The last Wallander: UK publication of Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Today sees the UK publication of Henning Mankell’s tenth – and final – Kurt Wallander novel, The Troubled Man.

Here’s the Vintage synopsis:

>> The first new Wallander novel for a decade, the culmination of the bestselling series from the godfather of Swedish crime.

Every morning Håkan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his apartment in Stockholm. However, one winter’s day he fails to come home. It seems that the retired naval officer has vanished without trace.

Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved in the investigation but he has personal reasons for his interest in the case as Håkan’s son is engaged to his daughter Linda. A few months earlier, at Håkan’s 75th birthday party, Kurt noticed that the old man appeared uneasy and seemed eager to talk about a controversial incident from his past career that remained shrouded in mystery. Could this be connected to his disappearance? When Håkan’s wife Louise also goes missing, Wallander is determined to uncover the truth.

His search leads him down dark and unexpected avenues involving espionage, betrayal and new information about events during the Cold War that threatens to cause a political scandal on a scale unprecedented in Swedish history. The investigation also forces Kurt to look back over his own past and consider his hopes and regrets, as he comes to the unsettling realisation that even those we love the most can remain strangers to us. <<

The Daily Telegraph carries an exclusive extract – available here.

There’s also a nice piece in The Guardian, in which Jon Henley talks to Henning Mankell about The Troubled Man, the Wallander series, and looking back over life at 60.

Can’t wait to get my hands on it.

An odd case of Zen-o-phobia as BBC decides not to recommission TV series

Posted on by Kat Hall
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I’ve just seen a post on the It’s a Crime (or a Mystery) blog reporting that the BBC has decided not to recommission the Aurelio Zen TV series. This really does seem to be a short-sighted move given its evident popularity. It seemed to grow on people over time as well – a slow burner that had the potential to turn into something significantly bigger. There’s still a chance that another channel will want to pick it up, but what a missed opportunity for the BBC, which has been showing such excellent taste lately with The Killing.  

How could anyone not want to recommission this stylish police investigator?!

For further details and links, see the post on It’s a Crime (or a Mystery). Lots of comments are being left there to encourage the BBC to reconsider. Do add your own if you feel moved to do so.

Germany meets Finland: Jan Costin Wagner’s Ice Moon

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Things have (ahem) been somewhat biased towards Danish and Scandinavian crime fiction in the last few posts. So I’m trying to broaden my horizons by means of a German crime novel by Jan Costin Wagner. But wait…his wife’s Finnish and the book’s set in Finland? So much for weaning myself off Nordic crime.

First line: Kimmo Joentaa was alone with her when she went to sleep.

I hadn’t heard of Costin Wagner before, but really liked Ice Moon (Eismond), his second novel, which features the young Finnish policeman Kimmo Joentaa. The novel opens with the death of Joentaa’s wife after a long illness, and in many ways is a study of grief that happens to be woven into a murder investigation. Each of the victims has been smothered in their sleep, and Joentaa becomes fascinated by these ‘eerily tranquil’ killings, while trying to absorb the loss of his own wife.

The novel’s nicely written, with a characteristic Nordic feel, and the both the investigator and the murderer’s story are explored with sensitivity. The Independent on Sunday described the book as ‘intriguing and touching’, which is spot on. A lovely little read.

Ice Moon is published in translation by Vintage Books (2006), and you can read the first few chapters online here.

BBC4 buys second series of The Killing / Forbrydelsen

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Excellent news for fans of The Killing: it’s been confirmed today that BBC4 has bought the rights to the second series (10 episodes) and that it will air later this year.

‘The Killing is the most intensely thrilling televison drama experience in British broadcasting of the moment and I’m delighted that series two will be on BBC Four. It is a diamond of a series – complex, dramatic, thoroughly gripping. It never loses sight of its truly brilliant insight: the humanity and the emotion that goes on behind a police investigation into a brutal and sordid murder. At its heart, this is The Killing‘s genius – to truly portray the human cost of tragedy. And it is to the BBC’s acquisition department that real credit lies for the clever discretionary spot-and-pick-up of a gem of a series’ – Richard Klein, controller of BBC4.

For full details, see Neil Midgley’s article in The Telegraph

Nick Cohen on BBC4’s The Killing (Standpoint Magazine)

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Now that we’re over half-way through the first season of The Killing, and now that everyone’s woken up to just how extraordinary this series is, some really good articles about it are beginning to appear.

Nick Cohen’s piece in Standpoint, ‘Murder most mundane’, provides a nice analysis of why viewers might be drawn to The Killing, and to Scandinavian crime per se. The article’s also very good on the figure of Lund, and the way in which the series’ makers have successfully found ‘a middle way between the art-house and the multiplex by making an exciting drama about consequences rather than body counts; about how a murder can touch everyone caught up in a police investigation’.

Thanks to @PeterSmith for drawing this article to my attention.

Wishing you all a Happy St. David’s Day!

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The ‘crime-loving library borrowers’ of 2010

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Last Saturday’s Guardian (19.02.11) carried a list of the top 100 books borrowed from UK libraries in 2010, along with a piece by John Dugdale on ‘the crime-loving borrowers’.

It turns out that almost two-thirds of the books on the most borrowed list are crime novels or thrillers, including the whole of the top 10 (four Pattersons, two Rankins, and one Child, Brown, Connelly and Slaughter respectively). Impressive stuff, and Dugdale explores a few of the reasons why this might be the case.

But the bit that caught my eye was this:

‘Stieg Larsson (who had the top three places in the sales chart) is relegated to a single entry in 76th place. Library users, this suggests, are less keen on Euro-crime, less responsive to the stimulus of TV or film adaptations, and not fond of lengthy, heavy tomes. What they want instead are American or American-style murder stories that are quick reads…’

What struck me was how much Dugdale ‘deduced’ from one statistic, and I’m wondering if he wasn’t being a little over-hasty in the assertions he made. After all, there’s an extremely complex set of factors that have contributed to Larsson’s position on the list in particular, and to the absence of other examples of Euro-crime in general.

Larsson first. Dugdale quite rightly notes the contrast between the 76th position on the list of The Girl who Played with Fire and Larsson’s dominance of the 2010 UK sales chart. This would actually suggest that readers liked the Millenium Trilogy so much that they wanted to buy it and keep it, rather than to borrow it and give it back. So ironically, it could well be the enormous ‘must have’ success of this crime series that has contributed to its lower position on the library chart. And (ahem), do such ‘lengthy heavy tomes’ really put libary readers off? The presence of Hilary Mantell’s doorstopper Wolf Hall at number 24 appears to suggest otherwise.

Larsson, of course, is a Euro-crime-writing phenomenon, whose world-wide sales were already in excess of 12 million by 2008. Other Euro-crime novels typically have a much bigger hill to climb before making it on to annual lists like these.

Firstly, European crime fiction has to be ‘found’ and translated by a sympathetic publisher like Maclehose. Only a modest selection make it. It’s inevitable, therefore, that the sales and borrowing figures for Euro-crime will reflect the smaller number of  Euro-crime novels that are in print compared with those produced for the massive Anglo-American market. Given this, it’s hardly surprising that only the truly big hitters like Larsson manage inclusion in the top 100.

I’d accept that publishers sometimes have a challenging time convincing a readership reared on a largely British and American cultural diet that European fiction – crime or otherwise – is worth reading. But I’m wondering if the recent surge of Euro-crime dramas on BBC4 is beginning to shift the perceptions of a more mainstream audience towards ‘foreign’ imports. The incredibly positive reaction to the Danish series The Killing is a case in point. One interesting observation from a couple of viewers has been how surprised they are to be enjoying a subtitled programme so much. So perhaps the success of quality foreign-language crime series like this will turn more people on to the wealth of excellent European crime fiction and TV out there. I really do hope that this is the case.

‘Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?’

Posted on by Kat Hall
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There’s a very nice article by Deborah Orr in today’s The Guardian, which explores Scandinavian crime fiction’s role in ‘framing socio-political debate’. She takes in The Killing (‘are political coalitions healthy?’), the ‘Martin Beck’ series (Marxist critique of 1960s Swedish society), Nesbo’s works (‘sexual crime as expression of discord between men and women’) as well as a couple of others in the course of her discussion. Well worth a read.

For the Lund watchers amongst you, the article also features a picture of Lund wearing a third jumper – white diamonds on black!

#3 Davidsen / The Woman from Bratislava

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Leif Davidsen, The Woman from Bratislava, trans. from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland (London: Arcadia Books 2010 [2001]). An ambitious thriller that explores the legacy of the Second World War, but doesn’t quite live up to its early promise. 3 stars

The Woman from Bratislava (Eurocrime)

 Opening sentence: It was a story often used by security-cleared lecturers in the civilian branch of FET, by serving officers of a certain rank and other trusted members of PET when briefing new volunteers on the special conditions under which the secret services had to operate in a post-communist world.

As I’ve noted in a previous post, Davidsen has been described as ‘one of Denmark’s top crime writers’ (The Sunday Times). As a former journalist specializing in Russian and Eastern European affairs, he tends to use the crime/thriller format to explore larger political and historical issues – in the case of The Woman from Bratislava, the legacy of the Second World War, set against the backdrop of the Bosnian War and the collapse of communism in the 1990s.

More specifically, the novel uses the story of a rather unusual family as a means of approaching the complex history of Danish involvement in the Second World War. In the post-communist Bratislava of 1999, middle-aged Danish lecturer Teddy Pedersen is approached by Mira, an Eastern European woman who claims to be his half-sister. She reveals that their Danish father, a former Waffen-SS officer, had not died in 1952 as Teddy had been led to believe, but had gone on to lead a secret second life in Yugoslavia. Shortly afterwards, Teddy’s Danish sister Irma is arrested on suspicion of being a former Stasi (East German) agent, one who has possible links to ‘the woman from Bratislava’. The novel explores the father’s influence on the political development of both sisters – and via them the lingering legacy of fascism in post-war Europe. If you haven’t spotted it already, Irma and Mira are anagrams of one another, which I *think* is supposed to indicate how inextricably intertwined their fates are. Or something profound, at any rate.

This is a very ambitious novel, but one that I felt over-reached itself in places. Davidsen chooses to focus on an extremely controversial bit of Denmark’s wartime past, namely the role of thousands of Danes who fought for the Nazis as members of the Danish Legion and Waffen-SS. The author attempts to provide a 360-degree examination of this historical moment, highlighting on the one hand the war-crimes committed by these young Danes in the service of Nazi ideology, and on the other, the hypocrisy of the Danish government, who in 1941 ‘blessed’ their departure for war, only to treat them as ‘pariahs and outcasts’ when Germany was defeated in 1945 (p.100). (Denmark is shown white-washing its wartime history, recasting its years of occupation by the Germans as a period of heroic resistance, and developing a strategic amnesia to cover the less savory aspects of that past).

In some respects, I admire Davidsen’s bravery in taking on such a controversial subject, and in trying to provide a rounded discussion of how these ‘Nazi Danes’ should be viewed. But at times, I felt that the exploration of their actions needed to be more nuanced, and I wasn’t able to follow the reasons why certain individuals felt moved to defend the Waffen-SS father, or to consider his post-war treatment unjust. It’s possible that Davidsen is trying to critique these characters’ blindness to the father’s criminal wartime activities (a form of misguided love or loyalty), but I’m not entirely convinced that this is the case. At certain points, there’s also a casual, problematic elision of fascism and communism, which rather confusingly leads communist characters to exhibit fascist sympathies and/or sympathy for fascists.

As if all of this were not enough, there’s an overarching thriller/espionage plotline involving the downing of a NATO fighter plane over Yugoslavia, which ends in a (for me largely incomprehensible) twist. It was all a bit too much for this simple reader.

Summary: There’s much to admire about the ambition and scope of this thriller, but its constituent parts do not add up to a satisfactory whole. It may be best suited for readers with an interest in the legacy of the Second World War and the Cold War.

Mrs. Peabody awards The Woman from Bratislavia a rather wobbly 3 stars.

A bit of a milestone

Posted on by Kat Hall
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This week, Mrs. Peabody Investigates celebrates its 10,000th hit.

With thanks to @NHJ_HE and @grnfngrs for tipping the blog over the magic total, and to everyone who has visited the site and taken time to comment on the posts. This new life of crime is proving to be extremely enjoyable … look forward to more blogging and discussion in future months.

Scandinavian Crime Fiction Smorgasbord

Posted on by Kat Hall
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Thanks to a tip-off from cavershamragu, I’ve spent the evening wallowing happy as a hippo in mud over at the ScandinavianBooks website.

Rubbing shoulders with Nobel Prize winners Knut Hamsun and Selga Lagerlof are a whole host of Scandinavian crime writers. Indeed, five of the six authors featured under the heading of ‘contemporary and rising authors’ turn out to be crime writers too, illustrating the extent of the Scandi crime boom (as well as the present publishing clout of writers such as Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo and Karin Fossum). 

You can browse Scandinavian crime on the site by writer or by nationality (for the latter, hover over the ‘crime’ tab at the top of the homepage). As one would expect, the Swedes are well represented (Sjowall / Wahloo, Mankell, Larsson and Nesser to name just a few), but so are the Norwegians (Dahl, Egeland, Holt, Nesbo, Fossum), the Danes (Davidsen and Peter Hoeg of Miss Smilla fame) and those amazing Icelanders (Indridason, Sigurdardottir). There are also a couple of Finnish authors, Sipila and Joensuu, whom I look forward to checking out. Typically, each author entry features a biography, a review/overview of key works and links to other sites, such as the affiliated Nordic Bookblog. There’s some information on film and TV adaptations too. 

It’s a veritable treasure trove if you’re new to Scandinavian crime and want to find out what all the fuss is about. Or, perhaps like me, you might have read many of the classics, and are keen to lay your hands on some lesser-known works. Either way, this site is a highly useful resource. Tack så mycket! 

Oh, and if you’re into Viking sagas, it’s also definitely the place for you. Apologies for the naffness that follows; unable to resist.