Monthly Archives: March 2015

The 2015 Petrona Award shortlist is revealed!

Posted on by Kat Hall
16

Six high-quality crime novels from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have made the shortlist of the 2015 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year, which is announced today.

  • THE HUMMINGBIRD by Kati Hiekkapelto tr. David Hackston                         (Arcadia Books; Finland)
  • THE HUNTING DOGS by Jørn Lier Horst tr. Anne Bruce                              (Sandstone Press; Norway)
  • REYKJAVIK NIGHTS by Arnaldur Indriðason tr. Victoria Cribb                        (Harvill Secker; Iceland)
  • THE HUMAN FLIES by Hans Olav Lahlum tr. Kari Dickson                               (Mantle; Norway)
  • FALLING FREELY, AS IF IN A DREAM by Leif G W Persson tr. Paul Norlen (Doubleday; Sweden)
  • THE SILENCE OF THE SEA by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir tr. Victoria Cribb             (Hodder & Stoughton; Iceland)

The winning title will be announced at CrimeFest, held in Bristol 14-17 May 2015. The award will be presented by – and we are so very excited about this! – the Godmother of modern Scandinavian crime fiction, Maj Sjöwall, co-author with Per Wahlöö of the influential ‘Martin Beck’ series.

Maj Sjöwall 01.jpg

The wonderful Maj Sjöwall. Photo by Dr. Jost Hindersmann via Wikimedia Commons

Here are the judges’ comments on the shortlist:

THE HUMMINGBIRD: Kati Hiekkapelto’s accomplished debut introduces young police investigator Anna Fekete, whose family fled to Finland during the Yugoslavian wars. Paired with an intolerant colleague, she must solve a complex set of murders and the suspicious disappearance of a young Kurdish girl. Engrossing and confidently written, THE HUMMINGBIRD is a police procedural that explores contemporary themes in a nuanced and thought-provoking way.

THE HUNTING DOGS: The third of the William Wisting series to appear in English sees Chief Inspector Wisting suspended from duty when evidence from an old murder case is found to have been falsified. Hounded by the media, Wisting must now work under cover to solve the case and clear his name, with the help of journalist daughter Line. Expertly constructed and beautifully written, this police procedural showcases the talents of one of the most accomplished authors of contemporary Nordic Noir.

The Hunting Dogs by Jorn Lier Horst

REYKJAVIK NIGHTS: A prequel to the series featuring detective Erlendur Sveinsson, REYKJAVIK NIGHTS gives a snapshot of 1970s Iceland, with traditional culture making way for American influences. Young police officer Erlendur takes on the ‘cold’ case of a dead vagrant, identifying with a man’s traumatic past. Indriðason’s legions of fans will be delighted to see the gestation of the mature Erlendur; the novel is also the perfect starting point for new readers of the series.

THE HUMAN FLIES: Hans Olav Lahlum successfully uses elements from Golden Age detective stories to provide a 1960s locked-room mystery that avoids feeling like a pastiche of the genre. The writing is crisp and the story intricately plotted. With a small cast of suspects, the reader delights in following the investigations of Lahlum’s ambitious detective Kolbjørn Kristiansen, who relies on the intellectual rigour of infirm teenager Patricia Borchmann.

The Human Flies

FALLING FREELY, AS IF IN A DREAM: It’s 2007 and the chair of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Lars Martin Johansson, has reopened the investigation into the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme. But can he and his dedicated team really solve this baffling case? The final part of  Persson’s ‘The Story of a Crime’ trilogy presents the broadest national perspective using a variety of different techniques – from detailed, gritty police narrative to cool documentary perspective – to create a novel that is both idiosyncratic and highly compelling.

Falling Freely, As If In A Dream: (The Story of a Crime 3), Leif G W Persson

THE SILENCE OF THE SEA: Yrsa Sigurðardóttir has said ‘I really love making people’s flesh creep!’, and she is the supreme practitioner when it comes to drawing on the heritage of Icelandic literature, and channelling ancient folk tales and ghost stories into a vision of modern Icelandic society. In SILENCE OF THE SEA, an empty yacht crashes into Reykjavik’s harbour wall: its Icelandic crew and passengers have vanished. Thóra Gudmundsdóttir investigates this puzzling and deeply unsettling case, in a narrative that skilfully orchestrates fear and tension in the reader.

As was the case last year, the standard of submissions was extremely high, with plenty of top-quality crime novels jostling for the shortlist. That the quality of the novels shone through in English is of course due in large measure to the skills of the six translators. They are often the forgotten heroes of international crime, without whom we would not have access to these marvellous texts.

Thanks to fellow judges Barry Forshaw and Sarah Ward for a thoroughly enjoyable shortlisting, and of course to Karen Meek – none of it would have happened without her hard work behind the scenes.

So did we get it right? Are there others that you’d like to have seen on the shortlist? And who do you think the winner will be? 

2015 Petrona Award judges

A happy Petrona team after the shortlisting. Clockwise from back row left: Sarah Ward, Barry Forshaw, Karen Meek and Mrs Peabody/Kat Hall

Further information can be found on the Petrona Award website. 

An album of Petrona pictures is also available at the Swansea University Flickr page.

New Wellcome Collection exhibition – Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime

Posted on by Kat Hall
20

An exciting and FREE new exhibition has opened in London that will be of interest to many crime fans.

>> Following a £17.5 million development, Wellcome Collection has opened a major exhibition exploring the history, science and art of forensic medicine. ‘Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime’ travels from crime scene to courtroom, across centuries and continents, exploring the specialisms of those involved in the delicate processes of collecting, analysing and presenting medical evidence. It draws out the stories of victims, suspects and investigators of violent crimes and our enduring cultural fascination with death and detection.

‘Forensics’ contains original evidence, archival material, photographic documentation, film footage, forensic instruments and specimens, and is rich with artworks offering both unsettling and intimate responses to traumatic events. Challenging familiar views of forensic medicine shaped by fictions inspired by the sensational reporting of Victorian murder cases and popular crime dramas, the exhibition highlights the complex entwining of law and medicine, and the scientific methods it calls upon and creates. It surveys real cases involving forensic advances, including the Dr Crippen trial and the Ruxton murders, pioneers of forensic investigation from Alphonse Bertillon, Mathieu Orfila and Edmond Locard to Alec Jeffreys, and the voices of experts working in the field today. << Wellcome Collection Press Release.

Image courtesy of Wellcome Trust

The exhibition, curated by Lucy Shanahan, has five sections:

‘The Crime Scene’ investigates the different techniques used to record the location of a crime and its power both as a repository of evidence and as a haunting site of memory. It includes one of Frances Glessner Lee’s ‘Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’ – one of twenty miniature dollhouse crime scenes created by the American heiress and criminologist in the 1940s and 50s. They are still used to train police investigators in observing and collecting evidence today. You can listen to a BBC Radio 4 programme about them here (thanks to Sarah Hilary for the link).

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

‘The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’ – Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection

‘The Morgue’ traces a history of pathology, from Song Ci’s 13th century Chinese text ‘The Washing Away of Wrongs’, often seen as the first guide to forensics, to the celebrity pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947), whose autopsy note cards are displayed for the first time.

Image courtesy Wellcome Collection

‘The Laboratory’: Edmond Locard founded the first police crime laboratory in early 20th century Lyon and his simple theory that ‘every contact leaves a trace’ (now known as the exchange principle) guides the array of disciplines, including serology, toxicology, microscopy, criminal profiling and DNA analysis.

Police crime laboratory, Lyon

‘Every contact leaves a trace.’ Image courtesy Wellcome Collection

‘The Search’ considers the reconstructions of movement and identity required in looking for missing people – both individual cases and mass disappearances. It includes a newly commissioned artwork by Šejla Kameric that seeks to recover the human stories behind the critical mass of statistics and data generated by the on-going identification of massacre victims in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

‘The Courtroom’ section explores the final test of forensic medicine’s success, as evidence is gathered and presented in the courtroom in pursuit of justice.

William Hartley – Courtroom sketches of the Crippen trial at the Old Bailey, 1910. Image courtesy Wellcome Collection

Doesn’t that look amazing? I’m already plotting my trip to London to see the exhibition, which I suspect will be fascinating and disturbing in equal measure. I have enormous respect for the expert and dogged work that forensic scientists do, so I’m looking forward to learning lots about the history of forensics and the amazing techniques it employs. At the same time, as the press release makes clear, the exhibition seeks to challenge the way in which forensic work is depicted in crime novels and crime dramas – and by extension, may jolt regular crime readers and viewers out of their sometimes overly comfortable fictional world into one that is altogether grimmer. I suspect that being confronted with real cases, techniques and investigations will a sobering experience. I’m also very interested in seeing how the artwork used in the exhibition provides a way of moving behind the science to the human stories and emotions that lie beneath, and how it explores our cultural fascination with crime. It really does look like a very thoughtfully designed exhibition that will engage visitors on a number of different levels.

The book accompanying the exhibition is by crime author Val McDermid – I’m keen to get my hands on this also (memo to self – no reading before, during or just after mealtimes).

The ‘Forensics’ exhibition, curated by Lucy Shanahan, is FREE and runs from 26 February to 21 June 2015 at Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE. For travel info, see here.

Further information about ‘Forensics’ is available via the exhibition website and the Wellcome Collection press release.