We Come to the End/What’s Next?

In my previous posts, I covered some of my favorite Nordic mystery authors. This is my final Nordic Noir post; future posts will cover individual authors, additional genres, and some of my many biblio-obsessions!

Yrsa Sigurdardottir: Iceland

One of the things I find most fascinating about this author is that she is also a director of one of Iceland’s largest engineering firms! Her work is found on bestseller lists all over the world, and films are currently in production for several of her books. Yrsa has also written for children, and won the 2003 Icelandic Children’s Book Prize with Biobörn.

The protagonist in her mystery series’ marvelous books is Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, an attorney and single mother of two. Book 1 in the series is “Last Rituals”. I find Thora to be a very appealing main character, and an refeshing change from the typical detective investigator. She also has a dry sense of humor that is often lacking in other books in this genre. Although it is not the first in the series, my favorite book so far is “The Day is Dark”.

In The Day is Dark, when all contact is lost with two Icelanders working in a harsh and sparsely populated area on the coast of Greenland, Thóra is hired to uncover the fates of the missing people. When she arrives in Greenland, she discovers that these aren’t the first two to go missing. The local townspeople believe that the area is cursed, and no one wants to get involved in the case. Soon, Thora finds herself stranded in the middle of a wilderness, and the case is as frightening and hostile as the landscape itself.

Chilling, unsettling, and compulsively readable, The Day is Dark is a must read for readers who are looking for the next big thing in crime fiction coming in from the cold.

From us.macmillan.com

Here is a list of the Thóra Gudmundsdóttir books in order.

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Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis: Denmark

The books by this writing team have an interesting approach; their lead character is not a detective but a Danish Red Cross nurse. Nina Borg has dedicated her life to helping those underserved by society—but her do-gooder tendencies often lead her into situations beyond the law’s protection. She has endangered her relationships with, and the lives, of her loved ones due to these tendencies. The books are not just great mysteries, but thoughtful meditations on society’s approach to those less fortunate.

The first book in the series, “The Boy in the Suitcase” was published in 2011; there are four books in total.

By the time the sequel, Invisible Murder, appeared a year later, readers knew that Nina was the main character, and she would continue as the series’ protagonist in the third and fourth books as well. In Invisible Murder, Nina has promised her husband not to volunteer with the asylum network that drew her into the previous story’s intrigue, but after she gets a call about sick Roma children living in an abandoned garage, Nina cannot help but get involved…The power of the series as a whole, notwithstanding the relentlessness of the first three stories and the somewhat slower development of the last, resides in the authors’ creation of one of the most distinctive characters in contemporary fiction. The Nina Borg books by Kaaberbøl and her collaborator Agnete Friis have given us a saga in which, as is the case with The Killing, the intensity of the woman around whom the story swirls draws us in and holds our attention.

From www.lareviewofbooks.org

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Helene Tursten: Sweden

Helene Tursten was a nurse and a dentist before she turned to writing. Books in the Irene Huss series include Detective Inspector Huss, The Torso, The Glass Devil, Night Rounds, and The Golden Calf. Inspector Irene Huss is a 40-something detective and judo expert in Göteborg, Sweden. I must admit that I only recently discovered Tursten; I have only read “The Torso” and “The Beige Man” but I enjoyed both a great deal and it was rewarding to read books in this genre with a female protagonist. Click here for a full list of the Inspector Huss series.

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Lars Kepler: Norway

Lars Kepler is a pseudonum for authors Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander AhndorilI. I really like the Kepler books mostly due to the unconventional nature of Kepler’s protagonist Joona Linna, a Finnish Detective Superintendent at the Norwegian police’s National Operations Department. His background provides him with skills that allow him to overcome obstacles and solve cases that his colleagues find difficult or sometimes, impossible.

Joona’s parents emigrated to Sweden from neighbouring Finland when they were young. Joona’s father, Yrjö, was a policeman, and his mother Ritva a housewife. When Joona was twelve, his father was killed on duty by a man with a shotgun at a domestic incident.
After sixth form, Joona did his military service as a paratrooper, was recruited into Special Operations, and qualified for special training in the Netherlands in mixed close combat, innovative weaponry, and urban guerrilla warfare.
Joona left the military, went to the police academy, and is now an operational superintendent at the National Crime Police in Stockholm. His poor background and Finnish accent make him something of an underdog in society and in the police force – which is why he has learned to walk his own path.

From larskepler.com

He is a highly skilled crime investigator and his empathic personality gives him the ability to look beyond the image of the perpetrator as monster. He understands those who commit crimes, sees their fear and suffering, and perceives their desperate choices. This is most likely the reason why he has solved more complicated murder cases than any other police officer in Scandinavia.

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Jussi Adler-Olsen: Denmark

I’m referring here to his “Department Q” book series. It features the deeply flawed chief detective Carl Mørck, who used to be a good homicide detective – one of Copenhagen’s best. Then a bullet almost took his life. Two of his colleagues weren’t so lucky, and Carl, who didn’t draw his weapon, blames himself. So a promotion is the last thing Carl expects. But it all becomes clear when he sees his new office in the basement. Carl’s assignment is to run Department Q, a new special investigation division that turns out to be a department of one. With a stack of Copenhagen’s coldest cases to keep him company, Carl has been put out to pasture. If you like “Cold Case Files” on A&E, you’ll love this series!

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Last But Far From Least:

Although I was not able to cover them in detail I would be remiss not to mention some other marvelous authors in this genre:
—Kjell Eriksson, of whom the WSJ wrote “Riveting in tone and spirit…resembles the books of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, not to mention those of the modern master Henning Mankell.”
—Anne Holt, described by Jo Nesbo as “the godmother of moder Norwegian crime fiction”.
—Quentin Bates, English author who spent a decade in Iceland and writes the Officer Gunnhildur Series.
—Niklas Natt Och Dag, author of “The Wolf and the Watchman”, an intense and thrilling period mystery set in the late 1700s in Stockholm, Sweden.

Next Up:

Two of my favorite authors:
Jennifer Egan (@egangoodsquad)
Simon Winchester (@simonwriter).

Recap

In my first post, I covered what I considered to be a Nordic mystery, how I discovered them, and the myriad reasons I love to read them. This post goes on to discuss additional authors.

The Master: Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell is best known as the author of the magnificent “Kurt Wallender” detective series, although he has written other excellent mysteries. The books below are laid out not in publication order, but in the order in which they are best read, which is chronologically according to the life of Wallander.

While I was photographing my books, I discovered (to my dismay) that I was missing one of the books in the series! I don’t own “An Event in Autumn”, an oversight I intend to remedy IMMEDIATELY by ordering it from an #IndependentBookstore (of course). It should be after “The Man Who Smiled”.

Why do I call Mankell “the master”? The complexity and depth of his plots, the settings he describes so vividly, but most of all, his central character. Wallender is deeply and profoundly affected by each case he works on. It’s Wallender who keeps me coming back to the books again and again, and why I think that Mankell has gone beyond the mystery genre to write great novels.

Credit goes to Fabien on howtoread.me for the following:

Kurt Wallander is a fictional character created by Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell. He is a cop working for the Ystad police department. He is the kind of detective that invests himself on a very personal level in order to solve a crime.

Divorced, Wallander also has a daughter who, like him, became a cop. She is at the center of one book, but Mankell didn’t give her a series after the suicide of the actress playing the role in the Swedish TV series.

“The Pyramid” is actually a collection of stories, starting with Wallander on his homicide first case as a twenty-one-year-old patrolman, but also as a young father facing unexpected danger on Christmas Eve, as a middle-aged detective with his marriage on the brink, as a newly separated investigator solving the brutal murder of a local photographer, and finally as a veteran detective.

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Back to Norway: Karin Fossum

There could not be a bigger contrast between the detective in Fossum’s novels, and those portrayed in Nesbo and Mankell’s books. From Jeremy Megraw at Crime Fiction Lover:

Karin Fossum is exceptional, not just in Scandinavian crime fiction circles, but in the broader crime genre. Referred to as the ‘queen of crime’ in Norway, she came into the genre as a poet whose work in the health and social work field has informed her compassionate meditations on crime. Her creation, the mild-mannered Inspector Konrad Sejer, is not typical of Scandinavian detective figures. Don’t expect an unhealthy, hot-headed drunk with failed relationships and dysfunctional family issues. Sejer is a soft-spoken widower who never loses control nor runs foul of his boss. While many of his contemporaries have problems with authority, Sejer actually finds comfort in the concept, and the order it brings.

I like the Fossum books because of the deceptive simplicity of the writing, which makes them compelling reads that are easy to consume in a single sitting. NB: I read pretty fast, but especially so in the style inherent to many of the Nordic authors.

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Next Destination: Iceland and Arnaldur Indriðason

With a character more in keeping with the other detectives than Inspector Sejer, Indriðason’s creation Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is a brilliant policeman, but also a gloomy and thoroughly anti-social figure who guards his privacy jealously. He is a solitary man who spends his free time reading his private library of papers about people lost in the wilds of Iceland. We learn that his obession with this subject comes from his sad history; as a child, he found himself in a bad storm with his little brother who was lost forever. He blames himself for his brother’s death, and periodically goes back to his birthplace to search for his body.

Set in Reykjavik, and across Iceland’s stony, unforgiving landscape, the books create a strong impression, reflecting the silent, glacial progress of Erendur’s battle with his own inner storms. His investigations provide rich insight into Icelandic culture, old and new. We hear a lot about certain issues – the criminal justice system, nationalism, racism, immigration, corporate greed, the welfare state. One book even touches on genetic disease. The small gene pool is a concern in this small, isolated country. These are thematic elements shared across the Nordic noir sub-genre. (emphasis mine.)

Jeremy Megraw, crimefictionlover.com

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Return to Sweden: Håkan Nesser

The Nesser books I own are from the “Inspector Van Veeteren” series; he is the author of several other novels. The interesting thing about the Nesser books is that they take place in a fictitious city called Maardam, said to be located in northern Europe in a country which is never named but resembles Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany. The names however are mostly Dutch (see blog #1, Janwillem van de Wetering).

The interesting thing about Van Veeteren is that the first five novels he is still a Detective Chief Inspector; in the last five novels he is retired, but sometimes he leaves his antiquarian book store to help out with investigations. Van Veeteren is a bit grumpy and cynical, enjoys dark beer and chess. He is very intuitive when it comes to reading people, a key factor in his success in solving his cases.

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In my final Nordic mystery blog I will be discussing the following authors:

• Helene Tursten (Sweden)
• Lene Kaaberbøl (Denmark): Author of the “Nina Borg” series with Agnete Friis.
• Lars Keplar (Norway)
• Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Iceland)
• Jussi Adler-Olsen (Denmark)