Anton Koch-Nielsen

The 11th Glass Key – presentation of the five candidates

This is a redletter day in the history of the Crime Writers of Scandinavia. For the first time ever, all five nations are represented by a candidate for the award for the best thriller: The Glass Key. This is pleasant in and of itself.

The five candidates are:

From Finland Leena Letholainen with "Luminainen", which the rest of us will have to read in the swedish translation, "Snöjungfrun" (might be "The Lady in the Snow"),

From Denmark Jan Stage with "Et kys fra kaliningrad" ("A Kiss from Kaliningrad"),

From Iceland Arnaldur Indridason with "Myrin", which exists in a danish prototranslation "Nordmosen", and an english edition as "Jar City".

From Norway Jon Michelet with "Den frosne kvinnen" (might be "The Frozen Woman"), and

From Sweden Åke Edwardson with "Himlen är en plats på jorden" ("Heaven is a Place on Earth").

Leena's book was originally published in 1996, Arnaldur's in 2000 (according to the publishers - the cover reads "2001"). The remainder were all published in 2001. Finland and Iceland can only compete when the books are translated to one of the nordic languages. This is why the association has allowed the two nations to enter works of an older date into the competition.

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How do our nations present themselves with the best, they have to offer? This is bound to surprise those who are unfamiliar with the genre. The prejudices concerning crime novels don't hold up.

There are no sharpwitted private investigators. There are no complex alibies for the suspects. There isn't much in the way of searching for clues, once the crime has been commited. Neither in classic sense of, say, ashes from a cigarette or footprints, nor intelectual clues like coded letters and sinister messages from the deceased. Arnaldur's book does contain some of the latter, though.

The investigations are done by the police, in a sober and proper fashion if not always with succes. There are no stupid cops, no corruption of the policeforce. They are portrayed as hardworking and talented professionals, for the most part as dedicated as well, which leaves ample room for a social comprehension .

Non-scandinavians will also be tacken aback by the settings. Scandinavia frequently seeks to portray itself internationally as the place of "lush, green forests" and "short, twilight summer night" or "midnight sun". This is not the case in the five novels. The icelandic scene is set in late autumn, Sweden, Denmark and Finland begin around christmas, while the norwegian tale begins in february. All 5 stories thus transpire in the scandinavia of cold, short days. "Winter's Tales" as a great danish poet named a collection of short-stories.

As for the contents, it is remarkable that the criminal intriques have long roots. Witnesses from the past strike, and present day people are mere victims with only limited power to choose their own fate or course of action. The moral dimension we know from the crime litterature of the inter-war period is all but gone. It seems almost deterministic.

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We have one woman and four male writes. I know little about Leena's background, but the four men either are or have been journalists. This is probably why the investigative work in the novels is sometimes more akin to journalistic research than to police-style invastigation. Åke Edwardson's inspector Winter is a case for the opposite, though, as he remarks that the work of the policeman is like that of an "archeologist of crime". Once again, the past rears its head to determine the present.

Finnaly all five novels are part of a series. The commanding policeofficers, or in the case of Michelet the key off-center character, have all appeared in earlier novels, and much space is devoted to further our knowledge of these characters, just as references to earlier works are interwoven with the stories.

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It is difficult to recount the novels. More than anything else, this is due to the genre. These are crime fiction, after all, and the thrill would be lost if one were to give away too much or prepare the readers for the surprises the writer has meticulously kept in store. Thus, only partial recounts are possible. Furthermore all the novels contain several storylines that are not necessarily linked to each other. In the case of Leena, something like one fifth of the novel is a thrilling story of pursuit of a convicted bankrobber, who has escaped from prison and now seeks revenge over the main police characters. This is a violent and exciting tale, but has no connection with the murder mystery that remains the main tale of the novel. At most this story serves the purpose of complicating and delaying the actual task of the police. And of course that of illustrating the working conditions of the police - there are always a number of ongoing cases. In the golden age of crime the private investigator was able to concentrate on one case. The policeman has no such luxury.

Despite the difficulties, we'll try to say a bit about the five candidates:

1.
Leena Lehtolainen's detective is a woman of thirty-something, Maria Kallio, who works at the criminal police in Esbo, a suburb of Helsinki, I believe. The story in Snöjungfrun evolves around a middle-aged psychologist and feminist, found dead under suspicious circumstances in the woods close to the estate she had inherited and used as a crisis centre and educational facility for women with no access for men. Elina Rosberg died from hypothermia but she had also been sedated and dragged under a pinetree where she's found 24 hours later. Maria Kallio encounters many women at the crisis centre, who are potential suspects - the novel is thus able to tell the tale of several women who have had a rough life in present day Finland. In the wake of another murderous assault, Maria Kallio goes far back into the past, and then she begins to suspect what actually happened. And as it turns out, that solution might not even be the whole truth.

A sharp, but not unfriendly, feminist attitude is present throughout the novel, and this is expressed both by the tales of the women involved and Maria Kallio's own life, when she learns she is pregnant and has to consider what a child will mean for her life and job. The novel also has traditional crime stuff. Maria Kallio, who tells the story herself, begins an argument by writing "even though life wasn't a Maria Lang novel, I couldn't help thinking…" such and such. In the end, when the suspect women are all interrogated at the crisis centre, one of the police officers rightly notices that "it sounds a bit like an old crime novel". This is not to say that the novel is old fashioned. The novelty compared to e.g. the works of Maria Lang, is that the theme - womens' opportunities in society - is an interwoven part of the plot, rather than simply a backdrop for the story.

2.
Arnaldur Indridason uses his icelandic background in an original fashion in Myrin. Iceland is a very active volcanic area, where the earth's crust is constantly shifting. In the part of Reykjavik called "Myrin", a dangerous cavern has formed below the cellars' concrete floors including the dismal house where a 69 years old truckdriver and habitual offender is found slain. At the same time Iceland is a remote island which has significance for modern day geneticists. The population is small and the genpool has remained constant until recently. Thus, it is possible to trace hereditary diseases through the generations with ease. The case becomes a complicated one for the 50 years old policeman Erlendur. His colleague is mistaken when he describes the case as a "typical icelandic murder" i.e. "dirty, pointless and with no attempts to conceal the crime or destroy evidence in any way".

The novel offers a previously unseen tight plot. Erlendur's character, on the other hand, is yet another disillusioned, divorced scandinavian cop, with an appalling personal life - his grown-up son is an alcoholic and his daughter is a prostitute drug addict. A small girl in the story believes that people have eyes for crying rather than seeing. There isn't much to laugh about in this novel, but it does contain good investigative parts and a lot of excitement. And, as has been stated previously, the idea is highly original.

3.
It's the social inheritance, not the genetically, which is the theme for Åke Edwardson's novel "Himlen är en plats på jorden". The title is the refrain from a song, which is a part of the repertoire of good jazz that - like in Edwardsons earlier novels - runs through the plot almost like a soundtrack. This time the crimepolice in Göteborg face two cases, that maybe don't seem too frightening in the beginning. Young men roaming alone late at night have been struck down and there seems to be no connection between them. And kindergarten children are taken for short rides by an 'uncle' - as of yet he hasn't molested a child, but what will happen next time?

Edwardsons main character is once again inspector Erik Winter. He and his crew follow the different leads with their usual competence, although the leads don't take them very far. In the end Winter's intuition leads to a disclosure. The novel ends with an actionpacked climax, which offers violence and death enough for everyone.

Heaven is not a place on earth, at least not in Göteborg and especially not in the sad, partly depopulated rural areas outside the city, where the policemen meet the depressing remains of Swedish old-fashioned lifestyle. Maybe it was - as one policeman suggests - our task to build heaven on earth, but we haven't managed to do so. We can see heaven from earth, and we can build houses that almost reach the sky. But there's nothing up there.

4.
Going from Edwardson's sophisticated police inspector and moral contemplations to the raw, unfeeling world presented by Jon Michelet in the novel Den frosne kvinnen is a violent contrast. As in Leenas novel it begins with the frozen corpse of a woman. The body is in the garden of Michelet's old anti-hero, Vilhelm Thygesen. He was originally a policeman, then he became convicted of murder, and after that he has made a living for himself as a lawyer, and now the 63 year old outsider lives alone in a large house, he has inherited. While Thygesen does the reasoning, the investigative work is done by a couple of young, smart criminal investigators. They have a hard time because, despite a lot of hard work, they don't discover the identity of the deceased until late in the plot. This is partly because they spend a lot of time on a wild goose chase involving the nouveau riche of the norwegian oil adventure: the kind of people who believe money makes money, and who fail to understand that added value is the result of productive work.

A parallel story involves a group of middle-aged people who once wanted to create a motorcyclegang, but never fulfilled this ambition. These previous freebooters are now reduced to gangsters, who smuggle drugs and who share a very low esteem of human life. The increasly violent passages of the novel contain as many as four murders. The police don't actually solve the murders, but they eventually manage to come up with a probable explanation (which also includes the dead woman), and the leading police officer then manages to get the hypothesis confirmed during an interrogation of the critically injured sole survivor of the gang in a swedish hospital.

Thygesen then pieces together the puzzle. Thygesen has gone from a quasi-marxist to a fully fledged misanthrope, and he believes the whole story was really about destructive contradictions, which caused the fragmentation of a group of men.

5.
The danish candidate Jan Stage's story Et kys fra Kalinigrad is completely different. It comes closest to being a political thriller about an attempt at blackmailing towards the danish state. The villain is a former soviet KGB-officer, who is stranded in the enclave of Kalinigrad. He wants to revenge the collapse of the soviet empire, which he blames on the decadent, capitalist western Europe. The revenge is to strike Denmark, the small self-centred country that is "the weakest link of the chain". In co-operation with a prominent russian mafiaboss he acquires a ship, that is then filled with dissidents, criminals and poor people. They are chased onto land on the island of Falster, Denmark. The operation is supposed to expose the danes' paralysed will to resist and their lacking ability to handle such a situation. The threat of new shiploads of asylumseekers is supposed to blackmail the danish government for an absurd amount of money. The danish authorities have to mobilise the veterans, first of all Stage's old commissioner Arne Sehested from the intelligence service. In co-operation with other vintage heroes he manages to ruin the blackmail scheme - the final, brutal liquidation of the novel. Thus, Stage, like the others, leave us in the hands of people from the past.

On it's own terms the story is a thrilling, actionpacked tale. The story is peppered with coarse satire referring to missteps in present danish politics. The novel gained a certain degree of stir in Denmark because it reflected the increasing level of xenophobia in Denmark in recent years. The novel certainly touches on a current and combustible subject. As a political doomsday scenario the story is somewhat unconvincing. It shouldn't be a problem for society to receive a few thousand asylumseekers, who for the most part probably only want to return to their homeland or who obviously don't come into consideration as refugees.

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So much about the five books - as stated in the introduction they are far from the classic crime novel. The classic model contained a message, which was beautifully stated by P. D. James a few years ago in her memoirs: "The detective story ought to… show that even the most intractable mystery is capable of solution, not by supernatural means og by good fortune, but by human intelligence, human perseverance and human courage".

When I've seemed to have my reservations, it's mostly because when reading the good writers of today (and most of the nordic crime literature I know), I miss this ambition, because too much of the investigative work is based on chance, guesswork and pure intuition. There's too little emphasis on traditional clues, the kind of evidence that leads to the solvation of a crime case.

Also in my own opinion, the books in general (apart from Leena's) suffer from a depressive mood and world view, ranging from grey to pitch black. And, really, the world isn't all that bad!

On the good side, I must count the convincing depictions of scandinavian environments and the trends and lifestyles, which characterise our countries at present. The reality we find in the works of the good writers of crime and suspense, is one we know and can recognise. They grasp the sign of the times and the general problems we face. Which is a good thing, especially as writers of more prestigious literature prefer to write about life in the private sphere and intimate relationships.

Should one wish to know something about contemporary scandinavia, these five novels can answer many questions.

(To english by Erling Koch-Nielsen)