Category Archives: Fiction

Nordic Noir – Scandinavian Crime Fiction

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clouds, sky

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Readers and fans of modern crime novels have been aware of the Scandinavian writers’ mafia for some time—long before The Girl Who/With . . . trilogy commandeered airport book stalls. Stieg Larsson was, in fact, only one of the hundred or so crime authors from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark whose books have been translated into English. “The crime tale has become to Scandinavia what the sonnet was to Elizabethan England: its trademark literary form,” says Lee Siegel in “Pure Evil,” a recent New Yorker essay on the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction.

An early signal of the impending invasion may have been the unexpected success of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Danish author Peter Hoeg (1992), a book I enjoyed greatly. As did a friend of mine’s mother, luckily only slightly injured when a tractor-trailer jackknifed in front of her on the New Jersey Turnpike and her car slid underneath. As the EMT’s loaded her into the ambulance, she yelled, “My book! Get my book! It’s on the front seat of the car.” Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

A line from Swedish crimewriter Henning Mankell—“every good story has a mystery in it” titles the home page of this website. He’s familiar to American readers and PBS Mystery! watchers for his Inspector Kurt Wallander mysteries. Several of these novels have been dramatized starring Kenneth Branaugh of the tiny mouth and co-starring the unutterably grey-and-gloomy Swedish skies.

From what source did all this high Nordic gloom arise? Siegel’s essay, which features Norway’s popular author Jo Nesbø cites several causes, perhaps most significantly the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot in the back while walking home from a movie theater. “The paranoia engendered by Palme’s killing,” Siegel says, “endowed the Scandinavian crime novel with a horrifying vitality.”

Also, in Norway—the territory of Nesbø’s Inspector Harry Hole novels—the discovery of oil led to a newly privileged class, and the social fears and resentments that ensued became fodder for the crime novelist, Siegel says. You will recall how in 2011, those class differences erupted in real life, when Anders Behring Breivik with bombs and guns killed 77 people, “most of them the young sons and daughters of the country’s liberal political élite” murdered at an island-based Workers’ Youth League camp.

Harry Hole of the Oslo Police Department is the protagonist in ten of Nesbø’s books—works that “stand out for their blackness.” Nesbø himself, on the interesting author-interview website Five Books (which also has interviews about Swedish and Nordic crime fiction), talks about how the mentality of the criminal is “actually very similar to the mentality of the police. And that is true for the main character in my books, Harry Hole. He experiences the same. The people he feels he can most relate to are the criminals that he is hunting.”

Nesbø’s books have sold 23 million copies in 40 languages, and several are on their way to being made into movies, suggesting that social fears and resentments are not themes confined to a single geographic locale, even if they can be presented in bleaker aspect against a lowering sky.

Read more:

Scandinavian Crime Fiction – billed as “your literary portal into Northern deviance,” featuring numerous authors, downloadable books (audio and e), and other resources

A Cold Night’s Death: The Allure of Scandinavian Crime Fiction – a guide from the New York Public Library

No. 1 With an Umlaut – Boris Kachka in New York magazine includes Iceland and Finland in his guide to this “massive iceberg of a genre.”

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***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

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Just finished the May, June, and July 2014 (how do they assign the date to this publication?) issues of EQMM. As always, a real mix of styles, eras, and plotting in the 28 stories therein, by both new and established mystery writers. Among the stories I liked best were those by:

homeless, dog

(photo: shiftfrequency.com)

  • Frankie Y. Bailey really got my curiosity going. She has a new book out, The Red Queen Dies
  • Alex Grecian – in whose story, a woman’s wireless pacemaker is threatened by a mysterious caller. Grecian, author of the NYT bestselling historical mystery The Yard, might have read the April 30 story on this website!
  • Brian Tobin’s “Teddy,” about a homeless man’s love for his dog, was powerful writing. Tobin’s two novels, The Ransom and A Victimless Crime, have been well-received.
  • I’ve grown to like the EQMM stories by Dave Zeltserman—two of whose mystery tales, A Killer’s Essence and Outsourced, are being optioned for film—which put a 21st century twist on the Archie-Nero Wolfe relationship. In Zeltserman’s version, “archie” is a “two-inch rectangular piece of advanced computer technology” that his owner, Julius, wears as a tie-pin. While Julius talks, Archie researches. Cute.
  • Liza Cody has created an engaging, not-so-sure of herself police constable Shareen Manasseh to good effect, and another story with Manasseh appears in the British Crime Writers’ Association’s new collection, Deadly Pleasures, and many novels, most recently, the Dickensian Lady Bag.
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The Rum Diary

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The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson

(photo: pixabay.com)

Is it that drinking-to-oblivion has exhausted its limited appeal? Is it that we feel we’ve been there before? Is it that I’m just old and crotchety? If you have The Rum Diary (2011) (trailer) on your Netflix list, you’re in for a few good laughs, but a predictable romantic element and a decided downturn in enjoyment when the main character suddenly dons a cloak of sanctimony near the end.

The movie, set in Puerto Rico in the late 1950’s (great cars!) is based on Hunter S. Thompson’s book, and while Johnny Depp, Richard Jenkins, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi (who makes the least likable character in the movie fun to watch) are more than fine in their roles, the material isn’t up to their performances. It might have been better as a straight comedy without hitting viewers with occasional deeply menacing information, then staggering on as if nothing just happened. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 50%.

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The Dream of the Great American Novel

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classics, books, Great American Novel, Moby Dick

(picture: upload.wikimedia.org)

I hold out my hand. Take it, and wade with me into the murky waters of literary criticism as we consider the Great American Novel. Or, rather, Lawrence Buell’s 584-page new survey, The Dream of the Great American Novel. I’ve read several lengthy reviews of this book, as well as excerpts, and although I want to warm to the subject, I am feeling the chill of excessive academicism. Yes, there has to be more to literary criticism than “I liked it,” but I’m not ready to sacrifice on the altar of subjectivity my regard for an author’s achievement of beautiful writing or the creation of drama involving believable characters.

The entire concept of a Great American Novel (or G.A.N. as Henry James mockingly dubbed it) has come under repeated waves of skepticism, surviving “more as a dream than a goal,” Adam Gopnik suggests in his review in The New Yorker review (link below). Buell himself suggests that critics have believed the G.A.N. was “a misguided amateurish notion that had long since outlived its usefulness if ever it had any.” By the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Kimmage says in The New Republic, literary scholars “rejected the very notion of an American literature.”

The narrative form of the idealized G.A.N, Buell says in Salon (link below), is expected to “replicate the nation’s vast, sprawling, semichaotic social textures and landscapes from the macro to the minute.” Such an endeavor has been decried by some critics as “documentation for its own sake” and “the great American bore.” Yet, the sweeping realistic novel that would describe all social classes and stations of a particular historical period, that would have a narrative agenda—think Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, or Zola—has not typically appeared in American literature. As Gopnik suggests, “in a country dedicated to the proposition of the autonomous individual, books about people defined by their place in a social web will never fly.”

Buell believes our greatest novels have splintered into four main subtypes, or “scripts” (and many of his observations apply equally well to American movies): tales of sexual transgression and punishment (e.g., The Scarlet Letter and its multitudinous progeny); the “up from” novel, which follows the protagonist from obscurity to prominence, and often back again; the romance of the divide, which dramatizes racial, cultural, or geographic fissures (all of Faulkner; Gatsby); and the “compendious meganovel,” which is generally not a true societal macrocosm, but more of a microscopic examination of a particular group of people or episode(The Goldfinch, Underworld, possibly).

Buell bases part of his analysis on the democratic notion that bloggers, internet chatters, and Amazon commenters’ views are important, too, thereby eroding the “firmness of the high culture versus mass culture distinction.” That seems admirable in concept, but shaky in execution, having tested my perceptions of various books against those of my fellow-amazonians and found bewildering diversity, with “Brilliant—best book ever!” followed by “Blech. Couldn’t finish it.” And, all-too-clearly, what sells is not the same as what is of lasting value.

For the record, books repeatedly cited as leading G.A.N. candidates by Buell and his reviewers include the schoolroom staples: Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and Huckleberry Finn, along with Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy,” Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (By contrast, the aforementioned readers place at the top of their lists of favorite books the works of Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Lord of the Rings.) More recent G.A.N. candidates include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I did finish that one, but I didn’t want to.

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Jennifer Egan’s Organic Writing

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Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad, Pulitzer Prize, writing, novel

Jennifer Egan (photo: upload.wikimedia,org – David Shankbone)

For a long time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan hadn’t consciously intended to pull together the stories that eventually formed A Visit from the Good Squad into a novel. A recent Glimmer Train interview with talks about the completely organic way of writing she employed in doing so.

The set of stories that form the book’s chapters focus on people who circle the lives of the main characters—Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and recording executive, divorced, and trying to connect with his nine-year old son, and Sasha, a kleptomaniac who has worked for him. Thus, we learn about Bennie’s and Sasha’s past indirectly through these confederates.

Each of these individual stories is told in a unique, technically different way. It wasn’t a matter of just selecting a character and some different approach to telling their story, it was more the challenge of creating stories that actually required different manners of telling. As a result, for example, one is written as a slightly cheesy news story (“Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!”), and another, in the unsettling second-person, begins, “Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it.”

Janet Maslin in The New York Times called the book “uncategorizable.” It wasn’t until Egan had the idea of treating the book like a concept album that its ultimate form suggested itself, she says. She had no desire to write a set of linked short stories with “a similarity of mood and tone.” (An example is Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction.)

“I wanted them to sound like they were parts of different books,” Egan says. “Because I felt if I could do that and still have them fuse, that it would be a much more complicated, rich experience.” Sticking with the record-industry theme, she says, “You would never want to listen to an album where all the songs had the same mood and tone.” The group Chicago comes to mind.

Chapter 12, structured as a PowerPoint presentation titled “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” (you can read it here), plunges into previously uncharted literary territory. This unlikely format her interviewer calls “destabilizing,” as well as beautiful and haunting. The challenge in using it, says Egan, was that it is basically a discontinuous form being manipulated to create a continuous narrative. In another writer’s hands, such a deviation from the expected might seem gimmicky, but in Egan’s view that particular chapter demanded to be told in a fragmented way, which PowerPoint enabled. Something unlikely to happen again, she says.

While the books experimentation was praised by critics and has baffled readers, Egan believes that the only legitimate way to experiment in writing is to let the content dictate the form. And that’s where the author’s creativity has to come through. Otherwise it’s an intellectual process laid on top of a story, which from the discerning reader’s point of view, never works.

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Everybody’s Favorite Read

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The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Yesterday the Mystery Writers of America announced winners of the 2014 Edgar Allan Poe Awards for the “best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, and television published or produced in 2013.” Among the winners were:

Links are to the Amazon.com descriptions, but here’s a directory of independent mystery booksellers, organized by state. Maybe one is close to you!

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Best Mysteries and Thrillers

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book cover

(photo: catalog.lambertvillelibrary.org)

How many of the “best” in mysteries and thrillers have you read? I’ve read about 30 of the Amazon 100 best list, though if I could count the movie versions the number would rise to about 42. No double-counting for both reading From Russia with Love and falling for Sean Connery. Especially note how the cover for Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase could be mistaken for a “Carolyn Keene,” represented in the Amazon list by The Secret of the Old Clock, my very first Nancy Drew.

The compilers seemed to go for the first in a series, like the first Jason Bourne or the first Inspector Gamache, perhaps thinking that a strong beginning will lead people to subsequent books in the series.

We’ve read the statistics about how Americans are reading fewer books. But they still love mysteries and thrillers. Some people are drawn to reading because they can identify with the characters and others because of “that excitement of trying to discover that unknown world,” said author Azar Nafisi. That might be a foreign country, a foreign planet, a foreign psyche. Mystery and thriller readers get both. A protagonist they can identify with and a journey through that foreign world (of crime, of spies).

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**** The Reversal

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Michael Connelly, Mickey Haller, Lincoln Lawyer

If you’ve read the Lincoln Lawyer series, you know Mickey Haller does most of his legal work from the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, which has the vanity plate NT GLTY

Got my Michael Connelly fix for the year—The Reversal—a 2010 crime thriller that alternates chapters between brash lawyer Mickey Haller and his half-brother (or did you miss that one?) cynical LAPD detective Harry Bosch. Both men have teen daughters so are especially anxiety-prone when a man convicted of abducting and murdering a young girl is released from San Quentin as a result of DNA evidence and must face trial again after 24 years.

It’s interesting how Haller—working for the prosecution this time—must introduce old evidence without revealing to the jury the prejudicial information that the accused has already been convicted once. Nor can he say why some witnesses are unable to appear (dead or demented) and interviews with them, actually their previous trial testimony, must be read aloud.

While this isn’t Connelly’s best, he never disappoints and received four Amazon stars from readers. If you like every plot angle tied up with a bow, in this one, that doesn’t happen, and the author leaves Harry still pursuing leads as to the convict’s possible involvement in other crimes. It’s as if Connelly was leaving the door open for a never-written sequel.

Matthew McConaughey, Lincoln Lawyer

Matthew McConaughey stars in the movie version – note vanity plate!

For a fun Netflix pick, Matthew McConaghey in The Lincoln Lawyer. Rotten Tomatoes Critics rating: 83%. I thought it was better than that, and I’d read the book! Also notice how the movie poster changed the license plate to “NT GUILTY,” thinking viewers were too dim to figure it out, I suppose.

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Lay on, Macduff!

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Macbeth, Sargent

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent (photo: farm2.staticflickr.com)

Word is out that Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbø, who writes a mystery series featuring brilliant and unorthodox Oslo police detective Harry Hole, is developing a crime noir, prose retelling of Macbeth. It’s part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which noted writers—including Pulitzer-winner Anne Tyler, noted Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and Man Booker prize-winner Howard Jacobson–are reinventing Shakespeare plays “for modern readers.”

It will be hard for Nesbø to top mystery writer David Hewson and Shakespeare scholar A.J. Hartley’s Macbeth: A Novel, which I have endlessly encouraged my friends and readers to immerse themselves in—especially the initial, audiobook version narrated by Alan Cumming. As a person who has listened to several hundred audio books, I can attest that this is one of the Very Best. You’ll never feel the same about Macbeth or those three witches, hereafter.

(The painting of actor Ellen Terry portraying Lady Macbeth is by one of my most revered artists, John Singer Sargent, who painted my favorite painting of all time, at London’s Tate Gallery.)

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Planner or Pantser?

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pantser, writing, author

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

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