I caught a few minutes of a BBC dramatization of one of the Kurt Wallander mysteries this season, but I was distracted and don’t even remember which story it was (it might even have been this one, the first novel of the series). Still, I’ve decided I need to acquaint myself with the booming Scandinavian mystery scene, and so I picked up Faceless Killers. I enjoyed it, with some reservations.

The hero is Detective Kurt Wallander, a policeman in the rural town of Ystad (pronounced EE-stad), Sweden. Wallander is no McGarrett, no supercop. He’s barely keeping it together, in his personal life and his profession. His wife recently left him, which spun him into depression and heavy drinking. His adult daughter simply disappeared from his life, though she makes occasional contact. His artist father is sliding into dementia. Meanwhile at work, it’s his bad luck to be the senior detective on the squad (his superior is on holiday) when an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered in their home. A whispered statement by the female victim suggests a “foreigner” was responsible. Somehow the word gets out, and there are reprisals against local refugee camps.

Wallander manages to do his job creditably, but sometimes it’s touch and go, thanks in particular to exhaustion and imprudent drinking. Leads are followed until they play out, and Wallander manages to get himself pretty severely beaten up more than once. There’s even an almost-comic car chase, in which Wallander follows a suspect driving a stolen car, in a commandeered horse van.

The story lost some steam toward the end, though I had no trouble sticking with it. As a conservative American, I had mixed responses to the ethos of the story. Wallander is surprisingly conservative (it seems to me) for a Swedish cop. Although heartily anti-racist, he has serious doubts about Sweden’s open borders policy, a sentiment which sat pretty well with me. On the other hand, as a typical Swedish civil servant, the idea of a right to bear arms is entirely foreign to his universe. I had a hard time, puritanical American that I am, swallowing his guilt-free pursuit of another man’s wife.

Still, it was an interesting story, and not quite what I expected. I may read more Henning Mankell.

A note on the translation—it could have been a lot better. The translator opted too often for literalism over idiom, and the story suffered for it. I need to get into the translation business. It would appear they need me.

In March of 2009, mystery author Stuart M. Kaminsky moved with his wife from his Sarasota home to St. Louis, Missouri, in order to wait for a liver transplant (he’d contracted hepatitis during service as a military medic in France in the late 1950s). Two days later he suffered a stroke, making him ineligible for the surgery, and he passed away the following October.

The online accounts of his death I’ve read give no hint how (or whether) Kaminsky’s health affected his writing plans. But these last two novels in his Lew Fonesca series (my favorite of his four detective series) possess an elegiac quality, as if the author was tying up loose ends.

I’ve told you about Lew Fonesca before. He’s a bald, skinny process server in Sarasota, Florida. During most of the series, he lives in the back room of his tiny office, next to a Dairy Queen. He gets around chiefly by bicycle. He doesn’t want to own anything, and he doesn’t want people in his life. He’s chronically depressed, overcome by the death of his wife, in a hit-and-run accident in Chicago a few years back. He drove south until his car broke down in Sarasota, and settled where he stopped.

And yet he doesn’t stay alone. Over the course of the books he acquires a staunch friend in the old cowboy Ames McKinney, who backs him up in tight spots. An old woman he once helped took in an unwed mother he rescued, and now he’s sort of an unofficial godfather to the baby. He has a girlfriend. There’s a “little brother” (who likes going around with him because shots tend to get fired). A therapist. And (in the final book) a Chinese man who sleeps on his floor, for reasons you’ll have to read the novels to learn.

You might think these books would be depressing. They’re not. In fact—it occurred to me while reading Bright Futures—they’re actually rather funny. Lew Fonesca, like some farcical Job, is the butt of a cosmic joke. The God in whom he claims not to believe (he’s a lapsed Episcopalian) seems to be playing games with him. Continue reading Always Say Goodbye, and Bright Futures, by Stuart M. Kaminsky →

Once again, I offer something more in the line of a reading report than a book review, because (alas) the novel I’ve just finished reading isn’t available in English.

My friend Baard Titlestad of Saga Publishers sent along a copy of Edvard Eikill’s Lokes Lek, personally autographed for me by the author. I was fascinated and moved by what I read in its pages.

Lokes Lek (Loki’s Game) isn’t precisely a Viking book, but is set about a century after the death of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my books. Indeed, Erling’s descendents at Sola are part of the story.

When Norwegians look back at their history, they see a Golden Age beginning with the Viking raids, and ending with the death of King Sigurd Jorsalfar (the Crusader). King Sigurd did mighty deeds in the Mediterranean as a young man, then settled down to a peaceful joint rule with his brother Øystein the Good, one of the country’s most beloved rulers. After Øystein’s death, Sigurd ruled alone, sometimes heedlessly, but there was peace in the land and the people loved him. Continue reading Reading report: Lokes Lek, by Edvard Eikill →

‘It’s an historian’s duty to uncover, not to judge.’ He lit his pipe. ‘Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils – the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.’

This snippet of dialogue is delivered by one of the characters in the novel The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø. I’m having trouble deciding exactly what to think about this book, but that passage seems to me about as close to a statement of the author’s world view as I can find (I may, of course, be entirely mistaken). Nesbø seems to believe that moral choices are extremely important, but who’s to say what the right ones are? Continue reading The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo →

I’ve written about the Lew Fonesca books before, perhaps my favorite of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s detective series. It occurs to me that my personal fondness for Lew may rise in part from the fact that he’s a fellow depressive, and that some readers may be put off by that. Perhaps it should be noted that although the hero of these books is a depressive, the books are not necessarily depressing. There’s a lot of comedy here (some of it pretty black), and wry humor. Lew is sad, but he knows when he’s being ridiculous.

In any case, I want to do what I can to raise Kaminsky’s profile in the world, while some of his books are still in print. They’re worth reading.

Denial begins with Lew locked in the office which is also his home, refusing to speak to any of his friends. Finally his therapist talks her way in, persuading him to tell her what’s kneecapped his spirits even more than usual.

The body of the story is his account of two detective jobs he was hired for (Lew isn’t actually a private investigator. He’s a retired prosecutor’s investigator from Chicago, now eking out a living as a process server in Sarasota, Florida. But people keep bringing problems to him). One job is a serious one, trying to find out who fatally ran down a teenage boy with a car. The other is almost comic—a lady in a nursing home insists she saw someone murdered in one of their rooms, and wants him to prove she’s not senile.

Lew sets about the jobs in his usual quiet, methodical way, with his friend Ames McKinney, a latter-day Gary Cooper from Texas, providing backup and bodyguard service.

Feathers will be ruffled. Secrets will be uncovered.

People will die.

In the end, Lew makes a life-changing resolution. I’m going to order the next book tonight, because I really want to find out how that goes.

Highly recommended.