The Glass Devil (Helene Tursten)

Back when I read the first of this Swedish author's novels about Detective Inspector Irene Huss to be translated into English, I noted the protagonist's impressive ability to integrate a sane family life with the schedule of a hard-working investigator of homicides. I also noted that the author seemed less able than her heroine to accomplish that difficult juggling act. A subplot about a flirtation with neo-Nazism by one of Irene Huss's daughters seemed grafted on. It had no especial connection with the principal plot, and it was not subordinated; Tursten gave it so prominent a weight that it seemed to me awkward and tendentious, a forced effort to prove a point.

Here, the subplots are, if I remember correctly, more numerous, yet more lightly sketched and hence far more successful at conveying the texture of a life as lived by a hard-working, self-aware, observant and socially conscious woman, mother, wife, and lead investigator of brutal killings. I especially enjoyed one delightful exchange between Huss and one of her daughters on the subject of a boyfriend who has been cruel to the daughter. I think it safe to say that a man is unlikely to write an exchange like this one any time soon.

I realized early on that Tursten was going to show here where she had told in the earlier novel, Detective Inspector Huss. And so I appreciated Irene Huss's observations of her male colleagues during meetings, absorbing what I needed to know about her observational skills at the same time as I absorbed the details of the story; neither interfered with the other. And such observations are a significant part of the novel.

Perhaps they are significant in any story about a good detective, but I may have noticed it more here because of Tursten's frequent descriptions of beautiful women Irene Huss encounters during the investigation. I had not often encountered descriptions of beautiful women, at least not in crime fiction, that were not at the same time descriptions of sexual desire on the part of the author, the narrator or both. Art historians a few years ago used to write about the male gaze, that combination of desire and possession with which male painters looked on their female subjects. Perhaps there is a quite different female gaze as well.

But yes, this is a crime story, and Tursten tells this one with greater technical skill than I remember in Detective Inspector Huss, including a masterly piece of misdirection that is all the more impressive because it at first seems like a cheat or a lapse. A young man and then his parents are found shot dead, and the investigation takes Irene Huss to England to interview a relative of the victim's but also, I suspect, so Tursten could share pleasant and occasionally surprising memories of a first visit to London.

Tursten plants a convincing red herring, explained eventually by the character who has planted it, and explained earnestly, of course. Author, characters and setting are Swedish, after all. I'll say no more other than that The Glass Devil worked for me as a crime story and as a mystery as well.

(Tursten has written eight novels about Irene Huss, according to Tursten's Swedish Wikipedia biography. The Glass Devil is the fifth, according to the list. It is the third and most recent to be translated into English.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Helene Tursten
Detective Inspector Irene Huss
Swedish crime fiction

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

Technorati tags:
Swedish Crime Fiction
Kjell Eriksson
Inger Frimansson
Hakan Nesser
Helene Tursten
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Who is your favorite trained, professional, but normal crime-fiction protagonist?

"I don't care for amateur sleuth stories, but characters such as this—a trained, yet normal person—are not common enough."

That's what author/reader/friend of Detectives Beyond Borders Dana King wrote in a reply to my comments about Owen Laukkanen's co-protagonists. I had written that

"Laukkanen offers as protagonists a married, male, mid-career state police officer and a beautiful, younger female FBI agent who wind up on the road a lot as the crimes cross state lines. Romantic tension? Sure, but no soap opera, no mid-life crisis, no over-the-top, should-I-or-shouldn't-I angst. Laukkanen's Officer/Agent Stevens is much closer to Brian McGilloway's Benedict Devlin than he is to the male crime protagonists who lie by your bed in messy, unhappy, poorly dressed, divorced, alcoholic heaps."

That's two authors whose main law enforcement characters are highly trained professionals, skilled at what they do and yet believable without going over the top into domestic bathos. Their domestic lives are more than window-dressing. They're heroes and believable characters at the same time.  Stuart M. Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman was like this. Helene Tursten tried for such a balance in the first of her novels about the Swedish police inspector Irene Huss to be translated into English and achieved it in the third, The Glass Devil.

What other crime-fiction characters achieve that delicate balance?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Meet, greet and eat with Swedish crime writers

Janet Rudolph of Mystery Readers Journal and Mystery Readers International will host an evening with Helene Tursten and Inger Frimansson, and "other surprises" possible at her home in Berkeley, California:

When: May 1, 2007
Time: 7 p.m.
Where: Janet Rudolph's home, Berkeley, California.
Directions: E-mail whodunit@murderonthemenu.com.
What to Bring: Swedish hors d'oeuvres/food/drink -pickup type food, if possible
RSVP: Space is limited for this event.
Books: MRI will not have books available at this event, so please order your books in advance from M is for Mystery, the San Francisco Mystery Bookstore or your local store or online. Tursten and Frimansson will talk as well as sign at this intimate evening of mystery.

Helene Tursten is the author of the award-winning series featuring Detective Inspector Huss. The latest is "The Glass Devil" (Soho). Inger Frimansson is another of Sweden's most celebrated writers. "Good Night, My Darling" and "The Shadow in the Water" were named Best Mystery Novel of the Year in 1998 and 2005. "Good Night, My Darling" is coming out in translation this month (Pleasure Boat Studio). There may be some other surprises. RSVP early.

Britons are from Christie, Americans are from Chandler?

In my opening post, I praised Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cops novels while acknowledging that they may be stronger on character than on plot. A British reader responded that she was no big fan of the one book in the series she had read, and she said she valued good plots over good characters and was a big fan of puzzle mysteries. That plays into the old commonplace of British readers preferring the classic, elaborately plotted whodunnit, (North) Americans the atmospheric urban P.I. story. So, here's my question for the day: Does that distinction retain any validity in these violent and hilarious days of Bill James, Ian Rankin and Charlie Williams? Do British readers and writers tend to value a well-plotted fair-play story more than their American counterparts?

Here's another question of the day: Who are the European (or Asian, African, South American or Australian) counterparts of the American "regular guy" (or regular girl) detectives? I mean American series characters such as Les Roberts' Milan Jacovich, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, and Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter. The first is a divorced father, the second a zany single woman, the third a gay man, but they share a number of characteristics: They have quirks, but not pathologies. They worry, but they don't brood. There's not an alcoholic or a psychological cripple in the bunch. And add Stuart Kaminsky's Abe Lieberman to the list. He has family problems, but the man is happily married.

The only comparable European character I can think of -- a character whose personal life is an important part of the story and who is still sane and balanced -- is Helene Tursten's Detective Inspector Irene Huss. Can you think of any others?

© Peter Rozovsky 2006