Category Archives: Historical

Dispatches from Bristol: CrimeFest 2013

Posted on by Kat Hall
24

I’ve just returned from four days in sunny Bristol at CrimeFest 2013, which was a grand adventure from start to finish. It’s impossible to do justice to the richness of the event in one post, but here’s a glimpse of some of the panels and highlights. I’ll also build a list of links to other CrimeFest reports at the end of this post.

I attended a number of mainly international panels (see below), but could have done with cloning myself to get to a few more. Those on Twitter can search for the hashtag #crimefest13 for my live tweets and those of other delegates.

Death Overseas: Valerio Varesi (Italy), Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Iceland), K.O. Dahl (Norway), Thomas Enger (Norway), Stav Sherez moderating. Showcase of international crime writing from three countries.

Native and Outsider: Different Perspectives I: Pierre Lemaitre (France), M.J. McGrath (UK/Arctic), Adrian Magson (UK/France), Dana Stabenow (Arctic), Jake Kerridge moderating. Exploring the advantages/disadvantages of writing crime set in Norway and the Arctic from an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’ perspective.

Native and Outsider: Different Perspectives II: Roberto Costantini (Italy), David Hewson (UK/Italy/Sweden), Thomas Enger (Norway), Derek B. Miller (U.S./Norway), Barry Forshaw moderating. As above, but with a focus on Italy and Norway.

The Tourist Board

The Tourist Board Never Said Anything About This! Quentin Bates (Iceland), Stanley Trollip (Botswana), Xavier-Marie Bonnot (France), Jeffrey Siger (Greece), Martin Edwards moderating. The sensitivities of depicting positive and negative elements of a particular national setting or identity.

Cold War: An Infiltrating Chill: Tom Harper, John Lawton, Aly Monroe, William Ryan, Martin Walker moderating. A wide-ranging discussion of the Cold War and crime fiction set before, during and aft…actually, it seems that it’s not over yet.

Fresh Blood: Debut Authors: Alex Blackmore, J.C. Martin, Fergus McNeill, Tom Vowler, Rhian Davies moderating. Exciting new crime authors discussing their work.

How Does (English) Crime Translate? Ann Cleeves (author), Charlotte Werner (Swedish publisher), Erik de Vries (translator), Daniel Hahn of the British Centre for Literary Translation moderating. The mechanics of selecting crime for or from other national markets, and the processes involved in translation.

The Translation panel

Interesting observations from the panels and beyond

A number of writers view crime novels as a ‘social novel’ engaged in an exploration or critique of society, or of pressing social issues (Dahl, Varesi, Trollip, Stabenow). In contrast, Enger says he has no political or social agenda: telling a good story is the thing.

Settings are often viewed by writers as characters in their own right (Bonnot, Stabenow, McGrath, Trollip). Cities are sometimes better for depicting isolation than the countryside (Dahl). Marseilles is more Italian than French (Bonnot).

Some authors need to write in the place where their novels are set (McNeill/Bristol). Others feel that they write better elsewhere, because they can ‘see better from a distance’ (Miller/Oslo).

Lemaitre thinks it’s perfectly possible for a British ‘outsider’ to depict a France that is more ‘real’ than his own.

Icelandic crime writers face a challenge in terms of reflecting reality, as there’s an average of one murder a year in Iceland (Sigurdardottir). By contrast, the Arctic has the same per capita murder rate as South Africa or Mexico (McGrath).

A number of authors are engaged in explorations of historical legacies, such as World War II or the Algerian War (Magson, Varenne, Hewson, Ridpath). 60 years is nothing in terms of dealing with the legacy of the past (Costantini, citing Italy as an example).

Britain was not occupied during World War II (with the notable exception of the Channel Islands) and therefore didn’t experience the war in the same way as other countries such as France or Norway (Hewson).

Crime authors who write on twentieth century history have a variety of motivations: a desire to understand the previous generation and its role in making our world (Monroe on the Cold War); the challenge of writing about a society in which truth and justice are flexible concepts (Ryan on Stalin’s Russia).

British Cold War spies were often not uncovered due to the class system and upper-class loyalties: a public school boy who is a member of a posh club has perfect cover (Monroe). All on Cold War panel agreed that the Cold War is not over (citing the current situation in Syria).

Swedish cover of Blue Lightning

Crime fiction provides the biggest market for literary translation in the UK (Hahn). Speed is the key element when translating, especially in Europe where readers may otherwise buy the English original (de Vries). It’s a struggle to introduce translated authors in Sweden due to the dominance of Scandi crime, but it helps if their novels are set in the Shetlands… (Werner).

Describing violence is less interesting than exploring a character’s reaction to violence (James Oswald).

Buzz

There was lots of buzz about Pierre Lemaitre’s Alex, and this blogger did her very best to spread the word about Derek B. Miller’s exceptional debut novel Norwegian by Night. James Oswald’s Natural Causes was also frequently mentioned both as a must-read and a significant self-publishing success story. The series has been picked up by Penguin, whose advance the author rather unusually spent on buying a tractor for his farm.

Highlights

Seeing Barry Forshaw present the inaugural Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year, set up in memory of Maxine Clarke. The very deserving winner was Liza Marklund with Last Will, translated by Neil Smith (Corgi/Transworld 2012). Barry also won the prestigious HRF Keating Award for his editorship of British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia. Congratulations!

The Petrona Award, now on its way to Liza Marklund in Sweden

Hearing the International Dagger shortlist being announced, which includes German crime writer Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case. Full details are available over at Euro Crime.

Attending the Sherlock panel, which featured Mark Gatiss, Stephen Moffat and Sue Virtue in fine form. We learned and laughed a lot.

Eating lunch in a graveyard. Bristol Cathedral is a stone’s throw from the CrimeFest hotel, and features a lovely little cafe and landscaped garden/graveyard, where you can enjoy a peaceful cuppa.

Attending the second meeting of the Icelandic Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association. I’m not quite sure how I ended up there, but it was very convivial and the Icelandic chocolates (Noi Sirius Konfekt) were delicious. Many thanks to Ragnar Jonasson and Quentin Bates for their hospitality!

l to r: Ann Cleeves, Ragnar Jonasson, Susan Moody, Barry Forshaw, Michael Ridpath, Quentin Bates (Icelandic chocolates on the table and empty seat reserved for Yrsa Sigurdardottir).

Last but not least, meeting old friends, making new ones, and seeing the faces behind the Twitter avatars of a number of writers and bloggers for the first time… It was all hugely enjoyable, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

CrimeFest blog-links

Crimepieces – CrimeFest Day 1, CrimeFest Part 2

Detectives Beyond Borders – CrimeFest 1, CrimeFest 2, CrimeFest 3, CrimeFest 4

Do You Write Under Your Own Name – CrimeFest 2013 – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Graskeggur (aka author Quentin Bates) – CrimeFest Report: All Over Bar the Tweeting

Mystery Fanfare – CrimeFest 2013 Award Winners (all except The Petrona)

Sherlockology – Highlights from CrimeFest – Creating Sherlock

Vicky Newham – My Experience of CrimeFest 2013

For tweets on the event, see the hashtag #crimefest13

#37 / Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night

Posted on by Kat Hall
49

Derek B. Miller, Norwegian by Night (ebook; London: Faber and Faber, 2013). 5 stars

Opening line: It is summer and luminous. 

I’m very excited about this book. Promoted as ‘a literary novel, a police thriller, and the funniest book about war crimes and dementia you are likely to read anytime soon’ (true), it’s also one of the best and most original novels you’ll ever read.

The star of the novel and its central protagonist is Sheldon Horowitz, a recently-widowed Jewish-American octogenarian and former Marine with possible dementia, who has been transplanted by granddaughter Rhea from New York to Oslo, so that she and her husband Lars can take care of him in his dotage. A few weeks after his arrival, following sounds of a violent argument in the flat above, Sheldon is faced with a life-changing choice: whether or not to open his door to help a mother and son in physical danger. His decision to do so, strongly influenced by the memory of the Holocaust, sets off a chain of events which have major repercussions for himself and those around him.

I loved this novel’s distinctive Jewish-New York voice and its brilliant characterisation of Sheldon, an old man trying to right past wrongs and protect a six-year-old boy from harm by drawing on the memory of his soldier’s training from half a lifetime ago. The narrative has the free-wheeling brilliance and humour characteristic of the best Jewish-American writing and is, quite simply, a joy to read (Miller’s work fits perfectly with others like The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer). The following excerpt is typical:

Sheldon catches his breath and stands up again. He walks over beside Paul and says, “Right, now we start walking backward. If we’re lucky, we’ll go backward in time, before yesterday and the day before. Before you were born, all the way back to at least 1952 […] We could stop for lunch in 1977. I knew an excellent sandwich shop in 1977.”

The novel also explores an extraordinary number of larger subjects and themes, such as: fatherhood, parental regret and loss; aging, memory and dementia; Jewishness, identity, the desire to belong, masculinity and war; the German Occupation of Norway during World War Two, the Holocaust, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Balkan Wars; war crimes and justice; and, last but not least, criminality and policing in a global era. While hugely ambitious in tackling such a wide range of issues, the author – somehow – manages to integrate them successfully, along with three generations of Horowitz family history, into a thrilling plot.

Written by an American author based in Oslo, this is also very much a book about Norway and its relation to the world. Sheldon and Rhea’s outsider perspectives  – like the author’s own – provide the opportunity for wry comparative analyses of American and Norwegian cultural traits. Meanwhile, Police Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård (another warm and wonderfully-realised character), allows the narrative to reflect on the globalisation of organised crime and the opportunities afforded to criminal networks through the softening of Europe’s borders. Norway is depicted as unprepared for the speed of these developments, with criticism levelled at its liberals (‘expounding limitless tolerance’) and conservatives (‘racist or xenophobic’), as well the failure of both sides to hold positions properly ‘grounded in evidence’. Here we see the author’s own background in international relations shining through: in a 2012 interview on the ‘Bite the Book’ blog, Miller describes how he has worked ‘designing “evidence-based” approaches to peace and security programming for almost a decade at The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research’. The whole interview is well worth a read.

Norwegian by Night is by turns a hilariously funny, heart-breakingly sad and genuinely suspenseful novel that makes you care deeply about its characters – not least the irascible Sheldon. On finishing it, I immediately wanted to read it again –  along with a stack of other books it called to mind (by Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving and Michael Chabon, to name but three). You can’t ask for more than that.

With thanks to Raven Crime Reads for alerting me to this novel. You can read Raven’s excellent review here (which contains slightly more details of the plot than included above). There’s also an earlier Mrs P. post on Jewish detectives here.

Mrs. Peabody awards Norwegian by Night an utterly brilliant 5 stars

Creative Commons License

.

In praise of John le Carré

Posted on by Kat Hall
43

Today, 25th April, sees the publication of John le Carré’s new espionage novel, A Delicate Truth, which has already garnered excellent reviews (see for example Mark Lawson in The Guardian). Set in 2008 and 2011, it explores shady Whitehall operations against the background of the Bush-Blair era and the ‘war on terror’, and is being viewed as a stunning return to form.

del

In the run-up to publication, le Carré has also been marking the 50th anniversary of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). In a piece for The Guardian on 13. April, he explores the personal and historical contexts in which this ground-breaking novel was written, and the frustration he experienced at being ‘branded as the spy turned writer’; the author of ‘anti-Bond’ novels that critics erroneously insisted on regarding as spying handbooks.

Given all the above, it seems like an apt moment to try to sum up what makes le Carré such a wonderful and important writer. Here is my personal appreciation, in random top 10 form:

One of the many covers for The Spy – showing the barbed wire that divided East and West in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin

I love John le Carré’s works because…

1. …the author and his creation George Smiley are linguists.                                   Le Carré studied German literature for a year at the University of Bern, and graduated with first-class honours in modern languages from Oxford. Most of his spies are linguists, and the most famous of them all, George Smiley, studied Baroque German literature and was destined for academia until the British Secret Service came knocking (in the shape of the brilliantly named ‘Overseas Committee for Academic Research’). The profession of intelligence officer offers Smiley ‘what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions’ (Call for the Dead, Penguin 2010, p. 2). And languages still really matter. Smiley’s ability to speak fluent German plays a vital role in Smiley’s People when he gathers intelligence in Hamburg, the city where he spent part of his boyhood, as well as a number of years ‘in the lonely terror of the spy’ during the Second World War. Le Carré says of him that ‘Germany was his second nature, even his second soul […] He could put on her language like a uniform and speak with its boldness’ (Sceptre 2011, pp. 252-3). This author’s world, then, is overwhelmingly multilingual, multicultural and international. Monoglot Brits need not apply…

2. …they so effectively evoke Germany during the Cold War. The frequent use of a German setting was practically inevitable given le Carré’s education, his membership of the British Foreign Service in West Germany (as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Bonn and Political Consul in Hamburg, which provided cover for his MI6 activities), and the timing of his stay between 1959 and 1964 at the height of the Cold War. Berlin was the frontline of the ideological battle between the Eastern and Western blocs, and le Carré says in an afterword to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold that ‘it was the Berlin Wall that got me going, of course’ (Penguin 2010, p. 255). Le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead, was published in 1961, the year the Wall went up, and, along with a number of his other novels, is partially set in East/West Germany (see list below). The most memorable for me are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Smiley’s People (1979), both of which feature dénouements involving Berlin border crossings and evoke the Cold War tensions of that time and place perfectly.

3. …as someone who teaches in this area, I appreciate le Carré’s sophisticated understanding of 20th-century German and European history. This is evident in his recent Guardian piece, where he references the complexities of Allied intelligence operations in Cold War West Berlin, including the pragmatic but unethical protection of former Nazis, because they were viewed as valuable in the fight against communism. The difficult legacy of National Socialism in post-war Germany is most closely examined in his 1968 novel A Small Town in Germany (and forms part of the corpus for my own research on crime that engages with the Nazi period).

4. …as someone who reads and researches lots of historical fiction, I admire le Carré’s ability to communicate complex histories to a mass readership in intelligent and entertaining espionage novels. This isn’t something that many authors can do well; le Carré is one of the best.

5. …their narratives reveal a deep engagement with moral questions. A fascination with the themes of loyalty and betrayal – in relation to both individuals and ideologies/states – is particularly visible in the Cold War ‘Karla Trilogy’ (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 1974; The Honourable Schoolboy 1977; Smiley’s People 1979), which in turn forms part of the eight-novel Smiley collection. What’s had the greatest impact on me as a reader, though, is the critique of how the intelligence services (on either side of the ideological divide) are willing to sacrifice the individual for the ‘greater good’, and the recognition of the immorality of this act. Le Carré’s third and fourth novels – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965) – are extremely powerful in this respect, as they recount the tragic tales of those who become pawns in larger political chess games. Incidentally, I’ll bet my maximum bet of 10p that the figure of Avery in the latter novel most accurately embodies the professional and moral disillusionment that led Carré to leave the Service. The central question for this author was and continues to be: ‘how far can we go in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them on the way?’ (see Guardian piece).

6. …their characters are fantastically drawn. Aside from the masterpiece of Smiley, the dumpy, middle-aged, unassuming, sharp-as-a-tack intelligence genius, who could forget Control, Connie Sachs, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Ricky Tarr, Jerry Westerby, Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux? All are so beautifully depicted that you feel they are living, breathing people.

Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

7. …you won’t find more perceptive writing anywhere. In German one would say that le Carré is ‘wach’: he is awake. He really SEES the world around him and has a deep understanding of how its political and power structures work, and how individuals get tangled up in them.

8. …they have given us wonderful TV and film adaptations, featuring great actors such as Alec Guinness and Richard Burton (whose diaries happen to rest at my own institution, Swansea University). See here for my film review of the 2011 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Gary Oldman.

Alec Guinness as Smiley, retrieving a clue in Smiley’s People (1982)
The man sees everything….

9. …they are so often top-quality. One of my own later favourites is 2001’s The Constant Gardener – a brilliant exploration of pharmaceutical corruption for commercial gain in the developing world. And now, at the age of 81, it looks like he’s done it again with A Delicate Truth. Mark Lawson, in his review, writes that ‘le Carré has a strong claim to be the most influential living British writer’ and that he ‘is back at full power with a book that draws on a career’s worth of literary skill and international analysis’. ‘No other writer has charted – pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers – the public and secret histories of his times, from the second world war to the ‘war on terror’.

10. Last but not least, le Carré is a true friend of languages, and has been extremely generous in using his influence to promote language learning in the UK – for which I as a German studies lecturer am deeply grateful. He was deservedly awarded the Goethe Medal in 2011 for ‘outstanding service for the German language and international cultural dialogue’.

All of which leads me to say how much I’m looking forward to reading A Delicate Truth. Further information about the novel is available at le Carré’s website (including an audio excerpt and the first chapter). The novel begins with a quote from Oscar Wilde: ‘If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out’. Something every spook needs to remember…

Le Carré novels that reference the German-speaking world/history

Call for the Dead (Smiley’s German links; Nazi past; East Germany)

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Nazi past; divided Berlin; East Germany)

The Looking Glass War (East and West Germany)

A Small Town in Germany (Nazi past; Bonn, West Germany)

Smiley’s People (Hamburg, West Germany; Bern, Switzerland; divided Berlin)

The Perfect Spy (German at Oxford; Vienna and Berlin)

The Secret Pilgrim (diverse, including East Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Zurich)

Absolute Friends (West Germany, East Germany)

A Most Wanted Man (Hamburg, Germany)

Our Kind of Traitor (Switzerland).

International crime drama news from BBC4: Dahl, De Luca, Young Montalbano, The Bridge 2 and more!

Posted on by Kat Hall

I’ve just seen the following on a BBC4 press release and couldn’t resist reporting IMMEDIATELY.

>> BBC Four has announced two exciting additions to an outstanding new year of international drama and film on the Channel: Swedish crime series Arne Dahl and Italian series Inspector Da Luca.

Arne Dahl (a pseudonym of award-winning author Jan Arnald) is based on five of Dahl’s novels, beginning with The Blinded Man. The series revolves around a tight-knit team of elite specialists who investigate the dark side of Swedish society. It is produced by Filmlance International and written by Rolf Börjlind and Cecilia Börjlind.

Inspector De Luca is made by Ager 3/Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana. A four-part crime series based on the novels by Carlo Lucarelli, it is set in and around Bologna during the tumultuous years of Mussolini’s dictatorship. Inspector De Luca is an investigator whose brutal honesty and uncompromising character may help him solve cases, but combined with his love of women, they also conspire to get him in trouble…

Other crime drama and film highlights in 2013 include:

Young Montalbano. Set in the early 1990s and starring Michele Riondino in the title role, Young Montalbano gives an insight into the private life and early crime-fighting career of the idiosyncratic Sicilian detective. This prequel series, also written by Andrea Camilleri, was recently shown to critical acclaim in Italy. (See here for details of the start date of this series.)

The Bridge, Series 2. A rusty old coaster en route in the Öresund sound suddenly veers off course and rams the concrete foundations laid out to protect the Öresund Bridge. The ship is empty – or so it is believed until five people are found chained, cold and exhausted below deck. The unknown victims, of whom three are Swedish and two Danish, are brought to a hospital in Malmö. Without hesitation, Saga Norén (Sofia Helin) from Malmö CID contacts her Danish colleague, Martin Rhode (Kim Bodnia) and their new investigation begins.

Inspector Montalbano. The popular Sicilian detective makes a welcome return in four brand new episodes.

The King Of Devil’s Island. Based on a true story, The King of Devil’s Island tells the unsettling tale of a group of young delinquents banished to the remote prison of Bastøy in Norway. Under the guise of rehabilitation the boys suffer a gruelling daily regime at the hands of their wardens until the arrival of new boys Erling and Ivar spark a chain of events that ultimately ignite rebellion.

Point Blank. In this action-packed French thriller, Samuel Pierret is a nurse who saves the life of a criminal whose gang then take Samuel’s pregnant wife hostage to force him to help their boss escape. A race through the subways and streets of Paris ensues. As the body count rises, Samuel must evade the cops and the criminal underground to rescue his wife <<

I’m so excited I can hardly breathe. Though I’m not sure how to break the news to my family that the telly will be off-limits for most Saturday nights this year.

For the full press release see here (contains info about series 3 of BORGEN as well). There’s also a very atmospheric trailer of all the international drama coming up.

Enjoy!

Saturday smörgåsbord: Richard III, Petrona Remembered and Spiral 4

Posted on by Kat Hall
8

This week has seen lots of interesting crime news – a veritable smörgåsbord of delights.

The confirmation that the bones found under a Leicester car park are indeed those of King Richard III, has resulted in some knock-on coverage for Scottish crime writer Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. This 1951 classic tops the Crime Writers’ Association list of 100 best crime novels, and shows Inspector Grant ‘re-open’ the case of ‘the princes in the Tower’ whilst laid up in hospital with a broken leg. Can he really prove that Richard is not the callous murderer that history paints him to be…?

An interesting article in the Canadian Globe and Mail explores the value of the novel’s critique of history, and its assertion that many historical narratives are falsely constructed for political ends. Nikolai Krementsov, professor of the history of science and technology at the University of Toronto, gives it to his students to illustrate the difference between primary and secondary sources, and says ‘I know no book that gives such as clear account of what history is and what its function is in society … It should be mandatory reading for historians, investigative journalists and policemen’.

He also points out that Tey is writing at the beginning of the Cold War, a time of enormous political transition when lots of inconvenient wartime facts were in the process of being forgotten. ‘In that atmosphere, she wrote a definitive account, not of Richard III, but of how history can be manipulated’.

This week saw the birth of a new crime fiction blog, Petrona Remembered,  which has been set up in memory of the wonderful crime blogger Maxine Clarke.

The team behind the site aims ‘to develop a resource for current and future fans of the genre and we want you to help us. We’re asking writers, bloggers, readers, translators and anyone else who loves a crime or mystery novel to send us a submission about that book. It can be a review, a pitch, a love letter, a poem or, a video. Or something else entirely. Each week we’ll post a new submission and, over time, this site will become a jumping off point to a world of much-loved crime fiction’.

I personally like the idea of a crime haiku :). Submissions great and small are welcome, and you can find out more here.

A new annual award, The Petrona, for the best Scandinavian crime novel, is also being established. Maxine was particularly partial to some top-notch Scandi crime, so this feels very fitting.

Last but not least, for those of you suffering withdrawal symptoms from Borgen, help is on the way in the form of Spiral series 4. Parisian Captain Laure Berthaud and her colleagues are back as of tonight for 12 gritty episodes, taking over the BBC4 Saturday evening ‘international slot’ from 9.00pm until 11.00pm.

Further information and a clip from the first episode can be found here.

#30 / Stuart Neville, Ratlines

Posted on by Kat Hall
15

Stuart Neville, Ratlines (New York and London: Soho Press, 2013). A tense thriller, which examines a dark and fascinating corner of 1960s Irish history  4 stars

Opening line: “You don’t look like a Jew,” Helmut Krauss said to the man reflected in the window pane.

Stuart Neville should receive a little prize for featuring in both my last review of 2012 and my first of 2013. My reading plan originally looked somewhat different, but in the end I couldn’t resist picking up Ratlines, as there was so much buzz about it online.

Neville is one of those authors who wades into controversial waters on a regular basis. His first novel, The Twelve, explored the legacy of The Troubles from the perspective of a former paramilitary hitman, while his fourth, Ratlines, highlights Ireland’s inglorious role in offering asylum to over a hundred former National Socialists and collaborators following the Second World War, including senior SS-member Otto Skorzeny and Breton nationalist leader Célestin Lainé. With supreme irony, the novel shows Justice Minister Charles Haughey hobnobbing with Skorzeny, who helps other former Nazis evade justice via ‘ratlines’ – routes of escape to safe territory – at around the same historical moment that war criminals such as Eichmann are on trial (Israel, 1961) and West Germany is confronting the Nazi past via the Auschwitz trials (Frankfurt, 1963-65).

When Neville kindly talked to me about the novel at the Harrogate Crime Writing festival, he explained that he was prompted to write on the subject by Cathal O’Shannon’s 2007 documentary Ireland’s Nazis, and elaborated as follows: ‘The more I dug into it, the more fascinating it became – the machinations of how those people got there, and why they were allowed to be there; and then the conflicts within the government itself, because the Department of Justice was notoriously anti-Semitic, but the Department of External Affairs was a lot more liberal, and there was a constant battle between these two parts of government about whether these people should be in Ireland or not’.

I loved the initial scenario presented in the novel. Former Nazis living in Ireland are being bumped off, and the government wants to stop the killings in order to avoid a scandal ahead of President Kennedy’s state visit in 1963. Lieutenant Albert Ryan, a member of the elite G2 (Directorate of Intelligence), is charged with tracking down the killer, but feels conflicted, as he fought with the British against the Nazis during the war, and is uneasy about the support he sees being given to his former enemies by the state. Ryan’s position allows Neville to outline a complex set of historical, political and moral dynamics: Ireland’s decision to remain neutral during the war (dubbed ‘The Emergency’); the postwar suspicion of the Irish who opted to fight ‘for’ the hated British colonisers; and the ways in which nationalism created a bridge between the Nazis and groups such as the IRA. I knew very little about these aspects of Irish history before reading the novel, and thoroughly appreciated the way in which they were illuminated – with an admirably light touch – in the first half of the narrative.

I was slightly less enamoured by the way the plot played out in the second half. To be fair, I think this has more to do with my own reading experiences than the book. ‘Nazi-themed’ crime novels are a key focus of my research as an academic, and I’ve read over 150 of them in the last five years (yes, really – see this list). There’s therefore very little that an author writing on this subject-matter could do to surprise me in terms of plot twists. Rest assured that there are plenty to be had as the novel develops … as well as some eye-watering violence in line with Neville’s earlier Belfast noir.

You can hear Stuart Neville chatting to Mark Lawson about Ratlines on Radio 4’s Front Row from 3rd January 2013.

There’s another, little-known crime novel by John Kelly, written in the 1968 but only published in 1993, which also touches on the subject of collaborators hiding in Ireland – The Polling of the Dead (Moytura Press). Kelly was a lawyer and politician, which may account for the posthmumous publication of the novel, and he casts a cool satirical eye over the post-war political landscape of late 1960s Dublin.

Probably the most famous novel about the postwar ‘ratlines’ is Frederick Forsyth’s 1972 The ODESSA File, which was adapted for film in 1974 with John Voight and Maximilian Schell in the leading roles. Along with Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), this hugely successful crime novel/thriller used its narrative to communicate extensive historical information about National Socialism and the Holocaust to a mass readership.    

With thanks to Soho Press for providing me with a review copy of the novel.

Mrs. Peabody awards Ratlines a taut and intriguing 4 stars.

Creative Commons License

.

#29 / Stuart Neville, The Twelve

Posted on by Kat Hall
16

Stuart Neville, The Twelve (London: Vintage, 2010). Hard-hitting Belfast noir that excavates the controversial past of The Troubles  4.5 stars

Opening line: Maybe if he had one more drink they’d leave him alone.

I read the first two chapters of The Twelve late one night at the Harrogate crime festival, and was immediately hooked. An extremely well-written blend of hard-hitting noir and ghost story, it tackles the controversial subject of The Troubles in Northern Ireland in a highly original and effective way.

The novel is set in 2007, around the time of the St. Andrew’s Agreement. Its central protagonist is Gerry Fegan, a former paramilitary hitman, who has been haunted nightly since his release from prison by the ghosts of the twelve people he murdered. When the ghosts demand that he exact eye-for-an-eye justice on their behalf, by executing various individuals complicit in their deaths, Gerry agrees, on the condition that they’ll leave him alone once he’s done. However, he also has to deal with the fallout of his actions in a fragile post-conflict Belfast.

Gerry’s ghosts consist of three British soldiers, two soldiers from the Ulster Defence Regiment, a Royal Ulster Constabulary policeman, two Ulster Freedom Fighter Loyalists, as well as four civilians – a shopkeeper, a teenager, and a woman and her baby. The way they haunt him (a trope with a rich pedigree in the work of Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Toni Morrison and Stephen King, amongst others), allows the author to examine the history and violence of The Troubles to devastating effect, and to explore larger themes of guilt, justice and responsibility in the post-conflict era. 

There is a particularly ingenious openness built into the ghostly figures and how we understand them as readers. We can either choose to accept that they’re a genuine supernatural happening, or alternatively, as Gerry’s psychologist argues, that they are a ‘manifestation’ of his guilt.

If we opt for the former interpretation, then the ghosts’ desire for vengeance can be seen as a response to the lack of justice in the wake of their deaths. The men who sanctioned their murders, some of whom are now respectable politicians with their eyes on power at Stormont, have evaded punishment. Even the little justice that was served has been sacrificed to facilitate an end to the conflict: murderers like Gerry were released from prison early and re-classified as ‘political prisoners’ following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. (This is a common conflict-resolution dilemma – to what extent can or should justice be sacrificed in the interests of achieving political stability?) 

If, on the other hand, we view the ghosts as the creation of Gerry’s fevered imagination, they can be seen as the embodiment of his guilt, but also as the means by which he sidesteps that guilt. Instead of fully accepting moral responsibility, he uses the ghosts to hold those who were above him in the chain of command accountable for his own crimes (the classic ‘I was following a superior’s orders’ defence).

So the ghosts point up the price paid for sacrificing justice as part of the peace settlement (the ghouls are a vicious ‘return of the repressed’), while also delivering a complex portrait of a perpetrator’s struggle to cope with his guilt. Very clever indeed.  

Alternate cover…

The key question for me throughout the narrative was how the author was going to square the circle of Gerry’s own guilt, given the latter’s ultra-violent past and present (he was and is a murderer, no matter how you spin the motivation for his actions). I’m not *quite* sure that the narrative’s moral logic was wholly sustained at the end (I won’t say more for fear of spoilers). But given the complexities of the subject-matter, I think the novel does an admirable job of maintaining a balanced point of view: barely anyone – be they Catholic, Protestant, Northern Irish, British or other – comes out of this story morally intact. Crucially, the narrative’s emotionally ‘cool’ tone ensures that readers are not tempted to empathise with Gerry in such a way as to excuse his crimes or moral failings.     

Given the assurance with which the narrative is written, it’s hard to believe that this was the author’s publishing debut. I haven’t been this impressed by a first novel since reading Sam Hawken’s The Dead Women of Juárez.   

You can read the first two chapters of The Twelve here.

There are also a number of ‘deleted scenes’ from the novel available on Stuart Neville’s website, which are worth a read after you’ve finished the novel.

The Twelve (titled The Ghosts of Belfast in the US), is the first of a three-part series. The others are Collusion and Stolen Souls.

Mrs. Peabody awards The Twelve a hard-hitting and memorable 4.5 stars.

Creative Commons License

.

Theakston File 4: Jason Webster interview with Mrs. P.

Posted on by Kat Hall
7

If you tuned in to the 8th episode of the Radio 4 ‘Foreign Bodies’ series on Wednesday, you’ll have heard crime authors Jason Webster and Antonio Hill in animated discussion with Mark Lawson about Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s investigator, Pepe Carvalho.

Listening to the episode, I realised now was the time to post my interview with Jason Webster at the 2012 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. Key areas explored with the author of the ‘Max Cámara’ series, which is set in Valencia, include the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the influence of Vázquez Montalbán.

Mrs. Peabody (MP): You’re a very versatile author: you started out as a travel writer, examining the history and culture of Spain, before turning your hand to crime fiction. Could you say a little bit about what led you to crime?

Jason Webster (JW): I suppose in some ways writing crime allows me to keep exploring Spain – this massive country that I’m really fascinated by – and has become an extension of the travel books, because the ‘I’ of the narrator in the travel books isn’t a million miles away from a detective: it’s exploration, it’s questioning, it’s looking for clues. And often there was a quest format in my previous books, so my writing has rolled on quite easily from those into crime.

MP: Are you able to take some of the material from those earlier books and incorporate it into your crime novels – say about flamenco or bull-fighting or Spain’s historical past?

JW: Definitely the past – the Spanish Civil War. I draw on that quite heavily for the third Max Cámara book, The Anarchist Detective, which will be coming out next year. So there’s a lot about this dark, dirty legacy of the Civil War – stuff that lots of people in Spain don’t want to talk about. Flamenco a little bit as well. Max likes flamenco so that fits, but it hasn’t played a huge part yet in any of the books.

MP: And do you think the crime genre is particularly suited to tackling subjects like the Spanish Civil War and the legacy of the past?

JW: Yes, absolutely. I mean there’s this largely untold violent history and lots of old wounds which haven’t healed. You have to remember that the families of those who were killed by Franco’s troops couldn’t mourn their dead. Anybody who was on the other side – on Franco’s side – and was killed or wounded – their stories were glorified for years and years. And when Franco died there was this period called ‘the pact of silence’ [pacto de silencio]. During ‘the transition’ [from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy] everybody agreed that you ‘don’t mention the war’… because that’s the only way we’ll get out of the dictatorship and move into democracy. But about eight years ago people started to ask – ‘hang on, what did happen to grandpa?’. So the grandchildren of the people who had suffered during the Civil War were saying, ‘well actually, I want to know’. And that opened up a can of worms, because a whole section of Spanish society – the political right, essentially – just didn’t want to go there. So there are a lot of untold stories, a lot of unhealed wounds, and a legacy of violence.

It’s perfect for writing crime, I think, because there are a lot of secrets … And in a sense there’s a long tradition dating back from the period of ‘the transition’ – just before Franco dies and just afterwards – of great Spanish crime writers like Vázquez Montalbán writing very much from a political point of view. They want to talk about what’s going wrong in Spain, and finally can publish their books once Franco dies, when the dictatorship is over and censorship has come to an end. So that’s very much part of the tradition of Spanish crime writing.

MP: Do you see yourself now as part of that tradition?

JW: In some ways, sure. Vázquez Montalbánwas definitely an inspiration, and the name that I gave Max Cámara…I was thinking of two things, really. I was thinking of Christopher Isherwood and ‘I am a camera’: ‘cámara’ means ‘camera’ in Spanish and it’s a perfectly legitimate surname as well. And this gives us a handle on Max’s character – he observes, he waits, he doesn’t really jump to conclusions. But I was also thinking of Vázquez Montalbán when he was writing under Franco and had been thrown in jail and had to write under a pseudonym – one of the pseudonyms he used was ‘Sixto Cámara’. So there’s a sort of homage to that, to Vázquez Montalbán…

MP: Can I take a tiny detour to your third book, Guerra: Living in the Shadows of the Spanish Civil War. What prompted you to write it?

JW: I was talking to one of the locals near where we live, which is in the middle of nowhere, off the grid. We were just chatting away, when she started telling me some things about the Civil War and took me to a place where she said there was a massacre, in around ’38 – so getting towards the tail end of the war, just as Franco was moving south towards Valencia. And she had seen this happen as a young girl – these bodies being buried. I’d sort of heard about this and it was about the time when it was starting to come out – these mass unmarked graves dotted around the country where people who had died at the hands of the Francoists were just buried… There was no commemorative plaque, there was no gravestone, no one had been allowed to mourn, the dead were buried there for years and years. And you know, death is important in Spain; it’s a culture where you seriously mourn the dead, and so for a whole side of the country not to have been able to mourn their dead… that’s a big deal.

I think a lot of people are just hoping that that generation– anyone who lived through that, anybody who suffered – will just die and then we can all forget about it. But there are quite a lot of people who are trying to recreate the oral history from the time – not let it just slip away. Paul Preston [the historian] and I have met on a number of occasions … and the book that he’s written on the ‘Spanish Holocaust’ is a very interesting one with a very interesting title… He’s deliberately being controversial. And he’s doing that because he’s making a statement about contemporary Spain as much as he is about the past. There are lots of Spaniards who don’t accept what happened. And they say we should just ‘turn the page’. But how are you going to get over the wounds unless you confront the past?

MP: It’s the classic model of the repressed, isn’t it?

JW: Yes, absolutely. Spanish society is still very much divided and this is what forms the backdrop to my second novel, A Death in Valencia. I’m trying to look at these massive divisions that split Spain apart still, eighty years after the Civil War.

MP: You build that history into your crime fiction through the figure of the grandfather, Hilario. He’s somewhat disapproving that his grandson Max chose to join the police.

JW: That deep paradox goes to the heart of who Max is, and I bring this to the fore in the third novel, The Anarchist Detective. Max comes from an anarchist family; he is essentially an anarchist himself, but an anarchist in the broad sense of the word. At the same time he’s an agent of the state, and of state authority, so how does that work? How does he square that circle? In some ways, what I’m doing in the second book, A Death in Valencia, is showing a breakdown in his character, because of this contradiction, whereas in the third book, he kind of resolves that paradox within himself.

MP: Do you think it’s helpful that you speak Spanish? I notice from having read some of A Death in Valencia ­that you include Spanish proverbs [refranes] in their original form, perhaps as a way of communicating with readers who are non-Spanish speakers – imparting the culture and giving us a flavour of the language as well. Is that a deliberate strategy?

JW: I think so. The problem is that it’s hard for me to put myself in the position of not knowing Spanish. Sometimes I’m just writing and there are certain phrases which I just think are so wonderful that I want to put them down in English. The proverbs are there because they are an important part of Max’s character. The Spanish are very, very proud of their proverbs, and it’s one of the things I love about Spain. It’s not Spanish intellectual culture that gets me going in the morning, it’s this intuitive side to the country and to the culture – and I see that in the proverbs. Essentially, there’s a deep wisdom that you feel has been passed on for centuries, by word of mouth – it’s an oral tradition. And I love that, so I did want to get that across in the novels.

MP: What do you think the Spanish would make of your crime novels?

JW: The first one, Or the Bull Kills You, might wind some people up because it’s about bull-fighting, but the second and the third ones don’t deal with so-called Spanish stereotypes, so they might be more acceptable. Basically, don’t talk about anything they term ‘el folklórico’ – flamenco, bull-fighting, all that kind of stuff that the Franco regime tried to promote in the 1950s and 1960s to get tourists to come over. It’s what they consider to be the backward side of their culture and they don’t want to perpetuate the image that that’s all Spain is about. But the Spanish Civil War is a legitimate topic for foreigners to discuss…. It’s complicated!

Interview carried out at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, 20 July 2012

You can still listen to the ‘Foreign Bodies’ episode on Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho via BBC iPlayer.

Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case, tr. Anthea Bell (Germany)

Posted on by Kat Hall
32

Following a lovely summer break, Mrs. P. kicks off with a review of Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (London: Penguin/Michael Joseph, 2012 [2011]). It’s an effectively written courtroom drama that asks some big legal and ethical questions.

Opening line: Later, they would all of them remember it: the floor waiter, the two elderly ladies in the lift, the married couple in the fourth-floor corridor.

Ferdinand von Schirach is an eminent defence lawyer based in Berlin. He first came to prominence as a writer in 2009 with the short story collection Verbrechen (Crime), which drew heavily on the real-life cases he’d encountered during his career. It was an instant hit, spending 54 weeks at the top of the German bestseller lists, as well as critically acclaimed (the winner of the 2010 Kleist prize). A second short story collection entitled Guilt was also extremely successful, which was followed by the publication of The Collini Case, his first full-length crime novel, in 2011.

The focus on criminality, justice and the law is as evident in The Collini Case as it was in the author’s earlier works. It’s 2001 Berlin, and young barrister Caspar Leinen is assigned to defend an Italian national, Fabrizio Collini, the perpetrator in an apparently open-and-shut murder case at the famous Adlon Hotel. Only after accepting the brief does Leinen realise that he knew the victim, retired industrialist Hans Meyer: the latter was the grandfather of a close school-friend, who had been kind to Leinen in his youth. While considering whether or not he should continue to represent Collini, Leinen is faced with another problem: the accused refuses to reveal his motive for the crime. How then is Leinen to defend his client when the case comes to court? Leinen’s personal difficulties in representing Meyer’s murderer and his efforts to figure out a viable defence become the key concerns of the unfolding narrative.

Von Schirach is a skilled author who knows how to write an effective page-turner. But by far the most interesting aspect of this novel for me was the legal discussion portrayed in the courtroom section of the novel. And here I find myself in a rather difficult position, as talking about this aspect of the narrative would inevitably mean breaching Mrs. P.’s spoiler rule. So I will have to content myself by saying that the discussion of genuine points of law and their impact on a genuine set of cases since the end of the 1960s was fascinating, and is not something that I’ve seen addressed this way in a German crime novel before. 

The wider impact of the novel has also been quite extraordinary. The legal points it highlights have been raised by German MPs in the Bundestag, with a Ministry of Justice commission established in 2012 to examine the larger issues raised about legislative processes in the 1960s. It’s extremely rare for a crime novel to have such an influence in the ‘real world’, and this sets it apart from others that have tackled the same subject in a very special way.

I would second Maxine’s advice over at Petrona to read the novel before seeking out further information about the author and his work. But once you’re through, you might be interested in the following:

A Spiegel piece by von Schirach in English, in which he talks a bit about his unusual family background (thanks to Maxine for this link).

An interview with the author in German in the newspaper Die Zeit, which includes discussion about the judicial issue at the heart of the trial (contains spoilers!).

This Guardian article also draws on the interview in Die Zeit (contains spoilers!).

The comments on this post may also inadvertently hint at the novel’s content…

UPDATES

May 2013: The Collini Case has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger Award.

And one last note: There’s extensive discussion of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader in the comments below, which also has a courtroom section, as well as reference to Schlink’s crime novels (the ‘Selb’ series). In my capacity as an academic, I’ve written two articles on Schlink’s work, with links as follows… The first is a comparative analysis of the crime novel Selbs Justiz (which opens the ‘Selb’ series) and The Reader in the journal German Life and Letters (2006). The second looks at the controversies created in critical circles by The Reader, both in Germany and in the English-speaking world (German Monitor, 2013). It’s nearly twenty years since The Reader was published, and critical reaction to the novel and the film continues to be extremely polarised.

Creative Commons License

Theakston File 3: Camilla Läckberg interview with Mrs. P. (Part 2) on The Hidden Child

Posted on by Kat Hall
4

Part 2: In which Camilla Läckberg (CL) and Mrs. Peabody (MP) discuss the author’s fifth novel, The Hidden Child – its origins, its impact, its depiction of wartime Sweden and Norway – as well as the the process of historical research, and why Swedish crime writers are still drawn to the subject of the Second World War.

I was particularly keen to discuss this novel with the author, because it forms part of the corpus for my academic research on Nazi-themed crime novels (crime novels that engage with the Nazi period or its post-war legacies).

SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve not yet read The Hidden Child, you might wish to come back to this interview at a later point, as it gives away major details about the plot. 

MP: Can I come on to The Hidden Child, in which you explore the legacy of the wartime past?

CL: They’re starting to film it in August for the cinema. I think it’s going to be great.

MP: I can imagine – it has lots of ingredients that would work very well. So what was it that drew you to the topic, because quite a few Swedish writers and Scandinavian writers do go back to look at the legacy of that past.

CL: Well, it actually started with an email from a reader, who thanked me for the books, and then said, ‘Did you know that there were lots of exciting activities going on in the area [around Fjällbacka, the coastal village north of Göteborg where the novels are set] during the Second World War? And I was like, ‘no, I never heard about that’. So I started doing some research and I found out about the smuggling, and the boats going back and forth [between Sweden and Nazi-occupied Norway], people fleeing over the border… And I thought ‘Wow!’, and the ideas started coming. Also, when I’d started writing about Elsy [Erica’s mother], who was already dead in the first book, I only knew that she had been cold with her daughters, but I didn’t know why. After four books, I still didn’t have a clue why. But when I started researching and started working on the idea of ‘the hidden child’, it literally dropped in my lap – Elsy’s whole story. It was one of those magical moments you have as a writer, when it’s like someone is telling you … I suddenly knew everything about  what had happened to her; why she was the way she was. That was fantastic. So that book is very special to me for that reason, because I was basically ‘told’ Erica’s mother’s story.

MP: And it’s a very moving book, I think, as well.

CL:  I had another very moving moment when it came to that book, actually. A year after it had come out in Sweden, I was doing a photo shoot for a cover, and there was this make-up artist, a woman who was around forty, forty-five. When we were alone for a few minutes, she asked me ‘How did you do your research into the Norwegian resistance and the people at Grini [Nazi concentration camp in Norway that held a number of political prisoners]? Did you know anyone who was there?’ No I didn’t; I researched through books and accounts that were on the internet by people who were there, but I hadn’t met one. And then she told me that her mother was from Norway: she had been part of the Norwegian resistance during World War Two, had fled from Norway, ended up in Sweden, and had never talked about her experiences with her children. But when she had read The Hidden Child, she got the children together and said, ‘read this, this is my story’. And then she talked about it: she was 19 when she was in the resistance and was put in Grini …. That was a special moment, because you guess so much. When you’ve done your research you have to guess a lot and fill in the blanks from your own fantasy. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you probably don’t, but those moments when you understand ‘I got that right’ – that’s fantastic.

MP: Can I ask you about the depiction of the main characters and their relation to the conflict? Because I think that you do something very interesting there – there’s a sort of twist.

CL: Hmmm. What do I do?!

MP: Well, you have a murder victim, who is supposedly a Norwegian resistance fighter, who then turns out to have a very different background – his father was an SS-officer and he also served in Grini. And the murderer is the Swedish resistance fighter, who was a prisoner in the camp. So it seems to me that there’s something complex going on there in terms of how you’re looking at the categories of ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’…

CL: It’s all about playing with the ‘good’ and ‘bad’; who’s ‘good’ and who’s ‘bad’? If you do good your whole life, can that compensate for then doing something bad once in your life? And on the other hand, if you’ve done a lot of bad things, can you compensate by leaving them behind, or do you have to carry them with you? Can you turn over a new leaf? I love playing with those things. And also when it comes to murderers, I think it’s so much more interesting when good people do bad things, than when bad people do bad things. What can trigger a basically good person to do something bad? And that’s so much the case in that book – he [the murderer] has lived his whole life doing good things… But that’s also a question: for whom did he do those things? Was it for his own ego or was it out of true conviction? You can always play with those things as well.

MP: It seemed to me that there was a real complexity about the position of the victim and the perpetrator / the murderer and the victim. There’s a trading of places and what you end up with is very much a grey on grey [CL: yes], rather than a black and white morality [CL: yes], which leaves some questions in the mind of the reader… Were you looking for that complexity?

CL: Yes, hmmm, it’s the same thing again [see CL’s comments in part 1 about the inclusion of ‘issues’ in her crime novels]. I don’t think about it when I write it. I just … go along and tell the story. It’s only afterwards that I can see the patterns. It’s like when I wrote The Stonecutter: I wrote the whole book, and when I read the manuscript through to start editing, I was like ‘oh my goodness, there’s a theme in here that I didn’t know was here’ – about what makes a good mother and motherhood. I don’t realise those things while I write. But I guess it’s part of the structure for the book. It’s like scaffolding and I don’t see the scaffolding until I take a few steps back and look at the whole.

Original Swedish cover/title (translates as The German Child)

MP: When you were writing about this controversial past in The Hidden Child  – one that still has resonance in the present – were you ever anxious? You’re obviously portraying something that is quite delicate. Was there a particular kind of caution when dealing with that subject matter, or did you just dive in?

CL: Just dove in, I think. I don’t think there’s anything that I write about that I’m afraid of approaching. The only thing I’m afraid of writing is sex scenes. That’s mainly because I picture my mother and my mother-in-law reading the books and their imagination running wild, so I can’t bring myself to do it! But that’s the only thing that I’m afraid of writing.

MP: It seems like another key theme in that novel was one of trauma: Elsy’s trauma and then the way that trauma has knock-on effects and is communicated down a generation…

CL: I think that theme is in all my books, and especially the eighth one, The Angel Maker. Do you know what an ‘angel maker’ is? It was a Swedish term common in Norway and Denmark as well, that described women in the late 1800s and early 1900s…. If you had a child out of wedlock, and you couldn’t take care of it, you could pay a woman a lump sum to take the baby, and what happened sometimes was that the women thought, ‘OK, I’ve got the money and this baby is only going to cost me from this point on…’. So there are a few court cases where women were found to have killed eight or ten babies. I start the story with a woman who is an ‘angel maker’ being arrested and they discover bodies buried in the ground in the basement. And that then follows as a dark cloud over her daughter, over her grand-daughter and the next generation after that. I love that theme; it recurs in my books.

MP: You’re always very concerned about the human implications of acts, whether of criminal acts or…

CL:  It’s all about the characters for me. It’s the characters that make the crime plot, not the other way around. I don’t form the crime plot and then add the characters. I have a murderer and a motive and then I make the characters start doing things and that creates the plot.

MP: You mentioned some of the research that you undertook for The Hidden Child. Did you look at historical studies?

CL: I borrowed books about the Second World War in the area, because that’s what I was interested in. And then of course I always have to do research depending on where the story takes me. The story took me to Grini, and then it took me on the trains to the concentration camps in Germany, so then I had to do research about the camps and ended up with the ‘white buses’ going to Sweden [programme set up in 1945 by the Swedish Red Cross and Danish government to transport concentration camp inmates from Nazi-controlled areas to Sweden]. So I had to do more and more. I don’t do this amount of research, then I’m done and I write the book. I start at one end and then I discover that ‘I don’t know anything about the part I’m going to write now – I’m going to do some research’. So it’s a continuous process all through the book.

MP: When you’re dealing with that kind of historical event, is historical authenticity important?

CL: Well, I’m not a historian, so I will never get it absolutely right. If I were to get it absolutely right I’d spend five years doing research for every book… And then I’d probably write a thesis instead which would be really boring, compared to a crime novel [ironic laughter from Mrs. P, who once spent five years writing a boring thesis]. I mean I do think that I get it pretty right, but I can’t say that I’ve got all the details right.

MP: But again you were talking earlier about scaffolding in terms of plot; there’s historical scaffolding as well that you can make sure…

CL: I make some markers, and I drop some details, and I let the reader fill in the blanks. I don’t have to describe every detail of what a person was wearing in the 1800s. I can mention a few details; I can mention a dinner; but I don’t have to describe that in the 1800s they were eating this and this and this. But I also happen to have a father-in-law who’s a historian, so I always give him the manuscript and say, ‘please come back to me when you’ve read it and we can discuss the details’. So he always has a lot of good input.

MP: That’s very handy.

CL: Yes, I know! A police officer husband and a historian father-in-law: that’s two for the price of one. If only my mother-in-law had been a forensics expert. That would have been perfect!

MP: One last question… I’m really interested that there are lots of Scandinavian writers who are still bringing in the legacy of the Second World War into their crime novels. Is that legacy still a point of public discussion in Sweden? For example, that there were Swedish nationals who went to fight for the Germans.

CL: It’s brought up once in a while and the fact that we were not neutral is now established. We don’t pretend that we were neutral any more. And also I think there are several reasons why it keeps coming back: it’s a very fascinating war, and it’s also visually a very striking war – for example, the swastika symbol. So it’s easy to picture it. And it was so big in every way. I think that intrigues us as crime writers, because it’s the epitome of human evil. I mean, it’s evil. And also I think it’s still up for debate because of the fact that we now have – and I think it’s a disgrace – a nationalist party in Sweden as part of the government [the Sverigedemokraterna or Sweden Democrats].  And I’m so embarrassed that people actually voted for them. I’m horrified that we’re starting to forget. History repeats itself.

21 July 2012 in the Library, Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate.

Extra links:

Part 1 of this interview

Camilla Läckberg’s website

Jo Nesbo interview with Mark Lawson in which he discusses his family’s wartime past and its impact on the Harry Hole novel The Redbreast

Creative Commons License

.