Monthly Archives: February 2012

New Danish crime drama on ITV3: Those Who Kill

Posted on by Kat Hall
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My thanks to Rhian over at It’s a Crime! (or a Mystery) for drawing my attention to a new Danish crime drama starting tomorrow, Thursday 23 February, on ITV3 at 10pm.

Those Who Kill (Den Som Dræber) originally aired in Denmark in March 2011 and appears to have been pretty successful – it’s been sold on to a number of other countries and will be remade for the US market (following in the footsteps of Forbrydelsen I).

The investigative team. Wait a minute! Who's that on the right?!*

The series synopsis from ITV3 reads as follows:

‘Those Who Kill is a compelling dark crime series, based on the novels by bestselling author Elsebeth Egholm. It follows the investigations of a special unit of Copenhagen’s police force, consisting of detective inspector Katrina Ries Jenson (Laura Back) and forensic psychiatrist Thomas Schaeffer (Jakob Cedergren). The pair specialise in identifying serial killers that do not fit within traditional behavioural patterns and aim to uncover the psychology of a violent killer in their attempt to solve a case surrounded by fear and mystery’.

I have to confess that this description doesn’t particularly appeal to me, as I’m rather averse to serial killer novels and dramas. They often seem to dwell excessively on sadistic acts of violence and the suffering of (usually) female victims, and of course this violence and suffering are enacted again and again with each successive murder (it’s the grim repetition that really does me in).

But what’s interesting about the ITV3 press release, which I’m guessing from its use of ‘we’ is a translation of Danish press materials, is the way that the subject of serial killings and killers is presented:

‘THOSE WHO KILL is a crime series about a violent criminal surrounded by fear and mystique – the serial killer. Up until now, we have been able to curtail their activities with early – and effective – interventions via the safety net of a comprehensive social welfare system in Scandinavia. But times have changed. Borders have opened up, social welfare is in decline, and slowly but surely the whole system has become imbued with a sense of resigned impotence and callous disregard for those it once sought to rescue. The rifts in the net have become so large that bigger fish are slipping through the mesh, and as a result, a new type of crime is starting to burgeon – killings not grounded in traditional motives and patterns of behaviour.’

So here we are given a sociological explanation for the rise of the serial killer in Scandinavia – the disintegration of the social welfare system (also a principle concern of the 1960s / 1970s ‘Martin Beck’ series by the Swedish crime writers Sjowall and Wahloo). I’d be interested to know if this rise is documented, but, whether real or not, the passage suggests a more thoughtful approach than most dramas to the topic of serial killers, through an exploration of the way in which society and its structures contribute to their making. This impression is reinforced in the description of the investigators’ activities:

‘For both Katrine and Thomas, the challange becomes one of discerning the human behind the monster. For only when they come to understand the fantasies and trauma that drive him are they able to confront him’.

On the one hand, this kind of psychological investigative approach reminds me of Val McDermid’s Carol Jordan/Tony Hill series (of which I’ve read The Last Temptation) and on the other, of historical studies seeking to understand perpetrator motivations and war-crimes (Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men springs to mind). Both try in their different ways to move beyond the idea of killers as one-dimensional monsters, and to comprehend the logic, however distorted, of their actions.

Of course the press release could simply be sophisticated packaging for the usual serial- killer schlock, but who knows, maybe Those Who Kill will be different. I’ll probably watch, given the high quality of other recent Danish dramas on BBC4 and the welcome presence of another strong female lead, but may find myself switching off if things get too uncomfort-able.

The full press release from ITV3 can be accessed here.

*One of the main characters in the drama, Magnus Bisgaard, is played by actor Lars Mikkelsen, who will be familiar to fans of The Killing 1 from his role as the idealistic politician Troels Hartmann.

24 February update: Due to a conspiracy of circumstances involving a snowboard, suspected concussion and a trip to A+E, I didn’t get to see last night’s opening episode. But here are a few Twitter reviews to give a flavour of how Those Who Kill went down with viewers.

@richard0x4A: thosewhokill pretty good. A bit predictable but I enjoyed it. itv3 in decent foreign drama shock.

@Schmolik: ThoseWhoKill last night was distinctly “meh”. Don’t know if Lars Mikkelsen’s cheekbones are enough to keep me interested.

@Packet_editor: #thosewhokill my new The Killing fix

@crifilover: thosewhokill getting tense!

@fleetstreetfox: Hmm. I could miss that and wouldn’t mind #thosewhokill

A week in Berlin: Krimis, Krimis and yet more Krimis

Posted on by Kat Hall
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I was lucky enough to spend the whole of last week on a research trip in snowy Berlin, and was sure to squeeze every last drop from the marvellous opportunities this world city has to offer.

Section of the former Berlin Wall

The main reason for my trip was to see the 5500 crime novels or Krimis (Krimi = ‘Kriminalroman’) in the Kuczynsky Collection at the Berlin Central Library for my  research into East German crime fiction.

Jürgen Kuczynsky (1904-1997), a prominent GDR academic and political adviser to Honecker, was a keen crime fan, and according to the archivists had a regular cigar-for-crime-novel exchange agreement with the famous dramatist Bertolt Brecht. I was very kindly given access to this as yet uncatalogued collection, and in the course of my visit unearthed a number of extremely interesting texts, such as Gerhard Scherfling’s fascinating East German crime novel Die Zeitungsnotiz (The Newpaper Item, 1973), in which a historian is revealed as the murderer and as a former Nazi (one for my database…). I was able to peruse these on a tatty yet comfortable sofa, which was bequeathed to the library along with Kuczynski’s books, and sits in the corner of the vast storage room where the collection is currently housed. I imagine that Jürgen and Bert had some lovely chats about crime fiction while parked there.

I was also fortunate enough to be able to visit all of Berlin’s crime bookshops. Berlin is an absolute mecca for Krimi fans, as it has not one, not two, but three wonderful bookshops packed to the rafters with crime. Finding them took me all over the city, from Prenzlauer Berg in the north-east, where the Krimibuchhandlung todsicher (‘dead certain’) is located, to Charlottenburg and the Miss Marple bookshop in the west, and finally to Schöneberg and the Hammett bookshop in the south-east, near the old Tempelhof airport.

The very helpful lady in todsicher presented me with an absolute treasure trove: a whole box of GDR crime fiction from the DIE series (a witty acronym that stands for Delikte Indizien Ermittlungen / crimes, clues, investigations).

While the other two didn’t carry GDR crime (according to the owner of Hammett, the continued existence of a ‘literary wall’ means there’s little demand for works from East German publishing houses), they did have stacks of contemporary crime fiction set in Berlin, which I was also keen to see. Notably, there appears to be a mini-explosion of twentieth-century historical series by German authors at the moment, which are being strongly promoted in mainstream bookshops as well as more specialist outlets. The following caught my eye:

Volker Kutscher’s ‘Gereon Rath’ series (2007-): three novels set in 1930s Berlin (Der nasse Fisch, Der stumme Tod, Goldstein; English descriptions and sample translations available here).

Uwe Klausner’s ‘Tom Sydow’ series (2009-): four novels set in Berlin between 1942 and 1961 (Walhalla-Code, Odessa-Komplott, Bernstein-Connection, Kennedy-Syndrom).

The ‘es geschah in Berlin Kettenroman’ (the ‘it happened in Berlin chain-novel’; 2007-): currently fourteen novels set in Berlin between 1910 and 1936, featuring investigator Hermann Kappes. This series was conceived by the famous German crime writer Horst Bosetzky, but – very intriguingly – is written by a number of different authors. It’s apparently achieved cult status in Germany.

I also picked up a standalone crime novel by Mechtild Borrmann entitled Wer das Schweigen bricht (The One who Breaks the Silence, Pendragon 2011), which won the Deutscher Krimi Preis in 2012. It’s a crime novel that engages with the legacy of the National Socialism through the story of a son researching his industrialist father’s wartime past.

None of these have been translated into English as yet, although the rights to Kutscher’s novels have been snapped up in a number of other countries, including Japan.

And as if all of that wasn’t enough…I got to hang out in Berlin the same week as the Berlinale film festival and the resignation of the German President due to a corruption scandal. No visit to Berlin is ever dull. I first visited in 1988, a year before the Wall came down, and every time I go back, I continue to be amazed at the dramatic changes taking place there – best appreciated visually from the top of the space-age Fernsehturm by the Alexanderplatz.

Fernsehturm as seen from the Alex

Most striking this time round was the disappearance of the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), the East German 1970s parliamentary building on Unter den Linden, which was demolished in 2008 due to its high asbestos content. The city now has ambitious plans to rebuild the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), which originally stood on the site between the 1750s and 1950 … the year in which the war-damaged building was torn down by the GDR regime! Berlin is full of these sorts of mind-blowing twists and turns, with buildings, streets and even whole districts being dramatically reshaped by historical events and the rise and fall of different regimes. On discovering that one street had undergone six name changes between 1907 and 1990, I had to retreat for a calming Bier.*

All in all, it was a highly profitable and enjoyable week, and I’m already looking forward to returning to Berlin soon. Lots of reading to keep me going until then though – my return luggage contained a ridiculous number of new Krimis, which I only just managed to lug home.

*Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz: was Babelsberger Platz (1907-10), Bülowplatz (1910-33), Horst-Wessel-Platz (1933-45), Liebknechtplatz (1945-47) and Luxemburgplatz (1947-69) before taking its current name in 1969.

BBC4: Inspector Montalbano returns!

Posted on by Kat Hall

This Saturday, following the end of the excellent Danish political thriller Borgen, BBC4 returns to international crime in the shape of Andrea Camilleri’s The Snack Thief, starring Sicily’s Commissario Salvo Montalbano.

I’ve had my differences with the Camilleri novels in the past due to their rather dated representation of women (see my review of The Terracotta Dog), and have to confess that I haven’t got on particularly well with the TV adaptation either (is it just me or has some of the novels’ humour been lost?). But I know there are lots of fans out there who will be delighted to see Montalbano back on our screens in the form of actor Luca Zingaretti. This episode was the first to be made back in 1999, and has not yet been aired in the UK.

Montalbano (second from left) and his handsome team

If I had the chance, I would definitely sneak a peek at Camilleri’s Sicily, if only to escape our current cold-snap. But by the time the episode airs, I will be in an even chillier Berlin, where I’m lucky enough to be spending the week. Tschüss for now!

The Snack Thief airs on Saturday 11 February at 9pm.

UPDATE: Series 2 of Montalbano (12 episodes) will begin on BBC4 on Saturday 25 August 2012 at 9pm. See The Radio Times for further details. With thanks to Rhian for alerting me to this information 🙂

Would the real Finland please stand up?

Posted on by Kat Hall
38

Finland, Finland, Finland
The country where I want to be
Pony trekking or camping
Or just watching TV
Finland, Finland, Finland
It’s the country for me

You’re so near to Russia
So far from Japan
Quite a long way from Cairo
Lots of miles from Vietnam

Monty Python, ‘Finland Song’

My first youthful awareness of Finland came via the affectionate musical tribute by the Monty Python team. A keen ‘Fin-o-phile’ ever since, I’ve very much enjoyed reading crime novels set amongst its ‘mountains so lofty’ and ‘treetops so tall’. Along the way, via the novels of Jan Costin Wagner, I’ve developed an image of the country in line with Nordic writers such as Indridason (Iceland): freezing cold, austerly beautiful, and as melancholy as can be. This brief excerpt from Costin Wagner’s Winter of the Lions illustrates the point: ‘Then he got to his feet, walked down the dimly lit corridor and through the driving snow to his car. He drove to Lenaniemi. As the ferry made the crossing, he stood by the rail in the icy wind’ (… before visiting his wife’s grave and keeping a late-night appointment with a bottle of vodka). 

However, I’ve just had an interesting reading experience that’s challenged this romantic-melancholic view of Finland. Having finished – and very much enjoyed – Costin Wagner’s Winter of the Lions (see review here), I embarked on James Thompson’s Snow Angels (HarperCollins 2010), another police procedural, set in northern Finland (Lapland), which presents a much grittier image of a country characterised by high rates of violent crime: ‘Per capita, our murder rate is about the same as most American big cities. The over-whelming majority of our murders are intimate events. We kill the people we love, our husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and friends, almost always in drunken rages’. The kaamos, the ‘darkness’ that falls over the land for long winter months, is shown to trigger high levels of depression, drinking, violence and suicide, and the way that it’s depicted here moves well beyond melancholy to something altogether darker.   

These divergent depictions of Finland ‘clashed’ for me as a reader, particularly as I read the novels more or less one after the other. Much of that sense of disjunction lay in the very different tone of the novels, which in turn reflected the contrasting literary traditions in which the authors had chosen to locate themselves. Costin Wagner (German with a Finnish wife) draws heavily on the model of Nordic crime established by writers such as Sjowall and Wahloo, Mankell, and Indridason (which reveals the underbelly of society, but has a highly controlled, pared-down style, and an introverted and melancholic feel). In contrast, Thompson (American with a Finnish wife) has channelled the grit and tone of the American thriller to create a hybrid text which his publicity blurb describes as ‘nordic noir’. It’s an often engaging, but very hard-hitting first-person narrative with frequent, extreme depictions of violence (a topic for another post another time).

The contrast between these texts and their depictions of Finland acts as a useful brake for those of us who might unquestioningly accept the portrait of any given country in a crime novel – or indeed any novel – as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ (literature as travel guide). It’s a timely reminder of an obvious point: that authors provide representations of countries in their novels, which are often very beguiling or sell well in the literary marketplace, but which may or may not be accurate in the eyes of their citizens. And it’s not necessarily a case of ‘would the real Finland please stand up’: some Finns might identify more strongly with Costin Wagner’s portrayal of Finland than Thompson’s, or vice versa, or even think that both have validity. 

A final thought: how intriguing that neither author is Finnish by birth. Given this, one could argue that neither has a true ‘native’ insight into Finnish society, although the counter-argument that the ‘outsider’ can often see you more clearly than you see yourself could equally be applied. In the case of Costin Wagner and Thompson, it would perhaps be more accurate to speak of a complex ‘insider-outsider’ status, as foreigners who have married Finns, lived in the country for a number of years and learned the language (respect!). This dual status grants the authors a highly valuable perspective from which to write about Finland, albeit in strikingly different ways.

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