It’s my judgment as a translator in a different Scandinavian language that the English title of Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson’s Icelandic novel The Flatey Enigma was poorly chosen. The Flatey Riddle or The Flatey Puzzle would have better expressed the idea (I found much, frankly, to criticize in the translation in general). On top of this, the use of the name “Enigma” in World War II codebreaking suggests to the reader that this book is probably some kind of thriller. But that’s not what it is at all.

It’s actually hard to assign The Flatey Enigma to a category. It seems to resemble the “Cozy” school of mysteries, but that’s misleading. Cozies are generally set, as the name implies, in comfortable settings. Middle or upper class homes, tea in the afternoon, that sort of thing. The setting for this book, on the other hand, is what we Americans would call “hardscrabble.” It’s the Icelandic island of Flatey, in the Breidafjord (I think I saw it from a distance on my one visit to Iceland), only a little more than a mile long, where the locals eked out a meager existence in the early 1960s (the time of the story) by fishing, hunting seals, gathering eiderdown, and anything else they could do to get by. Radio service was limited and electrical power almost unknown.

When a skeletonized body is found on a nearby islet, Kjartan, the hero (so to speak) of the book is sent to investigate. He’s not actually a policeman of any kind. He’s an assistant to the district magistrate, a summer job he took because he’s a law student and wants experience with legal documents. In fact he’s extremely shy with people, and dreads going around asking lots of questions of strangers. Continue reading The Flatey Enigma, by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson →