What Book to Read?

Inspired by enjoying Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, I some time ago wrote a post about four other Scandinavian crime writers.  While acknowledging that Henning Mankell has some strengths – and a lot of readers – I concluded that Scandinavian crime writing, aside from Larsson, had nothing particular to recommend it. So it took a particularly enthusiastic recommendation from a friend for me to try another one. Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian writer, and The Snowman (2007 – translated by Don Bartlett 2010) is the seventh of eight crime stories he has written featuring Inspector Harry Hole of theOslo police.

Hole is another brilliant detective with a dysfunctional personal life. He is a loner, driven, says his ex-girlfriend, by anger and a desire for revenge rather than any sense of responsibility. He is a recovering alcoholic, always in danger of falling off the wagon, and consequently unpopular with his superiors. He suggests that ‘all the best stories are about losers’.

The plot is complex. The main thread is Harry’s investigation of a series of missing person cases which gradually begin to show a pattern. Those missing are all young women; could there be a serial killer at work? There are flashbacks to earlier events which may or may not relate to the disappearances, and there is also information about some of the victims. Hole explores a number of avenues that appear to lead to dead ends in the investigation, but these are nevertheless finally tied into a coherent resolution. The reader knows they have to be red herrings, if only because they come at points where there is still a lot of the book left to read. But each mini climax raises the tension effectively, and having dashed it, the writer builds again to the next one with a genuinely scary finale. I’d be interested to know at what point you guess who the real killer is.

I think I’ve said before that I’m not a great fan of serial killer crime stories because they do away with the need to establish a motive other than obsession, and they usually involve fiendish cleverness on the part of the villain. Both of these caveats apply here. But I also like complexity in a story, and this to some extend cancels out my objections. Is a bit too complex? Hole is clear and logical about evidence and connections, and I find most of the detecting he does to be quite convincing, without much reliance on chance or coincidence. At one point he reflects that he believes in the sort of luck that comes ‘through hard work and spinning yourself such a fine-meshed net that at some point chance would play into your hands’. But a particularly crucial insight, he acknowledges, ‘was just a fluke. An atypical fluke’.  I think that by acknowledging this, the writer gets away with it.

Don Bartlett’s translation doesn’t have the clunkiness of some of the other translated Scandinavian crime stories I’ve read. I don’t know whether this is because of his skill, or the soundness of the original, or maybe both. The down-to-earth prose helps keep the story grounded, and there is sufficient characterization for most of the characters to seem real enough.  I got a bit confused by the Norwegian names and place names, but you can’t blame Nesbo for that. The weather and the scenery – particularly the snow – make a realistic, if not compelling, background.

Nesbo’s books are selling very well, and he has been called the next Stieg Larsson. But he says ‘I feel more related to some American crime writers than I do to Stieg Larsson’. And there isn’t really anything Scandinavian about the story. So probably I shouldn’t even use the category ‘Scandinavian crime stories’, but judge on the normal basis of would I read another Harry Hole story? Yes, certainly.

You can read more about Nesbo here, and an interesting interview with him here.