Nordic humor and satire from Hallgrímur Helgason

I've run into deadpan Danes, wisecracking Swedes, jovial Icelanders, and Norwegian authors who enjoyed a good joke, and the one Finn I've met was a gregarious hotel clerk who radiated benevolence and good fellowship. In short, if dour, gloomy Nordics exist, they cheer up when they see me coming.

So I was not shocked by the following in Hallgrímur Helgason's The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning:

"I understand the smoking ban is on its way up here [to Iceland], in a sunny sailboat named the Al Gore. ... Only when you've had some fifty warless years do you start worrying about things like air quality in bars."

and

"Getting Friendly off my back was like dumping a loud girlfriend with a Texan accent and a cell-phone addiction."

and

"She smells like a New Jersey Devils' banner that's been hanging on the dim corner of a seedy Newark lounge for the past twenty years."

and

"I don't know. I just hate it when people discriminate against me, only because I kill people."

Along the way, Hallgrímur's satirical targets include sanctimonious public apologies and spurious declarations of corporate duty to the customer. And I have to think that his decision to make the protagonist a Croat is a bit of sly fun at the expense all the crime novelists who have found it expedient in recent years to people Europe with Balkan characters, usually one per book, generally dark and forbidding, all the better a background against which we are asked to contemplate big subjects like human depravity and the vicissitudes of history. (I can't be sure, but I think those characters have tended to be Croats rather than Serbs, possibly because Serbs were the bad guys in the recent Balkan wars, as opposed to World War II, when Croats filled that role.)

The Icelandic author's decision to make his protagonist/narrator a foreigner also affords him the opportunity to observe the oddities of his own country: its silence, its high prices, its cleanliness, its difficult language, its beautiful women. And the briefer glimpses of the protagonist's native Split tally with my recollections of that marvelously situated city.

I'm not sure how well a middle section works in which the multi-named protagonist has an emotional crisis and undergoes a kind of exorcism. The section is melodramatic, and Hallgrímur has more fun when the soul-savers turn out to engage in some of the same crimes as the protagonist does.  But even there Hallgrímur works in a few good observations and jokes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Who needs copy editørs?

I don't like crime-novel cover copy that brags that the author is a lawyer for the same reason that I don't like covers that identify the author as So-and-so, Ph.D. Such braggart branding plays on the intellectual insecurity of readers. It's a not so subtle effort to bully shoppers into thinking that the author must be smarter than they are, so they will either improve themselves by buying the book or else get a dirty little insider's glimpse at a world they would never know without the author's help.

Me, I don't give a crap what authors are or what degrees they have; I want to know what they can do.

I was thinking about this while reading the following this evening on the back cover of a trade paperback edition of Easy Money by Jens Lapidus when something else caught my attention:

"From one of Sweden's most successful defense lawyer(sic) comes an unflinching look at Stockholm's underworld."

Someone's not paying to have cover copy proofread carefully.

And note the o with a slash in the cover's rendering of the book's title. Jens Lapidus is Swedish, and he wrote the book in Swedish. Ø is a letter in Danish, Norwegian, and Faroese — but not Swedish.

***

In recognition of professional reality, I have taken a number of the posts I'd previously classified as "Things that drive me nuts" and reindexed them under the heading "Who needs copy editors?" Read them and weep. Just don't expect to be paid for your tears.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

DBB in Nordic Noir book

Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV has lots of Swedes and Norwegians, roving gangs of Danes and Icelanders. a smattering of Finns, and a Faroe Islander or two.

It also has me, holding forth on Stieg Larssonism on Page 38 and Harri Nykänen's Raid and the Blackest Sheep on Pages 107 and 108, and I admit it was fun to see my name in the index.

The book's author, Barry Forshaw, is probably best known for his biography of Stieg Larsson, but he writes all over the crime fiction, film, and television map. He's the man behind British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia, Italian Cinema: Arthouse to Exploitation, and British Crime Film, for instance, and I was chuffed when he asked me to take part in this project.

Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide is out now in the U.K. in paperback and e-book formats, with a U.S. edition to follow in September. As always, Forshaw packs lots of information into a compact space (I have just verified that the book does indeed fit in a pants pocket.) He brings a light, conversational touch to a subject not always celebrated for such qualities, and I'd call the book a good choice if you want to know what the Scandinavian fuss is about and who the up-and-comers are.
© Peter Rozovsky 2013

I review Nesbø in the Philadelphia Inquirer

The novel is Phantom, ninth of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole novels, and my review begins thus:

"I once suggested that some Nordic crime novels are Jackie Collins or Harold Robbins with enough mildly leftist musing thrown in to make readers feel intellectually respectable."

More than in my previous reviews, I write about why I think Nesbø made some of the choices he made. The man has a living to make, after all.

Read my guesses about Phantom, Nesbø, Nordic crime, and why readers read it in the complete review here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

What's the best weather for crime stories?

Iceland's Yrsa Sigurðardóttir has bemoaned the difficulty of setting crime fiction in a country that has almost no crime. The sometimes forbidding Nordic climes offer an offsetting advantage, however: Isolated Arctic outposts and sudden snowstorms make it easy to plausibly strand characters, kill them off, and gather suspects in one place.

Yrsa does this in The Day is Dark, her most recent novel in English translation, and Norway's Anne Holt does something similar in her novel 1222. What other Nordic crime novels take advantage of their settings in this way? How about crime stories from outside the Nordic lands? What crime novels take special advantage of their settings?

(I once spent a week in the Dominican Republic, my bliss marred only by the fear that a coconut would fall on my head as I relaxed under a palm tree. Stage that to look like an accident, and you've got the sort of crime story I have in mind.)

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

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 next month in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What did Yrsa know, and when did she know it?

When I met Yrsa Sigurðardóttir at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, Iceland's economy had just crashed. When Yrsa and her husband weren't worrying that their credit cards had been rendered worthless, we speculated about what the crash would mean for Icelandic crime fiction. Too early to tell, we decided.

Turns out that Yrsa may already have had some ideas.

Her novel The Day Is Dark, published in English translation in 2011 but in its original Icelandic in 2008, is peppered in its early chapters with references to the currency crash and how it might affect daily lives:

"Fortunately they hadn't taken a loan in foreign currency for the purchase, as so many who now bore the consequences of the falling Icelandic króna had done, but the payments had increased nevertheless and they were eating into their income."

and

"...a two-story single-family home which was to be divided into two separate apartments to save the owner ... from the black hole of the currency basket loan that he had taken at the wrong time."

Next time I see Yrsa (and I'll see her soon), I will ask when in 2008 she wrote those passages. What did Yrsa know, and when did she know it?

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

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir will be part of my "Murder is Everywhere" panel at Bouchercon 2012 next month in Cleveland, Saturday, October 6, 10:15-11:05 a.m.

Here's the complete Bouchercon schedule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Larsson-y: I review Lars Kepler in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of The Nightmare by Lars Kepler in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer posits the existence of a school of Nordic crime writing called Stieg Larssonism (its practitioners are Larssonists) that

"combines potboiler thrills and righteous anger in a fat, sprawling tosh-filled package, often with 475 or more pages plus a didactic, statistics-filled epilogue in case the reader doesn’t get the point – or in case he or she thinks the point was just to have some fun. That way the reader get dirty thrills but feels morally uplifted at the same time."

While preparing the review, I came across a comment by Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, the female half of the couple that writes as Lars Kepler, that Stieg Larsson had revitalized crime fiction and that the Lars part of their pen name was a tribute to him.

At the same time, I was reading Barry Forshaw's Death in a Cold Climate, which includes a chapter on the Larsson phenomenon but also another called "The Anti-Larsson Writers."  Finally, my post on realism, naturalism, and their opposite in crime fiction elicited this comment in Larsson's defense:

"[Larsson] was doing something different. He loved potboilers. He wrote fanfic when he was young and omnivorously consumed pop culture. He wrote a mashup of everything he loved and borrowed from Modesty Blaise to Sarah Paretsky but he also threw in everything he cared about in his day job as a journalist."

That commenter and I analyze Larsson and Larssonism in substantially identical terms, in other words, though her assessment is more positive than mine.

This, plus Forshaw's chapter on anti-Larsson writers, leaves me with a bracing feeling that I and the world now understand Nordic crime fiction better than we once did and the hope that we'll be spared further silly invocations of this, that, or the other utterly un-Larssonian writer as the next Stieg Larsson.

But mostly I liked writing the review because I got to define Stieg Larssonism as "potboiler plots with didactic political intent; call it Harold Robbins meets Noam Chomsky."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Why Lars Kepler are the real next Stieg Larsson

The Stieg Larsson school of Swedish crime writing doesn’t go in for guilty pleasures. Instead, it combines potboiler thrills and righteous anger in a fat, sprawling tosh-filled package, often with 475 or more pages plus a didactic, statistics-filled epilogue in case the reader doesn’t get the point – or in case he or she thinks the point was just to have some fun. That way the reader gets dirty thrills but feels morally uplifted at the same time.

The Nightmare, second of Lars Kepler’s novels to be translated from Swedish into English, offers one protagonist haunted by deep secrets. The novel is fascinated with Paganini and with great old violins. It equates moral rectitude with musical ability, and it does so with a straight face. Talk about far-fetched, potboiler-y notions.

The solution to the central mystery, though that mystery concerns a political issue torn from today’s headlines and involves government and corporate corruption, is straight out of Columbo. Quite naturally, the novel includes one especially horrible death. And then its prologue ranks the world’s top arms-dealing nations, of which Sweden is in the top nine.

There's nothing wrong with potboilers, and there's nothing wrong with politically engaged crime fiction. But it's always fair to ask whether the politics and the potboiling are organically intertwined, or whether they appeal, separately, to two separate aspects of what the reader wants. Dominque Manotti, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and the great Leonardo Sciascia tell stories in which the politics and the thrills seem to emerge, inextricably bound, from the same reality. Among current Swedish crime writers, I would argue that Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström come close to achieving this in Three Seconds.

The Stieg Larssonites don't do this, and I don't think they try. I find their achievements less impressive than I do those of the authors I've just named, but it doesn't mean the Larssonians are any worse, just different. I can't blame an author for failing at what he or she may never have tried to do.

*

The invocation of Stieg Larsson is especially apt in the case of The Nightmare because Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, the female half of the couple that writes as Lars Kepler, has said that the Lars part of the nom de plume is a tribute to Larsson. Crime writing previous to the late author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was fine, she said, but it had grown a bit stale.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Edgars, Part I

Anne Holt was both gracious and jovial when I told her after last night's Edgar Awards dinner how much I was enjoying her novel 1222, but she kept addressing me as "sir."

She's about my age, so there was no call for such formality. "Typical Scandinavian reticence and reserve," I thought, until I noticed sometime afterward that I'd lost my name tag. So all Holt, whose book had been short-listed for the best-novel Edgar, had to go on was an empty plastic card-holder with a yellow strip dangling from it that read "Press." Anyone who detects irony in the juxtaposition can take it somewhere else, pal. I have a job to do.

I finished reading Holt's book on the train home from New York, and I remain impressed by her boldness in taking an old Agatha Christie formula and infusing it with tension and a thoroughly contemporary feel. The novel's dénouement may have just a touch of the anti-Americanism that makes some readers of Scandinavian crime fiction roll their eyes, but if it does, Holt's handing of the matter is nuanced and humane.

(Mo Hayder's Gone won the best-novel Edgar. Here's a list of winners. And here are the nominees.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Charlie Stella's polemical porno pizzazz and a handful of Holt

I've finished Johnny Porno by Charlie Stella and started 1222 by Anne Holt, the latter because it's up for a best-novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America on Thursday night, and the former because no one in crime fiction is more fun to read than Charlie Stella.

With Stella the fun starts before the novels proper do; how can you not smile at an author's note that addresses readers as amici (friends)? The note that follows is a zesty polemic on the historical moment in which the novel is set: 1973, after a New York judge ruled Deep Throat obscene.

"As films go," Stella writes, "one has to acknowledge Deep Throat was nothing more than a campy, cheaply made porno that showcased the `sexual talent' of a young woman stage-named Linda Lovelace. With a soundtrack comprised of silly parodies and jingles and a plot born of male fantasy, the movie might well have come and gone without the slightest notice had the government ignored it. Instead, political directives from the White House launching a moral crusade that had much more to do with distracting the public from the war in Southeast Asia and an ever growing Watergate scandal guaranteed the film’s iconic success. What it also did was provide organized crime with a new way to make a fast buck. It is fittingly ironic that the name given to the secret informant (FBI agent William Mark Felt) who provided information that would eventually take down the Nixon White House itself shared the name of the film."

That polemical thread runs judiciously through the novel that follows, adding social and historical oomph to Stella's cast of hard-working guys, reluctant gangsters, cops, bookies, wives, girlfriends, and families, almost all of whom the author means us to view with a sympathetic eye.

***

1222 is the first novel of Holt's that I've read (she's published about sixteen), and I'm impressed because she has given herself the challenge of taking a well-worn crime-story set-up (group of people trapped by a snowstorm in an isolated hotel; one of them is found dead) and making it fresh. She has succeeded so far, in part by making the narrator/protagonist not especially likable, in part by doling out information about her characters only gradually.

1222 is one of at least six novels by a non-American author up for an Edgar (Holt is from Norway) and, based on what I've read of it so far, I won't complain if it wins.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Scanning Scandinavian crime

Declan Burke asks a provocative question about why Scandinavian Crime Always Pays: Whither the mavericks?

His thesis, to which commenters, including your humble blog host, provide but minor correctives, is that there's a certain sameness to the Nordic crime fiction translated into English, as good as some of that crime fiction may be.

You can find the rest over at his place, but to expand on one of Declan's rhetorical questions, where are the Scandinavian Eoin McNamees, Ronan Bennetts, Eoin Colfers, Adrian McKintys, and Kevin McCarthys?

The hook for Declan's post was the publication of Barry Forshaw's Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Forshaw was kind enough to provide some advance material from the book last year when I moderated a panel full of Scandinavian crime writers at Bouchercon.   And here's a post based on some notes Forshaw sent along some months ago about the book.

*

Declan's post may be a message from above, as it comes just when I had picked up his interestingly neo-Chandlerian novel Eightball Boogie for a second reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nights of Awe

The protagonist of Harri Nykänen's Nights of Awe is named Ariel Kafka, and he's one of two Jewish police officers in Helsinki.

Now, Finland's entire Jewish population is no bigger than a couple of good-sized Long Island bar-mitzvahs, so it's no shock that Jews would be somewhat exotic figures there. Nykänen has Kafka react with head-shaking amusement to well-meaning questions about Jews, and the deadpan humor is of a piece with what Nykänen did so well in Raid and the Blackest Sheep.

Kafka's Jewish identity figures also in the crimes that drive this story, a series of killings of Arabs that eventually involves drugs, trains, cars, Israeli diplomats, the Mossad intelligence service, and friends and others from Kafka's own past. To say too much more would risk spoilers, except that things, as in all good mysteries, are not what they seem, even when you think you've figured out what's what and who's who.

The novel's title refers to the Jewish high holidays, the Days of Awe, when observant Jews repent of their sins. Nykänen presumably intends moral weight, but a character named Kafka needs no help from the calendar to get introspective. The story could have been set any time in the year.

***

The book was smoothly translated into English by Kristian London, an American who lives in Helsinki. The fluency of the translation is especially noticeable in the novel's first half, which consists largely of routine police detail and dialogue, where the prose, and not the action, must hold readers' attention.

© 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

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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!

***

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

***

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

Nordic crime is more than just a barrel of laughs

Nordic crime fiction has been in the spotlight here at Detectives Beyond Borders, notably the question of what, if any, characteristics are common to crime writing from the Nordic countries.

With that in mind, two bits from Helsinki Homicide: Against the Wall, by Finland's Jarkko Sipila, typify what I suspect many people would regard as typically Nordic:

"Finland was home to one of the top per capita homicide rates in Western Europe, but most slayings were the result of drug and alcohol addicts solving their disputes with whatever weapons they could get their hands on."

and

"Over a million semi-trucks passed from Finland to Russia every year. It was impossible to track all the imports and exports. ... The incidents of fraud were numbered in the thousands, or tens of thousands, but investigators were numbered in the tens."

Resignation. Fatalism. What does Nordic/Scandinavian crime fiction mean to you?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Nesbø in my newspaper

My review of Jo Nesbø's The Snowman appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer. I had a bit of fun writing this one, and the headline writer picked up the fun rather nicely.

Here's what Nesbø had to say about that fun topic in my interview with him:

There's a big wave of Nordic crime fiction. Do you consider yourself part of that?

I am part of that whether I consider myself part of it or not because it's sort of a commercial label. It doesn't necessarily have much to do with Scandinavian writers having the same style. When I've been asked what I think are the similarities between Scandinavian authors, I would say that they were either from Denmark, Norway or Sweden.

I think my style is probably closer to some of the American writers — Bukowski, Hemingway — than to other Scandinavian writers. Then again, I write from Oslo, so the atmosphere would probably be similar to Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell.

For me, my inspiration doesn't come mainly from Scandinavian crime writers. It comes from Scandinavian literature, like Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, lots of other Norwegian and Danish and Swedish writers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

A Finnish crime novel that's all deadpan, all the time

I like my cold, gray Nordic crime fiction sprinkled with a bit of humor, and Harri Nykanen obliges in Raid and the Blackest Sheep.

Deadpan humor is plentiful in crime fiction from countries in the Scandinavian cultural sphere, but the first third of this Finnish crime novel  is all deadpan, and the effect is novel, as if a joke is liable to break out at any moment.

One nice touch: Further evidence that Nordic writers' are willing to poke fun at their countries' reputations for vigorous good health. Here's Helsinki Police Lt. Jansson moping his way through a stay at a health center:

"The decision to stay in bed had nothing to do with a hangover. Having only drunk moderately, he felt reasonably alert. He simply had no desire to submit to the hazing of another physical therapist. `Doesn't Jansson's back bend?'  `Jansson, tuck in your belly.' `Jansson, breathe deeply.'"

That's a nice companion piece to the stone-massage ordeal Iceland's Yrsa Sigurðardóttir puts her protagonist through in My Soul to Take.

***

Raid and the Blackest Sheep come from the commendable newish publishing house Ice Cold Crime, an American publishing house dedicated to translating and promoting Finnish fiction,

© Peter Rozovsky 2011