165 posts tagged “eurocrime”
Translated by Don Bartlett.
Varg Veum is a private detective based in Bergen. Although he's featured in almost 20 novels, only two of them are readily available in English, both published by Arcadia: THE WRITING ON THE WALL (first published in 1995, 11th in the series) and THE CONSORTS OF DEATH (2006, 14th). I was lucky enough to obtain a second-hand copy of the second in the series, YOURS UNTO DEATH, first published in 1977, so I have some idea of the background of Varg Veum, who was ironically named "Varg", meaning "wolf", by his father - "Varg Veum" taken together meaning "outlaw", to his chagrin but to the mirth of many people he encounters.
Veum is a private eye of the classic mould, having been for many years a social worker specialising in child care. His experiences in this profession led him to become hopeless about the ability or even will of the state to help the many sad cases of abandoned and abused children he and his colleagues encounter. His constant brushes with authority led to a parting of the ways in the 1970s, and a new career as a private detective. The three books I have been able to read in this superb series all feature children and teenagers, and how Veum tries to protect them, often not very successfully - not so much for a lack of his own detective skills, which are pretty sharp, but because of the general hopelessness of their life-circumstances.
THE CONSORTS OF DEATH is a perfect introduction to Varg Veum because almost all of the book takes place in flashback, the first chunk of it back to the time before Veum became a detective and hence before the first book in the series. The reader learns Veum's back story as a social worker as well as being introduced to his newest "case", that of Johnny Boy, an ex-criminal newly released from prison, who has Veum on a "death list" of people he blames for his situation. When Veum learns this information, via an old colleague, he remembers the first time he met Johnny Boy, as a young baby. Later, the two meet again, again in awful circumstances when it appears as if the boy has killed his foster father. In the wake of that incident, Veum and two colleagues look after Johnny for six months before he is again taken into care.
Veum then leaves the social services department, sets up as a private detective and loses touch with the boy, until yet another crime takes place ten years later in a remote farmhouse. Again, Veum becomes involved, and not only becomes aware of a century-old crime in the same area that was never properly solved, but also uncovers many puzzling links and coincidences between all of these cases. The final part of the book returns to the present-day and the resolution of the story of Johnny and all the convoluted motives and relationships that are resolved in a cleverly constructed climax.
I enjoyed this book, and previous novels by this author, for many reasons. First, as Maxim Jakubowski writes on the cover, Varg Veum is a Philip Marlowe figure. The classic PI story is, for me as well as many others, a very large source of appeal of the crime-fiction genre. Gunnar Staalesen really is a worthy inheritor of the mantle of Chandler and Macdonald, both in his multi-level plotting and in his world-weary yet straight talking, semi-tough protagonist. Second, the writing is superb - it is always worth looking out for books translated by Don Bartlett, one of my favourite translators, and THE CONSORTS OF DEATH is no exception. Norwegian society and scenery are described with laconic beauty and meaning, an atmospheric background for the events of the story. Here is an example:
It was beginning to get dark as I drove into Osen where the Gaular waterway plunged like a faded bridal veil towards the fjord. High up above the mountains the moon had appeared, the earth's pale consort, distant and alone in its eternal orbit around the chaos and turmoil below. It struck me that the moon wasn't alone after all. There were many of us adrift and circling around the same chaos, the same turmoil, without being able to intervene or do anything about it. We were all consorts of death.
I can't recommend this book too highly. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of it, and am only a bit frustrated that because as most of the series is not (yet?) translated, there are gaps in the past 20 years of Veum's career which are hinted at but I can't fill in. In my opinion, this series stands alongside Connelly, Crais, Temple, Camilleri and others, who are among the very best modern exponents of the poetic yet tough detective story with strong, classic plots; a social conscience; and perfect pitch in terms of a sense of place.
Translated by David Hackston
Not having read this author's PRIEST OF EVIL (first published in 2003) as the subject matter does not appeal, I was pleased to discover that one of his earlier books, TO STEAL HER LOVE (first published in 1993), has just been translated into English, thanks to the Arts Council of England and English PEN, as well as the publisher, Arcadia, who is putting the book out in its Eurocrime imprint. Was DS Timo Harjunpaa worth the wait? On balance, yes.
On the plus side, it is great for me to read, finally, a police procedural set in Finland, as part of my criminal travels across mainland Europe. The haunting ICE MOON by Jan Costin Wagner, a German author who set his novel in Finland, is the closest I have yet come to it, but Wagner's book is more focused on the personal journey of the main character and is set in the countryside. TO STEAL HER LOVE is city-bound, complete with all the atmosphere and irritations of life that the detectives have to contend with in order to do their jobs - mainly at the level of having enough staff to reach an emergency on time without having to wait in a queue of reported fires, thefts and attacks. Another plus is the character and setting. Harjunpaa is a slightly remote man, but his domestic life is bought into focus by his attachment to his children's pets and a moving subplot about his senile father, from whom he's been estranged since boyhood but who is now dumped on him by the social services department. Initially the visit is just temporary, but Harjunpaa is soon frustrated by his attempts to contact social services to deal with the old man, being cycled round an eternal loop by answer machines, an experience with which we are all familiar but, as the irritated detective asks himself, how do the old people themselves cope with this Kafkaesque bureaucracy?
Other aspects of his family life are tantalisingly remote, however. I imagine that this is because the author's English-language readers have not been well-served by the lack of translated versions (as well as the almost inevitable wrong chronological order of those that are translated). I would guess that the earlier books provide more domestic context, particularly concerning Harjunpaa's wife, who barely features here but who is clearly a significant influence on her husband. The translation itself, by David Hackston, is excellent - a wonderful use of language that helps to bring this complex and subtle book to life, as well as adding many touches of humour throughout.
The main plot of TO STEAL HER LOVE concerns the creepy Tweety, a young man from a large family of criminals who is an expert lock-picker and synaestheisic - he experiences sensations as colours and images. Tweety, however, has a chilling hobby - he follows women to their homes and breaks into their houses while they are asleep, watching them and sometimes even getting into bed with them, albeit on the other side to their partners. He has a network of such boltholes across the city, which he visits at night and which are useful when he's on the run. Tweety gives everyone and every thing a name, whether it is a person ("Wheatlocks" is his favourite woman), his feet, or his lock-picks. He lives in a perpetual fantasy-schizoid state. Gradually we realise that his mother, whom he calls Mother Gold and idolises, is in fact a horribly manipulative old crone who has driven Tweety's father to death and constantly harangues her many (now adult) children, most of whom are devious, cunning criminals, all living together in a Dickensian rabbit-warren of shacks and decrepit buildings with secrets in the cellars.
The police have long known that somebody is stalking women and breaking in to their homes, but they can't catch the perpetrator. At the same time, they are bogged down by inter-departmental rivalries, budget cuts and corruption. Harjunpaa does his best to carry out his pure, self-imposed, mission as a detective but is constantly undermined by internal and external politics of one kind or another - even when he transcends that despite his chronic workload, there are never enough resources so he can't successfully follow through his cases, which regularly fail and so continue the cycle of his lack of good standing with his unsympathetic superiors.
Ultimately, although I'm glad I read this book, it fails to satisfy. The plotlines involving the repellent Tweety and his ghastly brothers are left hanging, and indeed it is one of the women he stalks rather than the police who is instrumental in the former's undoing. Harjunpaa lets Tweety slip through his fingers on several occasions, usually but not always by no fault of his own, and the other main plotline (a bank robbery) peters out after what seems to be an overlong build-up. My favourite parts of the story involved the police and how the lower ranks try to get the job done despite all the politics and rivalries from above and from other departments, and the broader observations of an overstretched societal system teetering on the brink and full of cynical opportunists, in the manner so ably conveyed by Sjowall and Wahloo in their Martin Beck series. I could have done with more of those aspects involving Harjunpaa and his colleagues on his team, particularly Onerva, and less of what it was like to see the world from Tweety's deranged perspective.
NO ESCAPE is the first of a series by N J Cooper, previously known as Natasha Cooper, author of the Trish McGuire books. Like the earlier books, NO ESCAPE has an appealing female protagonist - this time a forensic psychologist called Karen Taylor.
Karen is staying rent-free in her grandmother's ramshackle holiday home on the Isle of Wight while she works on her research project to identify and characterise "dangerous severe personality disorder" (DSPD). Her task is to interview Spike Falconer, incarcerated in Parkhurst prison for shooting a family of four to death some years previously. Karen and her autocratic boss Max Pitton think that based on his history he may have DSPD, which if so would be additional evidence that the condition exists.
As Karen gets to know Spike via her prison interviews, she becomes unsure whether he really did commit the murders for which he has been convicted. At the same time, a policeman on the island, DCI Charlie Trench, tells her of some unsolved crimes from years back. Charlie would like to nail Spike for these murders too, but Karen does not think they fit with what she is learning about Spike.
Part of this pacy novel is a straight "whodunit" - if Spike did not commit the crimes, who did? A crisis occurs when Spike escapes from prison accompanied by Jim, a guard he's befriended, and takes a young girl hostage, an event both resolved by Karen and one which makes her even more sure that nothing adds up about the strange young man she's investigating.
The book is also a story about Karen's journey to self-confidence. She's experienced a traumatic event in her own past, which we come to learn about, and as a result is reluctant to trust anyone - either a partner or a colleague. How she learns to overcome her own fears and demons in the light of police hostility to her views, bossiness from Max Pitton, her encounters with Spike's family and her wavering over her attraction both to Charlie Trench and her current lover, heart surgeon Will Hawkins, all take place against the increasingly tense backdrop of threatened violence and instability. As well as being a satisfying mystery novel, I liked way in which Karen develops from being rather weedy at the start of the book, to capable self-assurance as she's increasingly threatened by unknown forces.
TRUE MURDER tells the story of Ajuba, an 11-year-old girl from Ghana whose parents' marriage is in great difficulty. She's therefore been dumped, uncomprehending, in an English boarding school. She befriends three other girls with whom she shares a dorm, and together they read 'true-murder' stories in American comics, acting out some of the cases in their games. Two detectives in the comic, Malone and Leboeuf, accompany Ajuba in her imagination, becoming substitute parents who guide her and act as her role models.
One of the girls in the dorm, Polly Venus, befriends Ajuba and invites her home at weekends and vacations to share life with her family. The Venus parents, Peter and Isobel, have an extremely brittle and volatile relationship, with Polly being very much a player in the warped dynamics that underlie the adults' superficially charming and sophisticated lifestyle. Ajuba is mainly an observer of these scenes, but they bring to her consciousness events that have happened to her mother in the past, and increase her confusion about her (rather unpleasant) father - a confusion only increased by her awareness of the supernatural, impressed upon her by her unstable mother.
At the Venus house, the girls again play their detective games, but this time they make a gruesome discovery in an old trunk in the attic. Much of the rest of the novel is set against the girls' determination to solve this crime, interrogating anyone they think might have been involved and generally making nuisances of themselves or even putting themselves in danger. What with this and the intolerable strains in the Venus family relationships, which become violent and unpredictable, it seems inevitable that disaster will strike - which it does.
There are many other elements to this novel that combine to make it a somewhat fractured whole. Although I enjoyed it very much and recommend it, I could have done with fewer fleeting characters who never really come into focus, and more development of some of the central ones. The school scenes would have been more convincing had some of them taken place in the context of other pupils - the four dorm-mates seem to exist in isolation of influences from other girls, which is necessary for the plot but not realistic. My other gripe is that there are too many heavy hints that something awful is going to happen, often at the end of chapters. Not only does this constantly snap the reader out of the world the author is creating, but slows the pace and actually reduces the tension rather than builds it up.
Don't let me put you off, though - this is a first novel which is enjoyable and holds a great deal of promise. If you enjoy Ruth Rendell or Morag Joss you will find much to like in TRUE MURDER.
Translated by Mike Martin.
Thumbprint is the first novel in a series written in the 1930s by Friedrich Glauser; a series so influential that Germany’s main crime-fiction award is the Glauser prize. The novel is a highly readable affair, opening with the imprisonment of Erwin Schlumph, a young man arrested for shooting Wendelin Witschi, a travelling salesman and father of Schlumph’s sweetheart, Sonja, in the woods late at night. Schlumph is visited in prison by the man who arrested him, Sergeant Studer, who discovers that the young man has attempted suicide. After rescuing him, Studer decides to look into the case in more detail, as he’s fairly convinced that Schlumph didn’t commit the crime.
First, Studer has to convince the investigating magistrate to authorize him to take this course, which Studer realises isn’t going to be easy as the man is a stickler for procedure and wants the case tidied away with no fuss.
“Sergeant Studer, I would like to ask you, in all politeness, what you think you are doing? Could you explain how you cam to involve yourself without authorization – I repeat, without authorization -- in a case which…”
The examining magistrate broke off, though he couldn’t have said why himself. The man on the chair before him was a detective, a simple policeman. He was middle-aged and there was nothing special about him: a shirt with a soft collar, a grey suit that had gone slightly baggy in places because the body inside it was fat. He had a thin, pale face with a moustache covering his mouth so that you didn’t know whether he was smiling or not. And this simple policeman was sitting there in the chair, legs apart, forearms resting on his thighs, hands clasped…
The Magistrate himself couldn’t have said why he suddenly adopted a slightly warmer tone.
Sure enough, Studer is allowed to investigate the case, and so travels to Gerzenstein, a microcosm of Swiss village life, where everyone listens to the radio all day and sounds like the announcer, and where every other building is a shop or small business. Studer is somewhat stifled by the atmosphere:
God, people were the same everywhere. People in Switzerland tended to keep their little indiscretions very much to themselves, but as long as they didn’t impinge upon other people’s lives, nothing was said…….Unless something unexpected happened. Such as a murder. And a murder needed a murderer, like bread needed butter. Otherwise people would complain. And if the presumed guilty party tries to hang himself, and a detective comes along who is stubborn as a mule, then it can happen that al the little irregularities there are in everyone’s life suddenly become important. You work with them, like a bricklayer with bricks, to erect a building. A building? Let’s say a wall just for the moment.
And later:
“Perhaps you remember the case of that dental technician in Austria? Put his leg on a chopping block and hacked away at it until it was left hanging by a scrap of flesh, just to pocket a huge sum from the insurance. There was a big trial.”
“Well yes,” the examining magistrate said, “in Austria. But we’re in Switzerland here.”
“People are the same everywhere”, Studer sighed.
For the rest of the novel, Studer, helped by the local police chief, works on the shooting, with a mixture of forensics, witness interviews, psychological insight and dogged persistence. Dreams and hallucinations begin to come into play – Studer’s wife and Sonja both have a tendency to stay up all night reading novels – which renders them into a dream-like state by day. Studer himself drinks too much and later becomes ill with an infection, causing him to vividly imagine various scenarios that may have led to the murder, and providing some flashes of inspiration.
At its heart, though, the book is a classic story of a murder, some suspects, some social observations, and a neat solution. What makes it special, and fresh more than 70 years later, is its straightforward truthfulness, lack of pretension and yet, despite these pragmatic aspects, its hints of other worlds through which Studer’s perceptions are filtered.
What had people done with their own voices? Had they been infected by the radio? Had the wireless sets in Gerzenstein triggered off a new epidemic: voice-swapping?
My final words of the review part of this post are in praise of the translator, Mike Martin, through whose interpretation the novel reads as if it were written yesterday. I also put in a note of thanks to the publisher, Bitter Lemon Press, which since 2004 have published all five of Glauser’s Studer novels in English translations (all, I believe, by Mike Martin).
Friedrich Glauser was born in Vienna in 1896, and died aged 42, a few days before he was due to be married. He was a schizophrenic, addicted to morphine and opium, and spent much of his life in psychiatric wards, insane asylums and in prison for forging prescriptions. He spent two years in the Foreign Legion in North Africa, and worked as a coal miner, gardener, labourer and hospital orderly.
Der Bund: Glauser has elevated his material to an exquisite artistic level, a master of psychological analysis, a warm, sensitive and wonderfully observant writer.
Nationalzeitung Basel: Perfect characterization, brilliant portrayal of humour and irony against the dark, brooding background of small-town life.
Bayerische Rundfunk: Friedrich Glauser is a remarkable discovery. An ability to translate an erratic, obsessive life into language that seduces by its intimacy. A reflection of his suffering and compassion.
Glauser at the Bitter Lemon website.
Glauser's books reviewed at Euro Crimeand Reviewing the Evidence.
Translated by Patrick Camiller.
If the Swedish authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, writing in the 1960s and 70s, are often held to be the parents of the modern police-procedural crime novel, then the Spanish Manuel Vazquez Montalban, writing a decade or more later, is held to be as significant for detective fiction. So much so that the author Andrea Camilleri named his Italian police chief Salvo Montalbano after the Spanish writer, sadly now deceased.
In THE SOUTHERN SEAS, written in 1979 but not translated into English until about 20 years later and published by Serpent's Tail, private detective Pepe Carvalho is commissioned by the wife of a missing millionaire businessman, Stuart Pedrell, to find her husband after his disappearance a year ago – assumed to have departed for a new life in Polynesia. That is, until his body is discovered in a run-down tenement block in a run-down area of Barcelona.
The bulk of the book concerns Carvalho’s interrogation of everyone connected with the life of the dead man, in an attempt to discover where he has spent the missing year. Carvalho has to don many personae in this process, involving him as it does in highbrow literary and metaphysical debate as well as dealing with the advances of the dead man’s nubile daughter. Unfortunately, I somewhat parted company with the book at this point, as books in which older men “take advantage” of vulnerable young women (however “inappropriate” their behaviour) make me cringe. In this case, I found it hard to sympathise with Carvalho’s (or any of the male characters’) self-indulgent and selfish attitude to women, which is Neanderthal.
There is charm in Carvalho’s refusal to toe the line to the health police, and his almost self-enforced, mechanical enjoyment of as much food and drink as he can ingest or imbibe. I also liked the images of post-Franco Spain, a country struggling to find a future in the fantasies of Communist ideology. And the investigation, during which the dogged Carvalho refuses to tell anyone, even his employer, what he has found out until he eventually gets to the truth, is admirable and, in the end, poignant.
There is something cold about this book, particularly its attitude to women—not only Pedrell’s daughter but the dead man’s young activist girlfriend and Carvalho’s longstanding female “companion” (a prostitute) seem to my eyes to come in for undeserved sneering. Even Carvalho’s manic and vast consumption of food and drink conveys none of the sublime appreciation felt by Camilleri’s Montalbano. I admire the plotting and the intellectual depth of the book, but I couldn’t warm to it.
Read about this author and his books at Serpent's Tail, the publisher's website.
Review of Tattoo, another novel by Montalban, by Mike Ripley at Euro Crime.
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg.
Six years after the events in GOOD NIGHT, MY DARLING, we re-encounter Justine Dalvik, still living in the house in the woods left to her by her father, the 'candy millionaire' whose 'Sandy Concern' bought material comfort if not happiness to his daughter and second wife, Flora. Justine is still with Hans-Peter, a middle-aged concierge at a small, traditional hotel in town, though unfortunately he is no longer portrayed as a bibliophile.
Justine is haunted by one of the events in particular of six years ago, described in GOOD NIGHT MY DARLING, and spends her days rowing out into the middle of the lake, peering beneath the surface to see if she can see the drowned body of Berit, the woman she knew from her schooldays and who now haunts her dreams. Berit's husband, Tor, has not worked since his wife disappeared, and is being romantically pursued by Jill, Berit's best friend. This fifty-something unlikely couple travel on a ship off the coast of Norway to see the whales, but Tor is too seasick and miserable to enjoy the holiday. Jill does shift-work as a pilot at the harbour, guiding the maritime traffic through the treacherous shallows of the canal. Relationships among the stunted and strange characters in this creepy novel are no less treacherous.
Many passages in THE SHADOW IN THE WATER repeat themes and incidents from the previous novel. Ariadne is the cleaner at the hotel where Hans-Peter works. Her blind daughter is now 16 and the picture of their domestic life with Ariadne's violent husband, Tommy, a policeman, is deeply disturbing and chilling. Tommy has inherited a suspicion of Justine. Not only was she the last known person to see Berit alive, but Justine's ex-lover Nathan, as well as a photographer called Maria, both either vanished or were killed on a Malaysian adventure holiday. The police can't prove anything, and nor can Micke, Nathan's feckless son who spends his life living with his shrewish mother, observing and plotting revenge on Justine, who he believes should be mourning Nathan instead of beginning again with Hans-Peter.
The novel revisits the lives of these and other characters, mostly elderly and all eccentric or damaged to a greater or lesser degree. There's a damp, claustrophobic air over the whole novel. Although Justine is the main character in the previous book, here she is far less central, appearing as quite a pathetic figure with her decrepit, smelly bird. And although she is obsessed with Berit, her nemesis comes from a different direction altogether.
Some degree of closure is obtained for some of the characters by the end of this book, but it is a very disturbing novel, clouded and obscured by perceptions and suspicions so that nothing is what it seems. I admire the translator, Laura Wideburg, for so ably conveying the many subtleties of atmosphere and character. Both this novel and its predecessor won the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year for the years in which they were first published (1998 and 2005), and I can see why. THE SHADOW IN THE WATER is even less of a comfortable read than its predecessor, in showing the nasty things that go on under the surface of apparently ordinary, small-town lives.
Translated by Victoria Cribb.
HYPOTHERMIA is among the very best of the books I've read this year. It's the sixth of the author's Erlendur series to be translated into English; it is truly a mature, masterful and utterly fantastic book.
It's a story stripped bare to the bone. A young woman, Maria, commits suicide at her holiday cottage on the shores of Lake Thingvellier. About 30 years ago, Maria's father Magnus fell from his boat and drowned in the same lake. Ever since then, Maria has been extremely close to her mother, Leonora, still living with her even after graduating from university and her marriage to a doctor named Baldvin, who moved in with the two women after his wedding to Maria. Leonora died of cancer two years before the book opens, during which time Maria gave up her job to nurse her mother, constantly at her side. Everyone assumes that part of the reason for Maria's suicide was her inconsolable loss.
Erlendur is only involved in this case tangentially, in that he is told of Maria's death because Maria's main house is in his jurisdiction, so it falls to him to inform Baldvin of her death. Baldvin is devastated. A few days later, however, Maria's friend Karen, who discovered the body, comes to see Erlendur, convinced that Maria cannot have killed herself. Not only was Maria in a positive frame of mind, but Karen has a tape of a recent session between Maria and a medium, in which Maria talked of her comfort in being in touch with her mother from beyond the mother's grave - the two women had talked about this in the mother's final days, and agreed on a method of communication if there is "life after death".
Although Erlendur is sceptical, he is irresistibly drawn to situations involving the missing and the disappeared. He's already looking into three old cases of young people who have suddenly and inexplicably vanished, reflecting on the impact these events have had on the families of the departed. Family members tend to get in touch a on birthdays or anniversaries of the disappearances to find out if there is any news, and Erlendur sees how time takes its toll as the parents of these vanished teenagers become more infirm and eventually die. Erlendur largely lives in his own past, as his own life was shaped by a traumatic event when he was 10 years old. He and his younger brother (aged 8) were out on the hillside in a blizzard, and both boys became lost in the storm. Only Erlendur was found, nearly frozen to death.
Reflecting on these events, Erlendur visits the friends and relations of Maria, the dead young historian. He becomes more interested in the accident in which her father drowned, and digs out the details of the old police investigation, which seemed to have been carried out in a rather perfunctory fashion. At the same time, in a familiar theme in these books, he pursues new leads in the cold cases with characteristic focus.
The events of HYPOTHERMIA occur in a bubble removed from any official criminal investigation - although Erlendur interacts occasionally with his colleagues, the story focuses on his "private" investigation of Maria's death and the old disappearances. Although Erlendur does not believe in the afterlife, he's driven by his own inner need to speak for the lost and the missing, and perhaps above all to seek to thaw out some of the hypothermia of the souls of those who are left behind - including himself.
Erlendur's family life is also a fairly significant part of this book, as his own two children gradually switch roles with Erlendur and his long-ago divorced wife. Eva Lind (mainly) and Sindri want their parents to meet and to reconcile themselves to the break-up of their relationship, but it is quite clear that they are incapable of even the slightest understanding of each other's point of view. Perhaps because of Eva Lind's determination that her parents achieve some closure, or perhaps because of the investigations he's involved in, Erlendur reads to Eva Lind from a book describing the events in which he and his brother were lost, and he reflects on the impact the events, and the book's publication, had on his mother and on his own decisions at the time of his mother's death - directly relevant to Eva herself.
It is hard to convey the sadness and depth of HYPOTHERMIA. The book's plot is completely solid, being an apparently simple tale of a man going round talking to various people, but underneath there are so many layers of the past, of emotion and mood, of different ways of looking at death, disappearance and the lost, descriptions of the ways of life on this bleak island, and how past ways are changing.
There are no dramatics in this story, no exciting set-pieces or thrilling climaxes. The book is simply a rich, thoughtful, mature and compelling work, sympathetically translated. These Icelandic books have much in common with Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series, in particular the lonely perspectives of the protagonists Harry and Erlendur in speaking for the dead and disappeared of however many years ago - but each is a unique creation. I loved HYPOTHERMIA, with its ageless, deeply sad stories lying beneath its pages.
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg.
GOOD NIGHT, MY DARLING tells the life-story of Justine, a lonely woman in her mid-forties who lives on her own in an isolated house in the woods near a lake, somewhere in Sweden. Justine is trying to move on with her life after what seems to be a disaster involving her boyfriend Nathan, but we are not sure exactly what has happened. She decides to begin running to get some exercise, but most of the time she wanders round the house with her tatty raven, who flies freely around, and muses on her childhood with her father, owner of a sweet factory, and her stepmother Flora. She has some dim recollections of her French mother, who died suddenly of a cerebral stroke when Justine was very young.
Gradually we realise that Justine had a deeply unhappy childhood, being bullied and ostracised at school, as well as having to cope with Flora's bitter jealousy and abuse. Justine was a withdrawn child, becoming even more so as a result of this misery. Her father loved her but failed to take any real interest in her. More is revealed about the traumatic events of Justine's early life, and we become more aware of how her past informs her present behaviour.
Interspersed with Justine's story, we also get to know some people who live in the nearby town, particularly a divorced man called Hans-Peter, a bibliophile who works as a night porter in a local hotel; the stepmother Flora, now totally disabled and in a nearby care home; and Berit, who works for a local publisher. I loved these character sketches: the author has a wonderful ability to draw the reader right in to her subjects' lives and preoccupations.
The second part of the book flashes back to Justine's holiday with Nathan, her lover briefly introduced at the start of the novel. He is handsome and feckless, having had three wives, various less formal liaisons with women, and a lot of children. He's decided to start a business running adventure holidays to the Malaysian jungle, so he and Justine decide to go on a trip to check out the locale and logistics. As the couple arrive and join up with a party of fellow-trekkers, Justine is subject to Nathan's mental bullying and unpleasant behaviour, under the surface of his false bonhomie. She cracks, and has to return home - but not before cracking again when she is yet further provoked.
The final section of this excellently translated, haunting novel weaves together all these elements, as the complete picture of Justine's life and character comes into focus from all the previous hints and fragments, as she decides to take decisive action. The author deliberately does not allow the reader to sympathise with or condemn most of the characters, which gives this atmospheric and gripping book a satisfyingly unsettling air. The treatment of the police investigation into various incidents is also told with a dry humour and a rather different perspective from the way in which the police are usually portrayed in crime novels.
Translated by Mike Mitchell.
THE LIE is an "identical twins" thriller, though the two women concerned, Suzanne Lasko and Nadia Trenkler, are apparently not related. Suzanne is down on her luck - her marriage has failed, she's lost her job as a bank teller due to confusion she experiences after a years-ago car accident, and is living in a meagre apartment for which she has trouble finding the rent. She's close to her mother, who is ailing and now lives in a home, and for the old lady's pleasure she makes up an interesting life for herself in which she has a good job and a boyfriend (in reality an odious, sexually abusive neighbour).
Suzanne is eventually reduced to dipping into her mother's nest egg to pay her rent despite the many job applications she fills out, so she's relieved when she finally scores an interview at the firm of Behringer and partners. While in the building, she briefly encounters a very smart woman who could be her double. The interview goes well and Suzanne feels confident about being offered the job, so is devastated when she is rejected. Enter Nadia, the rich double who sees an opportunity in the fortuitous likeness, who pays the desperate Suzanne to stand in for her with her husband for a weekend while she goes off for a fling with her lover.
The premise is not new, but is given interest and depth by the character and life of Suzanne. At this stage I was intrigued to continue with the novel. I'm afraid that I then rather rapidly lost interest, as what transpires is a mish-mash of "lives of the rich and famous" told at the level of a mediocre TV movie or magazine-inspired romance, together with some casually described scientific research aspects and financial manoeuvres. The two women swap identities again and again; Michael (Nadia's husband) veers between illogical positions; and the constant shifting of suspicions is confusingly superficial - is Nadia really having an affair, or is she conducting a financial scam - and who are the mysterious hit men she's apparently involved with?
Somewhere in all this there is a good little psychological thriller struggling to get out, but unfortunately, for me it never does. If the novel had been revised (again) and shortened before publication, ironing out some of the inconsistencies and cutting some of the to-ing and fro-ing between Suzanne, Michael, Nadia and various bit-part scientists, neighbours, business associates and cardboard villains, the result would have been more focused and involving. Suzanne is the only character with life or depth, and the aspects of the plot concerning her non-Nadia life are the most interesting.
Petra Hammesfahr has written many novels, only one other of which has been translated into English (at time of writing this review). That novel, THE SINNER, is a dark and excellent journey into the depths of the human soul; it is in a different league from THE LIE and in my opinion a much better demonstration of this author's talents.
