Nordic Noir

I have been on a Nordic Noir kick ever since the British Wallander debuted on the BBC, which led me to the Swedish Wallander, which I liked better, which led me to the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it just sort of went on from there. Håkan Nesser is Swedish but I think his main character, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, is of some indeterminate northern European country, which could be Sweden or Holland or Poland, according to Wikipedia. He seems to use British police titles and ranks, which makes sense because he has lived in London for the past couple of decades. Van Veeteren is a popular character, and some of the early novels have been made into TV series in Sweden. In the first five, VV is still on the police force, and in the next five, he is retired and running an antiquarian bookshop but still getting involved in cases. He is something like a halfway mark between Sherlock Holmes and Wallander, with some of the wry and negative self-awareness that Holmes lacks and also some of the mysterious methodology, a mix of genius, showmanship and intuition, that Wallander lacks. Borkmann's Point is about a serial axe-murderer with exactly three victims, at least until he kidnaps a female police detective and no one is sure why or if he has killed her. The Point in the title is a point in time defined by Borkmann, a well-remembered mentor from VV's early days as a detective. He taught that there is always a point in the investigation where you have all the information you need to solve it, and all the information that comes in after that point will slow you down rather than help you. So if one can learn to discern that point, one can ignore all the extraneous information and just sit at ones desk and think. Unfortunately, you an only recognize Borkmann's Point after you have solved the crime, so it's more of a thought experiment than a tactic.

Things I have read in the past couple of years, and things I want to read

To see some things I want to read, you can view my Amazon UK wish list. To see another wish list and some of my Bookcrossing activity, check out my bookshelf.

Here are some highlights of books I have read in the past two years, when the tension-levels chez Deborama have been very high and consequently little or no blogging was happening.

The thing that stands out most, which was so excellent and moving and unforgettable that it immediately made it to my top 25 list, was E. L. Doctorow's The March. (I bought this in America, so this is the American paperback cover. I actually like the cover on the British edition better, which you will see if you follow the link, but the book is nearly unknown here.) I reviewed this book on Bookcrossing some time ago. Here is what I said soon after reading it:

This gripping work of historical fiction is, in my opinion, Doctorow's masterpiece. I cannot praise it highly enough. I wanted it never to end, it was that kind of book. The historical event it concerns is one I grew up surrounded by : Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's famous "march to the sea", creating a deliberate swathe of anarchy, suffering and often false jubilation from the north Georgia mountains to the city of Savannah.

Two novels that I read that were both highly political in content were very satisfying reads. Apart from that factor, they were very different. One is a current and well-known author, both for the genre and for his often controversial political positions: John le Carre. The book was A Most Wanted Man and it was absolutely chilling. The other was written by a virtual unknown. Again, I bought this book in America and it's not something you're likely to see in any bookshop in the UK, sadly. I say sadly not because this book is stupendous or anything, but because the state of the bookshop market in the UK is sad beyond belief, and far beyond what it is in the States, which is sad enough. Anyway, the book is Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta.

A Most Wanted Man is definitely le Carre's most paranoid spy story to date, easily (in my opinion) outstripping in cynicism and moral pessimism any of his incredibly dark Cold War era stories. For in Smiley's world, the spies had to do amoral things for (arguably) moral reasons, but the elected government was mainly insulated from the choice and the burden of what they put in place. In A Most Wanted Man, the government itself connives to set up an innocent man as a patsy in the war on terror, and not even for any valid reason from a moral standpoint, but just to keep power and the status quo. The really awful thing about this story is that it's so very very believable. Eat the Document is a story of the early twenty-first century denouement of a 1970's political crime entangled with idealism, young love and possible betrayal. It is wonderfully paced and multilayered enough in its plotting to be intellectually engaging, and as one who was on the fringes of the 1970s left, with all its cults and conspiracies and outrageous fantasies, for me the whole milieu as presented in the book rings remarkably true.

The next blog will cover the non-fiction books I have read, and also How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, The Girls by Lori Lansens and a couple of novels by Mary Wesley.

What I am reading now

I have been patiently waiting for this to come out in paperback and there it was, at the local W. H. Smith's when I stopped in for a paper on my post-workout ramble. So now I'm reading it. I could have read it months ago if it weren't for the fact that a) I hate reading hardbacks (too heavy) and b) when I decide to own a set like this (the Millenium trilogy) I want them to be the same format. This is the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, in the trilogy by the late Stieg Larsson. The other two are:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played With Fire



Even if you haven't been aware of the several years' of buzz about the books, you probably saw that the film of the first book has opened in the UK recently. This whole Swedish crime thriller thing (second installment) started for me with the British Wallander, based on the Wallander novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell. This led DH and I to watch the Swedish Wallander, which I actually like more. As the stories got darker and darker, I got swept up in the characters of the two young police officers, and sometimes lovers, Linda Wallander (Kurt's daughter) and Stefan Lindman. I had read about the fact that there was a final Wallander novel that Mankell said he would never write, due to his grief over the suicide of Johanna Sällström, who played Linda. In the last televised Wallander episode, the character Stefan commits suicide. Stefan was played by Ola Rapace, whose wife Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth Salander, the lead character in the Millenium trilogy.
Ola and Noomi Rapace at the Paris premiere of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Some books I have read and want to read

Here, in no particular order, are some good books I have read recently (in the past two and a half years, that is.)

The March, by E. L. Doctorow

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

Meanwhile, the books I have been planning to read can be found on wish list at Amazon.co.uk. Also my "tbr" list at Bookcrossing.

Princess Diana fictions

News.Scotsman.com, the online version of The Scotsman, has an article titled "If Diana had lived", which combines a review of a forthcoming book with more speculation on the meaning of the Diana phenomenon. This is undoubtedly a tie-in with the new public inquiry being conducted in Scotland, at the request of Mohamed al Fayed, into the car crash deaths of the Princess and al Fayed's son, Dodi. Mention is also made of the private investigation carried out by best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell, who revealed her findings on a TV show on ABC last October.
Balmoral is first being published in serial form in the Talk of the Town Sunday magazine, and will be published in book form in spring 2004. The authors are Emma Tennant and Hilary Bailey, writing under the pseudonym of Isabel Vane.

This is a literary reference to an obvious precursor novel, East Lynne (Broadview Literary Texts), published 1860, in which the narrator/protagonist has that name; she is a "lost" mother who returns to her family home disguised as a governess to care for her two sons. In Balmoral, a nurse named Sister Julia, with a more than passing resemblance to the deceased princess, comes to Balmoral Castle to tend to an injured Prince Harry. The main thrust of the book is a critique of the current state of the British monarchy, and the authors call it a "fable" wherein Diana has not died, and returns, sans the trappings and traps of royalty, to finish the job of reforming the institution and shaking up the dysfunctional Windsor family. It is also a fond homage to the splendid old Victorian romance, including the practices of serialisation and mixing fantasy with true contemporary figures.
Update: Balmoral: The Novel is now available, if you're interested.

A New Trend in Crime Novels?

Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem
It could be a new trend in detective stories, which have always tended to have a social criticism edge to them anyway (well, the good ones.) A PI or an amateur or an innocent fitted up for a crime is endowed with a little understood disability, which paradoxically gives him or her great advantage in solving the crime. In a way, it's not a new idea. Miss Marple springs to mind, the disability in this case being that she is old and single and thus subject to all kinds of stereotypical assumptions which prove untrue. And then the creation of PIs who are morbidly obese, female, black, quite old or quite young, as well as unlikely combinations, from "I Spy" (OK, they were spies, but the same idea) to Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) have captured the interests of viewers and readers and smashed stereotypes along with bigoted or just unimaginative villains.
Motherless Brooklyn (great title, don't you think?) is about Lionel Essrog, aka the Human Freak Show, who is not only motherless, but suffers from Tourette's Syndrome as well, putting him at the social bottom of his little gang of outsiders, a group of orphan boys employed by small-time Brooklyn hood, Frank Minna. Frank is murdered, and the gang tries to find out who done it and who else is in danger.
I have to confess I knew very little about Tourette's before reading this and it really raised my consciousness. I was running around trying to get everyone I know to read it, too, just because it was so well written.


The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was short-listed for the Booker Prize. I won't review it because I have not read it yet (but mean to soon). It concerns Christopher, a boy with autism, who is obsessed with finding out who killed the next-door neighbour's dog with a pitch-fork. From the reviews I have read, it sounds like it has a lot in common with Motherless Brooklyn, including the compassionate attempt to glimpse the inner world of the "mentally different".

An Excellent Con from Liza Cody

Gimme More, by Liza Cody
Liza Cody is mainly known for detective novels, the Anna Lee mysteries: Dupe, Bad Company, Head Case, Stalker, Under Contract and Backhand.
This is one of a handful of other novels. It's an exciting and fast-paced con-game story about Birdie Walker, an aging but still attractive rock widow who has long-standing issues with record company moguls. The bigwigs are trying to enlist her input for a retrospective film about her deceased megastar husband, Jack. She is trying to protect something but it is not clear what. Her sister, her niece, and her one ally in the business, a sound engineer who has semi-retired to New Orleans, are all drawn into the scheming and mind-games. Then the corporate bad guys up the stakes by sending in a young, naive but ambitious chancer to act as a honeypot to Birdie's niece. In the end, it turns out to be sort of a detective story after all, and has a very gratifying surprise ending.

Two Crackers from Once Upon A Crime

Bad Boy Brawly Brown Star Witness

In a previous post, I bemoaned the lack of good, independent bookstores in most of Britain. Once Upon A Crime, in Minneapolis, is one of the type of bookstores I was thinking about. On my recent trip there for the birth of grand-daughter Savannah, I visited OUAC and purchased five books, reviews of which follow.
Bad Boy Brawly Brown, by Walter Mosley, is a book you will expect to be good if you are already familiar with Mosley's Easy Rawlins series. And it doesn't disappoint. The Easy Rawlins books are all in chronological order, so the story develops, society in multi-racial Los Angeles changes through the decades, and characters grow, change and in some cases die. This is the first novel after the death of Mouse, Easy's criminally violent but strangely endearing oldest friend. The ghost of Mouse haunts the story, plaguing Easy and giving him strength at the same time. This story takes place in the early 1970s, and concerns Easy's attempts to save a young boy from falling into a life of criminality through the strange politics of black power in that era. It is full of all the things you want in an Easy Rawlins story: tender family dramas and piercing sociological insights alternating with anatomically described fight scenes and thrilling car chases.
Star Witness, a Willa Jansson Mystery, by Lia Matera, is one in a series that is a personal favourite of mine. Willa Jansson is a lawyer with a colourful past. She is what we used to call a "red diaper baby"; her parents are 1960s radicals, her values are unashamedly leftist, and her heroes are secular and intellectual and revolutionary, like her parents. The early books in the series featured Willa working for a leading leftist lawyer and then, when he died in an early book, an idealistic legal cooperative. Now she works for a corporate firm, and so gets into those typical nineties-naughties conflicts of belief vs. livelihood. In this story, a bit of a departure, she gets roped into the world of alien abductees and conspiracy theorists, and gets herself tied up in some Gordian knots of legal ethics and personal responsibility. The thing that really shines about Lia Matera's books is the dialogue, both internal and external. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Two Women - A PI and A Vicar - Two Mysteries

In the Bleak Midwinter The Big Dig

Here are two more books that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, is a first crime novel, featuring one of those unlikely buddy pairs that can make detective stories either really entertaining or cringingly bad, depending mostly on the writer's skill with dialogue and narrative touch with relationships. (There is an obvious intention to start a "series" here, including a taster of the forthcoming second novel.) This writer is neither the best nor the worst I have encountered, but nearer the top than the bottom, so, so far so good. The pair is a newly appointed female Episcopalian priest and a married, male, non-religious local police chief. The scene is set to bring them together by a newborn baby being left in the church porch, and the attempts to find the mother, the father or the truth about what happened to them. Extra tension is added to the relationship by a small romantic attachment on both sides, and needs to be filled that are not being met by the wife on one hand or the vocation on the other. Not at all bad for a first timer.
The Big Dig, on the other hand, is one in a long-established and well-respected series by crime author Linda Barnes. The female PI, six-foot tall, red-headed, ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle of Boston, is very much in the V. I. Warshawski/Kinsey Mullhone vein. The Big Dig is a real project, the massive engineering feat of putting all the freeways in downtown Boston underground, the "central artery tunnel", which is the largest modern engineering project in the world. And a great setting for a mysterious death that may be a murder.

Persia Cafe

Persia Cafe, by Melany Nielson


This is the fifth book that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
This is a mystery of sorts, but it features neither a cop nor a PI nor even an amateur investigator. But a crime occurs, what we would now call a hate crime, although in the time and place of the story - Mississippi in the 1960s - such a term did not exist. The principal character is a young white woman, Fannie Leary, who runs the Persia Cafe. At the start of the story, the Persia Cafe is the only place in town to eat out or even have coffee and it is patronised by whites only. The cook, of course, is black, and in the way of white families in the South, because she has worked for Fannie's family all her life, she is in the sort of relationship with them that I will not even try to describe, because you cannot understand it unless you experience it. This is the relationship that my ex-father-in-law and others of his ilk referred to when they said "We care for our nigras," in a tone and context that made it clear that "yankees" and outsiders cared not for their own nigras and were exposing them to harm. But if a black person did something to put himself outside their "protection", well, that is a relationship that it is also hard to understand, except in terms of pure evil, the natural predatory nature of the human beast coming out.
The main arc of this story is what used to happen when a white woman did something to put herself outside the protection of the Southern white men. Fannie does not quite declare herself a race traitor (as I did myself in the 1960s in suburban Atlanta, and if I had done the same in Mississippi, I may not have grown up to tell about it.) But her crime of omission is enough to get the Persia Cafe boycotted by the white community, so in a moment of supreme courage, she invites the black community to dinner at the cafe.
What we get at this point is a great picture of a small southern community on the cusp of change. Having lived through this era and this place, I can attest that the picture is accurate and believable. Oh, and Fannie solves the crime, too, the original crime, which does turn out to be murder. This is a great story, a cut above the genre.

British Mysteries

An Orkney Murder The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

For some reason I ended up reading two little-known British detective stories, both from the Nottingham Public Library, both set in the late Victorian period. [rant mode on] It annoys me no end that books like these are not available in ordinary bookstores, at least not if you don't already know about them and want them enough to order them. All the bookstores in the UK seem to be clones of one horrible bookstore, with five hundred copies of the latest Harry Potter, and lots of books about sports that I care nothing about, and loads of celebrity chef cookbooks. (And in fact I like celebrity chef cookbooks, but I don't like depressing bookstores with nothing of interest to browse.) In other words, I rarely go into even a large "good" bookstore in the UK (like Waterstones) and FIND SOMETHING, as in something that I haven't heard of before but that I am compelled to buy and read. In some ways that's good - I spend less money impulse buying, but, look, I am going to read the same amount anyway, I am just enjoying it less. [rant mode off]
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (Peter Lovesey) refers to boxing shorts (I thought it was going to have some erotic element to it, but any that it has is only incidental to the plot.) It is quite interesting though, and you learn a lot about the sport of bare-knuckle fighting which was made illegal in the UK in the 1870s but persisted for a long time after. You also learn the origins of such expressions as "come up to scratch" and "throw in the sponge" and "throw his hat in the ring".
I didn't realise that An Orkney Murder, by Alanna Knight, was also set in late Victorian times until I started reading it. It features a way-ahead-of-her-time Scottish female private investigator. It also features an archaeological dig in the Orkneys and dark domestic secrets in a Scottish family. In the end, I got rather irritated at this book, for a reason that often applies when I am reading novels by contemporary writers set in the Victorian period. They just sound far too contemporary and therefore anachronistic. It is always a problem when writing a story set in the past to know how the people would sound, their diction, their colloquialisms, their social markers, all that. The bigger problem with a Victorian setting is that there are so many wonderful extant Victorian writers. I have read so much Conan Doyle, Dickens, Trollope and the like, not to mention my favourite childhood novels Little Women and Black Beauty, which I must have read 100 times each, that it is a very rare historical novel from that period that doesn't sound horribly false to me. But this one was egregiously so. But if you don't have my problem, you may be able to enjoy it, if only for the plot (which was only pretty good) and the main character.
The Lovesey book was, for me, a far better read, even though I have little interest in the Victorian London underworld and bare-knuckle fighting, and lots of interest in Victorian Orkney and archaeology and women private detectives. Just goes to show what a huge difference writing style, careful research and natural talent can make.