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.

Paignton, bookshops and various books

I am blogging to you from the little seaside town of Paignton on the south coast of Devon. Originally my purpose in coming here was to look at a bookshop coming up for sale, the award-winning Torbay Bookshop in "beautiful dowtown Paignton". After my trip was booked, but before it occurred, my husband and I came to the inevitable conclusion that as much as I would love to run a bookshop, as much as he would love to buy a business with living quarters attached in a market town on the south coast of England, and as much as we would both love to sell our house and change our lives for the better, this was just not going to work. We can't even communicate rationally about the household finances, so the thought of trying to co-exist and run a business is just impossible. But I needed a break anyway, having just been made redundant from my job of 12 years, so here I am. And the bookshop is lovely.
Being a "proper" bookshop rather than a used bookshop, and with a fairly small footprint, it doesn't have a coffeeshop or wifi, so I am hanging out at the moment in another (used) bookshop just a block down the road called epicentre. Which does have wifi, obviously, and also excellent coffee, vegan snacks and quite cheap used books. (In the original version of this post, I misrepresented the Torbay Bookshop by claiming it had no seating, but Matthew, one of the owners, has pointed out to me that they do in fact have a comfy leather sofa and a children's book area with seating. My bad, or at least, my bad memory.)
I brought a number of books with me to read on the train and in the poky little hotel room at night. Two of them are centred around the slave trade, one fiction (Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, 1992 (a Booker winner) which I just got started on) and one non-fiction (Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, 2005, which I have not started.) But then, at epicentre, I bought a paperback Iris Murdoch (The Book and the Brotherhood, 1987.) So I started reading that, putting off the Unsworth for now. I have never read any Iris Murdoch and have been meaning to for years; ditto Barry Unsworth.
I also have three magazines with me, and I also read maps and tourist "literature" in a totally compulsive way when on holiday in a new place, so I can't swear I'll finish either of these books, let alone all the ones I brought along.
I am being urged by everyone to try a steam train, ferry boat and coach trip around the coast and the River Dart. But it takes a whole day and costs £21, and I am trying to "do" Paignton on less than £20 a day, so I may not. I really love going out on boats, though, so I may do a shorter cheaper little boat trip and then just hang out in cafes and pubs reading and blogging.
See also my Paignton reviews on Qype.