leader but is fun to read about.

Borkmann's Point has an amusing solution to a married couple's difficulties at achieving intimacy in crowded quarters, and I discuss the novel's brevity and wit here. Clive James complains in a recent New Yorker article about the indeterminacy of Nesser's settings. To me, some of the ways Nesser achieves that indeterminacy (names that are not quite Swedish, not quite Dutch, for example) add to the novels' fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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An evening with Inger Frimansson, Kjell Eriksson, Håkan Nesser and Helene Tursten, Part II

Four of Sweden's top crime writers have something in common: They didn't start out as crime writers.

Helene Tursten was a nurse, then a dentist who began writing when an illness made it difficult for her to continue practicing dentistry. Kjell Eriksson was well into his career as landscape gardener before he published his first novel, and he didn't publish his first crime book until several years after that.

Håkan Nesser was a teacher, and Inger Frimansson, who says she had wanted to be a writer from an early age, became a journalist and an author of fifteen books before she turned to crime. "I thought if I wrote from a woman's perspective, I could change the world," Frimansson says of her pre-crime work, "but then I got bored."

Nesser said he started writing after an alternating-weeks joint-custody agreement in his divorce gave him free time he had not had earlier. "I had seven nights!" he says. Even then, according to Nesser, "I didn't intend to write a crime story, but since I had killed a woman in the bath tub ... "

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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An evening with Inger Frimansson, Kjell Eriksson, Håkan Nesser and Helene Tursten, Part I

I've just returned from a reading by Inger Frimansson, Kjell Eriksson, Håkan Nesser and Helene Tursten. I spoke with all four during and after the event, and I'll present parts of those discussions and selections from their remarks over the next few days.

The evening's second reading concluded with a passage that muses on the place of leeches in the universe. "Leeches don't deserve to live," declares a character in Frimansson's Goodnight, My Darling before crushing one of the slimy bloodsuckers. The leeches are among the torments inflicted on Frimansson's protagonist, Justine, a character for whom the author has profound sympathy.

Frimansson, neither a bully nor a victim during her youth, by her own account, nonetheless recalls seeing a group of boys grind a girl's face into the snow. The girl's resulting asthma attack made a profound impression. "I remember how we stood there looking, clinically looking, and now we understood that this was asthma," she said.

Years later, after Frimansson had started writing books, "I had to help her get revenge, but how? I was her creator. ... I felt that I had to use my fantasy to help Justine get her revenge. ... I decided to send her out into the world so she could kill."

For Kjell Eriksson, the sympathy takes the form of identification with his neighbors in Uppsala, a Swedish city known for its university, the oldest in Scandinavia (founded in 1477). It, along with the city's main cultural attractions, is on the west side of the Fyris River. "I'm on the wrong side if you're talking literature," Eriksson said. "I'm from the east side. ... I had no dreams to become a writer." Instead, Eriksson left school at fifteen and became a landscape gardener, a career he says included one job at a nuclear power plant.

Eriksson says the main purpose of his crime novels "is to describe my home town, my society, the conflict between east and west." Early in his novel The Princess of Burundi, a man with a lengthy though small-time criminal past is found murdered, likely tortured to death. "Little John is dead," the police chief tells a meeting of investigators convened to discuss the case. "There are probably those of us who don't think that's much of a loss. ... That would be a pity, however," and he proceeds to explain why. That is an unexpected note in a police procedural.

Eriksson says he bases characters on local residents, and he acknowledges his fellow feeling with those characters: "They are my neighbors."

Tursten, three of whose novels about Göteborg Detective Inspector Irene Huss have been translated into English, said she "wanted to create a female investigator that would be believable as a good cop." That meant she was older than twenty-five and lacked the looks of a runway model. "She's intelligent, she has intuition, but she's not intellectual; she doesn't have time."

Detective Inspector Huss, the first of the books to be translated, includes a subplot about one of Huss' daughters and her involvement with racist music and the people who play it. The subplot stemmed from Tursten's alarm at the strength of the neo-Nazi movement in Sweden, the biggest in Europe at the time she wrote the book, she says. (Read more of my comments about Helene Tursten here – scroll down after clicking – including Irene Huss' special skills at observing her colleagues' behavior.)

Håkan Nesser expresses his sympathy in several ways, some of which I discuss here (scroll down after clicking), others of which are harder to talk about without giving away critical plot elements. But he did say that his excellent novel The Return was spurred by a notorious Swedish murder case in which a man spent twenty-four years in prison based on dubious evidence.

Each of the four writers has a different take on the question of sympathy for his or her characters. "We are not interested in telling how to kill people," Eriksson says. Frimansson, whose writing is significantly different from that of the others in at least one respect – she declares flatly that she has no interest in how police solve crimes – nodded when I suggested a compassionate interest in characters as a common element. "I think we all have that sympathy," she said.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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More readings the same week!

I juggled my schedule so I could go hear Carlo Lucarelli and Massimo Carlotto read in New York, and then I found out that Håkan Nesser and Helene Tursten are reading in Toronto the same night. OK, readers, which reading should I attend?

Now, "that's" bleak ...

Well, not really, but Håkan Nesser's The Return is a bit bleaker than the same author's excellent Borkmann's Point, about which I posted here earlier this week.

Nesser has given the targets of the police investigation in this novel more desperate lives than their predecessors in Borkmann's Point, which he published a year earlier. (1994 for Borkmann's Point, 1995 for The Return. The English translations followed in 2006 and 2007, which makes one wonder why this splendid writer was not rendered into English earlier.) In addition, the lead investigator, Inspector Van Veeteren, struggles with a medical problem throughout The Return. (He survives.)

The tone here is harsher, the questioning of suspects and others more psychologically brutal than in the earlier novel. Yet there is precious little, if any, melodrama or self-pity in either book. It is characteristic also of Nesser's playfulness that even as Van Veeteren is laid up while the investigation progresses, he makes a sly reference to that other crime classic about a bedridden investigator, Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time.

Nesser may have refined his technique as a mystery writer in the interval between the two books. Van Veeteren's solution of the killings in Borkmann's Point has a faint whiff of cheating to it, which I can obviously not detail here. But please do not let this deter you from reading either novel. Borkmann's Point and The Return are not just two of the finer crime novels I've ever read, but two of the most distinctive.

And now Nesser had better get translation deals for more of his novels, or I'll have to start learning Swedish.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Håkan Nesser, the (thinly) smiling Swede

A correspondent refers in passing to Håkan Nesser's bleakness, but I find Nesser anything but bleak. Yes, Borkmann's Point is set, presumably, in northern Europe, land of clear, strong drink and pessimistic detectives. Yes, the novel's three murders (and the one so far in The Return) are especially horrific, but Nesser handles all, it seems to me, with his characteristic low-key wit. By comparison, Henning Mankell dispatches his victims with detail far more horrible. (I once attended a reading by Mankell where someone asked why he has his killers take care of their victims so graphically. His answer was simple: Because such things really happen.)

Nor do Nesser's characters seem especially gloomy by temperament. Yes, they may fret about their private lives, but they are not obsessed. I would regard Nesser's outlook primarily as one of amused wonder rather than bleakness.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Hakan Nesser

More reasons to like Borkmann's Point

1) The author, Håkan Nesser, has a sharp eye for the misdeeds of television reporters:

"Well, that was that," said the chief of police, flopping back onto the leather sofa. "I have to say I prefer the newspaper boys."

Van Veeteren agreed.

"Those well-oiled talking heads on TV make me vomit; they really do. Do you have a lot to do with that crowd?"

2) Nesser includes an amusing flip on the theme of detective with troubled family life. The officer involved has been called out of town, worked hard on a series of a murder cases, and come close to making a pass at (or being seduced by) an attractive female colleague. And then his wife and children take a house nearby so they can be with him:

"It was past eleven before the kids finally went to bed. They opened a bottle of wine and put on a Mostakis tape, and after several failed attempts, they finally managed to get a fire going. They spread the mattress out on the floor and undressed each other.

"`We'll wake them up,' said Münster .

"`No, we won't,' said Synn. She stroked his back and crept down under the blankets. `I put a bit of a sleeping pill into their hot chocolate.'

"`Sleeping pill?' he thundered, trying to sound outraged.

"`Only a little bit. Won't do them any lasting harm. Come here!'

"`OK,' said Münster, and restored relations with his wife."

That's the entire scene, and and it's fair representation of Nesser's technique: short scenes, laconic reactions, scenes that rely heavily on dialogue.

3) Nesser permeates the narrative with references to the doubts large and small that plague dedicated officers during an urgent investigation:

"Well?" said Münster, feeling as if he'd just missed the point of a long and complicated joke.

or

He kicked off his shoes and wiggled his toes rather cautiously, as if he ere uncertain whether or not they were still there.

These are trivial examples and deliberately so. Other characters question the reality of their observations or contemplate the meaning of death, but it is the tiny incidents, the little doubts, that create the novel's distinctive texture. Small doubts echo larger ones. Everyone, sharp and dull alike, moves in a kind of fog that clouds all certainties -- and somehow makes the characters all the more human.

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A character makes passing reference to houses with Hanseatic gables. This adds northern Germany to the list of settings evoked but never named. Others include the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The lack of a named setting added to the delight for me, to the sense of fun. Perhaps it contributed as well to that enjoyable sense of doubt mentioned above.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Hakan Nesser

Håkan Nesser

The surprises haven't yet started in this Swedish author's Borkmann's Point, but the deadpan wit has, as have the pleasingly laconic style and some pleasant invocations of camaraderie between two wise and intelligent police officers.

The brevity and the wit work together. Many a fictional veteran officer has rolled his eyes at the antics of a too-eager, too-punctilious young colleague. Naser lets an impersonal narrator speak: "It is true that Kropke had not had time to prepare any overhead projector transparencies before he addressed his colleagues in the conference room that evening, but everything was neatly set out in his notebook with detachable pages and dark-blue leather covers."

Concision is a watchword. Nesser shifts point of view frequently, telling just enough about a character to add flavor, breaking off before veering into mawkishness and excessive psychologizing.

And he has fun with the setting. The names are close to Dutch, but spelled not quite the Dutch way. The setting is coastal, though perhaps a coast more varied than that of the Netherlands. Readers familiar with Denmark or Sweden are free to weigh in on this matter.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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