Tag Archives: Kjell Ola Dahl

‘Little Drummer,’ by Kjell Ola Dahl

My relationship with the Nordic Noir genre, as you may recall, is troubled. Though I’m generally a Scandinavian booster, I have my pet hatreds (Ibsen and Stieg Larsson, to name a couple), and I’m cold to Nordic mysteries overall (except for Jørn Lier Horst’s Wisting, probably because I worked on two seasons of the TV miniseries). I’ve read one of Kjell Ola Dahl’s Oslo Detectives books before, and didn’t care for it a lot. I found it depressing and distasteful. But I bought Little Drummer on a whim (it was on sale), and I liked this one a little better.

Lise Fagernes is an Oslo newspaper reporter. She finds herself, to her shock, part of a news story herself when she discovers a woman’s body in a car in a parking garage. The police consider the death an accidental overdose, as the fatal needle is right there. But one of the brass, on a hostile whim, assigns the case to his enemy, Inspector Gunnarstranda. And Gunnarstranda, on a hunch, asks for a toxicology test. Turns out it wasn’t an accidental overdose after all. The woman was chloroformed before being injected.

Together with his partner, Frank Frøhlich, Gunnarstranda starts looking into the woman’s background. Turns out she was friends with a student from Kenya who has just been reported missing. When he proves to have fled the country, Frøhlich will have to travel to Africa. There he encounters Lise, who’s still on the story. They circle each other warily before forming a temporary alliance – both in business and personal terms.

The case will lead to international medical conglomerates, African relief, and the general fecklessness and corruption of Western aid to the Third World.

About the highest praise I can give to a Nordic Noir novel is that it didn’t make me want to kill myself. Little Drummer was better than most in that regard. But it was hardly cheery, and I suspect the political underpinnings are anti-capitalist.

Still, not bad, and the translation is good. Cautions for the usual.

‘The Assistant,’ by Kjell Ola Dahl

It’s not often I finish reading a book with the feeling of, “Glad that’s over.” But that was my response to The Assistant, a stand-alone novel by Kjell Ola Dahl, one of the big guns of Scandinavian Noir.

There are two parallel narrative threads in this book. In 1924, a young man with the non-Norwegian name of Jack Rivers works as a driver for a bootlegger. Though a thrill-seeker and a bit of a rogue, Jack would rather be doing something legal. But there’s a depression on, and he takes what work he can get. Eventually he will be arrested by the incorruptible policeman Ludvig Paaske, who nevertheless takes a liking to him. Jack has a sense of honor and is faithful to his friends, something those friends do not reciprocate.

In 1938, Jack is out of prison, now working as an assistant for Paaske, who has become a private detective. Paaske is approached, in the classic Hard-boiled manner, by a beautiful woman who wants him to follow her husband. She suspects he’s being unfaithful.

Her husband, it turns out, is the bootlegger Jack used to work for, now a successful businessman and politician. And the wife is not being entirely honest. Both Jack and Paaske will have reunions with women they cared about in the past, and each will worry that the other is being manipulated. In addition, Nazi agents are involved.

The Assistant is a moodier and more thoughtful book than the average mystery. I suspect it might be more evocative in the original Norwegian. This translation seemed good to me at first, but seemed to deteriorate as it went along. Sometimes it was ploddingly literal (a vice hard to avoid, as I can say from experience). And sometimes it seemed like a rush job to me, the author having given up on finding the right words. The first time someone made coffee in a “pan,” I thought it was due to their poverty, but eventually I realized the translator must have blanked on the words “pot” and “kettle” all through. And the parliament is referred to as “Stortinget,” which is technically correct but won’t be familiar to many English-language readers.

I need to mention that a Labor Party speech gets fact-checked by Paaske at one point (that’s rare in a Norwegian book), and one character’s Christian piety is  treated with respect.

But I didn’t believe this story. It was operatic – the main characters make great, Quixotic gestures that seem both irrational and out of character. And the two different timelines share so much in location, characters and action that they were hard to keep straight.

Also, the ending just left me floundering.

I can’t really recommend The Assistant.

‘Faithless,’ by Kjell Ola Dahl

Faithless

Oslo police detective Frank Frølich stops a woman leaving a business he’s surveilling in connection with a series of thefts. He searches her purse and finds drugs. That’s not a major crime in Oslo; she pays a fine and goes home.

The next night, Frank goes to an old friend’s engagement party. His friend introduces him to his fiancée – who turns out to be the very woman Frank arrested the night before.

Shortly thereafter, that same woman is found murdered, naked in a dumpster.

That’s how Faithless, by Kjell Ola Dahl, begins. It’s one of the “Oslo Detectives” series, which follows Frank and his older partner, Gunnarstranda (who doesn’t seem to have a first name, or at least I didn’t catch it).

The story was well told, and pretty suspenseful. The translation got clunky now and then, but I’ve become more tolerant of clunkiness since I started translating books myself.

Indeed, the story was so interesting that it wasn’t until the very end that I realized how grim and nihilistic the whole thing had been, right up to the climactic scene, which involves a hand to hand fight in a waste treatment plant. Well, what do I expect from Scandinavian Noir?

I was ready to buy another book in the series, but I accidentally bought a stand-alone by the same author. It appeared to be a thriller about drug dealers and junkies, and I quickly lost heart and just gave it up.

But Faithless is a well-done cop thriller, and I can’t disrespect it. Cautions for language, violence, sex… pretty much everything.