The Consorts of Death: latest Varg Veum in English by Gunnar Staalesen

The fourth Varg Veum novel by Norway's Gunnar Staalesen, The Consorts of Death, was recently released in English translation by Don Bartlett (published in the Euro Crime series by Arcadia Books in the U.K.). The novel has a complex time-line, beginning in the present day (it was originally published in Norway in 2006), skipping back to the 1970s as Varg, then in his child-welfare career post, encounters a neglected boy that everyone calls Johnny Boy; then we move forward to the 1980s as Johnny Boy, now a teenager, is suspected of murdering his foster parents and asks to speak to Varg (by now a private detective) in the middle of what seems to be a hostage crisis; then we move back to the present when Johnny Boy, a bitter man just out of prison, has Varg on his hit list. Along the way, we also get a glimpse of a murder case from the mid-19th century that has resonances with the 20th and 21st century events. The whole pattern investigates the difficulties that some kids have with the child welfare system (and with their original parents), as well as Varg's attempts to (not very succesfully) help Johnny Boy. Most of the action is away from Varg's usual territory in Bergen: the pages set in the 80s are mostly in the hill and lake district outside Bergen, and the present-day passages are more in Oslo than Bergen. There are some eloquent passages when Varg meditates on his and the system's failures, and the story is mostly carried forward in Varg's personable first-person voice. Staalesen shows great skill in keeping a very complex story coherent: characters and events weave in and out, with personal and metaphorical connections among them all along the way. There are some surpises at the end, as well, when Varg finally discovers what's been going on in the several murders and in Johnny Boy's life. Staalesen's novels take on social issues, but there are many passages in this book that are right out of classic noir (though Varg isn't the usual noir hero, he has too much hope for his clients' fates). There's a lot more Varg Veum in Norwegian, and I for one hope for translators and publishers to fill in the gaps in what has been translated. In the meantime, we have the Varg Veum TV series from Norway (and there's an episode waiting for me that I'll be reporting on soon).

Donna Leon, About Face

I thought I was catching up with Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti series but while reading her 2009 About Face I discovered that there's an even newer 2009 title, A Sea of Troubles. But that gives me another Brunetti to look forward to. About Face ranks with the best of the series: it's a tragedy, as so many of them are, but in this case there is a very particular echo with the classical world that Brunetti often retreats to in the books he likes to read. As usual, his complicated relationship with Paola, his wife, and her aristocratic family is central to the story, which seems to be moving in several directions (concerning the ongoing Italian garbage crisis, investments in China, a mysterious friend of Paola's mother, conflicts with the Carabinieri over jurisdiction in a couple of murder cases, and intrigues within the Questura (the police station) in the San Lorenzo neighborhood of Venice where Brunetti works: Leon's plotting is sophisticated enough, though, that though she brings the threads into proximity she resists the impulse to tie everything up in a neat bow. The tragedy is not only the murder plot, with its classical echo, but also the entire social, legal, and political situation of Venice and Italy.
Though frequently funny, Leon's novels are always melancholy, a most suitable mood for a story so embedded in the fading glory of the serene city--and as usual Brunetti is an excellent tour guide for we the readers as he makes his way through the unique setting (evoked in quite different ways by the three covers I've pasted into this post, from the American, Australian, and English editions). Leon's novels are perhaps not to everyone's taste, in the melancholy tone and plotting, but she is a unique voice in the crime-fiction world and perhaps no crime writer is as well suited to portray her chosen city.

Niels Arden Oplev's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Danish film director Niels Arden Oplev was in my neighborhood on Saturday to show his film of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor in the original Swedish), at the American Film Institute (which is about 4 blocks from my house). Several things to remark about the film: First, from Oplev's comments, he says that he was determined to use only Swedish actors, for verisimilitude, a wise difference from the normal Euro-TV practice of placing German or French or Italian actors in key roles (to buy off international collaborators among the producers, I presume). Oplev was actually very funny in his comments, with the starting point that he at first refused the project without having read the book, dismissing it as a thriller, only to accept later after the producers contacted him again and he remarked to his neighbor that he'd been offered the project--the neighbor immediately went in her house and brought him the book to read, which he took as an omen. One point to make about the film is that there has been some criticism of the choice of Noomi Rapace in the role of Lisbeth Salander--unfounded criticism based perhaps on the "glamor" shot of her (pasted into this post), which makes her look older and not as small and boyish as Larsson's Lisbeth: in the film itself, she fulfills the requirements not only in physical appearance but in the manner with which she conducts herself in her embodiment of the character. She's very good, playing her as withdrawn, angry, and cautious in her relations with people--though not as an Asperger's victim (or any other kind of victim). The rest of the cast is also good, Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist is very natural in the role. Two of the actors are a bit distracting for anyone who has seen the Beck Swedish TV series: Peter Haber, who plays Beck as a normal guy in the series, is here quite spooky and complex; and Ingvar Hirdwall, who is, I believe, Beck's weird and comic neighbor in the series, is here quite natural and normal. The plot of the story is handled very well by Oplev, reducing some of the long passages of research in the book to short collages to get the story down from about 600 pages to 2.5 hours, but there are a couple of plot points that are changed--one in particular (that I won't go into to prevent plot spoilers) seems to leave a big hole regarding the relationship between 2 central characters, something that will have to be explained or justified in the next film which turns in considerable part on the missing detail. But altogether a very satisfying film version of a book that must have presented the director and his writers with a lot of problems in the translation from text to film: highly recommended to the fans of the book as well as anyone who hasn't read the book.

Slovakian Police Procedural (or thriller), vol. 2

The pure detective story or police procedural has an odd structure: the central character is essentially peripheral to the story. He/she is an observer and investigator, but the prime mover of the story and the prime event (the murder and murderer, or for that matter the murderee) are elsewhere. From the beginning of the genre, though, the detective or cop has gotten involved, frequently getting beaten up or threatened, sometimes taking his/her own violent action, and very often the detective's personal life is an element of the narrative. But when the detective's personal life becomes a major center of the story, the novel veers into the realm of the thriller, wherein the main or series character is central, rather than peripheral. Michael Genelin's Dark Dreams, the 2nd in his Commander Jana Matinova series about a Bratislava cop, is for that reason more of a thriller than a detective story, as was the first book in the series--that's not a criticism, it's simply a characterization, a signpost to readers to let them know what sort of book (and series) this is. That said, Dark Dreams has a lot to recommend it. For one thing, there are a lot of substantial women characters beyond Jana herself, on all sides of the various conspiracies and crimes that make up the story. Genelin also offers an atmospheric and detailed portrait of a struggling democracy in today's Eastern Europe. The plot is unconventional: it has a realism that refuses to bow to the conventions of the crime novel, in that there are a lot of characters (and a lot of villains), moving in a lot of directions, across a considerable geography (from Nepal to Vienna), with substantial political/social insights, and the story moves unpredictably without following all the threads to any expected conclusion (though readers will have figured out some things long before the cops do). The result is absorbing and always interesting, without quite reaching a conclusive, cathartic climax (though many of the threads of the conspiracies are indeed resolved). Certainly interesting enough that I'll be watching for the next installment in the series.

Shamini Flint: Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul

The 2nd Inspector Singh novel to be published by Piatkus Press (and the third overall) is more confident and accomplished than the earlier stories. Singh is a more rounded character (he was pretty one-dimensional in the first of the novels, which is apparently to be reissued in the "Inspector Singh Investigates" series as The Singapore School of Villainy, though its original title was Partners in Crime). The plot of the Bali novel is layered: one crime conceals another, which we ultimately find conceals another still. After the Bali bombing (the real one that we all know about), Singh is sent to Bali to give assistance (along with a number of Australian police, who have a more obvious reason to be there). When a piece of a corpse's head is discovered among the dead with a bullet hole in it, Singh (with no expertise in terrorism) is asked to investigate the solo murder buried beneath the mass murder. With the assistance of an Australian cop that is similarly not involved in the main investigation of the bombing, Singh maneuvers among a group of emigre Anglos and a small Indonesian Muslim group, whose stories Flint tells as an omniscient narrator, as well as showing them through Singh's eyes. The novel is quite involving, especially for the first half. As the mystery becomes more clear, there is a bit less momentum for a while, but at the end the novel shifts into thriller-gear and moves along quite quickly. Some of the characters, cops, emigres, and terrorists, seem curiously naive, and there remain some elements of the romance novel, as in the earlier books in the series, but overall "A Bali Conspiracy" is effective in dealing with a terror incident at arms length, through the structure of a detective novel, and the rising quality of the series raises expectations for later books, perhaps returning to Singapore and perhaps continuing the crime tour of Southeast Asia.

Bronze Varg Veum

An old friend of mine just let me know that there is a statue of Varg Veum, the main character in Gunnar Staalesen's novels and the films made from them, leaning against the wall in the hallway of the building where his office is located in the books. Here's an image, courtesy of Petunia's blog (click here, it's in Norwegian). I have to say the statue doesn't resemble my mind's-eye-view of the detective from the books nor Trond Espen Seim, who plays him in the films. But how many of the detectives from the current Scandinavian crime wave (or any other part of the crime fiction world) are immortalized in metal?

Varg Veum: Fallen Angels

A new Varg Veum film, Falne Engler/Fallen Angels, from the crime fiction series by Gunnar Staalesen, ran last week on MhZ Networks in the U.S., in wide screen (so perhaps this one ran first as a theatrical release before its life on TV). The movie starts out not with Veum but with a police investigation by Inspector Hamre, the detective that is Veum's friend/adversary, after a young woman is discovered hanged in her parents home, an apparent suicide. Veum is first seen re-entering the country through a Norwegian airport (after an investigation took him to Poland), having his belongings inspected by customs: including a pair of pulp-noir novels by Mickey Spillane and the now-almost-forgotten Brett Halliday (pen name of Davis Dresser). Veum is hired by an old friend, now a Norwegian rock star, to find out if his wife is cheating on him. After other murders by hanging, the police treat the original suicide as a murder, and Veum becomes involved professionally and emotionally. The plot is complicated, with a final twist that reveals the murderer but also changes the complexion of the whole story quite effectively. There's a bit of the Antonioni film Blowup in the plot and the style, as Varg inspects his surveillance photos from his infidelity case and revisits a crime scene, a villa on a fjord. Norway and Bergen are a bit more appealing here than in some of the other Varg Veum films, and the plot quite effective (children, as usual, play more of a role than in some crime stories, though not in the way a Veum fan might expect). My copy of the newly translated Staalesen novel, The Henchmen of Death, has been delayed (some reviews have already appeared on-line, making me jealous and anxious to receive my copy)--it will be the first Veum novel that I've read since the films started to appear, and it will be interesting to see how the films color my reading of this character, whose three previously translated outings I read some time ago.