Karin Fossum

First things first: I have to credit Florida writer Glynn Marsh Alam, creator of the Luanne Fogarty Mysteries, with turning me on to Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. I met Glynn at the Cape Fear Crime Festival and we shared our favorite authors. Once I started on Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series, I gobbled them up, and I promise, you will, too.

Fossum has written poetry and general fiction but her award-winning crime novels have now been translated into sixteen languages. Her inspector has been dubbed “the Morse of the fjords” as he uses his intellect, reasoning, and knowledge of human nature to solve the crimes that fall across his path. Fossum’s coastal Norwegian settings and small villages are brought to life, but the novels are character-driven, as she displays an understanding of the psychology of her characters, as does Sejer, and writes from the points of view of all the main participants. For some reason, two of the Sejer novels remain untranslated, but the publication dates I’ll give you are the US editions. Today’s blog will cover the first three. While you can read them and enjoy them in any order, you follow the trajectory of Sejer’s personal life if you read them in order. He is extremely likableand appealing, conflicted in veryhuman ways, and very fond of his huge Leonberger, Kollberg.

2002 Don’t Look Back:    This novel won both The Riverton Prize and the Glass Key for Best Nordic Detective Novel.

In a rural village such as the ones most of Fossum’s characters inhabit, a young child, Ragnhild, goes missing. The frantic search for her reveals the naked, dead body of a well-known and well-liked schoolgirl. Annie often babysat for most of the families on her road; she was strong and intelligent.  Investigating her untimely death are Inspector Konrad Sejer and his colleague Jacob Skorre, both likable, but distinctly different. As he investigates, Sejer uncovers layers of distrust that run through the village. From page one, Fossum has the reader hooked with a tension that never lets up. Annie is drawn for Sejer in the words of the people he interviews. He tried to reconstruct the murder by retracing Annie’s last moments and chillingly succeeds. The book is filled with the crisscrossed stories that maintain the tension, as the patient Sejer unravels the stories and red herrings of people’s secrets with the ones that lead to Annie’s murderer.

2003 Hear Who Fears the Wolf:           Errki is a schizophrenic who escapes from a mental institution and is seen in the area when the horrifically murdered body of elderly widow Halldis Horn is found on her doorstep.

A young obese boy who lives in a nearby group home find the body and alerts the police. The case swings into action just as Sejer is literally thrust into the middle of a bank robbery with a hostage taken that  same morning. Trying not to be sidetracked by the hostage situation, Sejer and Skarre begin to track down both criminals. As he searches for these strange criminals, Sejer comes up against small-town prejudices that twist every version of the information he seeks to collect. Fossum’s gives the reader extraordinary insight into the psychologically warped mind and the lives which have been marginalized because of it. She is every bit as good as getting inside the psyche of children or adults.

2004 When the Devil Holds the Candle: 

This novel won the Gumshoe Award for Best European Crime Novel.

Two teenaged punks steal a young mother’s purse with dramatic and unforeseen consequences. The events they set into action tie what at first appear to be loose threads and unrelated perspectives, but are skillfully woven in Fossum’s hands.

When one of the delinquent’s disappears, Sejer doesn’t immediately connect the two crimes. The chilling and awful truth unfolds inside an old woman’s home. Fossum has Sejer do his usual digging beneath the surface of the quiet life in the small towns she features in her novels. It is to her credit that she understands how chillingly violence destroys everyday life, and that she is able to bring these places and these characters to life.

In subsequent blog I’ll discuss the next 3 Sejer novels available in the US, but don’t wait! Get started now on a series you’ll find impossible to put down.

Psychological Crime Novels, Anyone?

If you’re a lover of crime novels (count me in) and especially those with a heavy emphasis on the psychology of the characters (ditto) you’ll find this list interesting.  Andrew Klavan, author of True Crime, Don’t Say a Word, and the recently published Empire of Lies, has compiled what he believes to be the top five most engrossing crime novels from1866 to1992.  Here are his choices, along with his {edited by me} reasoning:

1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Former student Raskolnikov conceives the idea that an “extraordinary man” should be free of socially constructed moral constraints. Working off that theory, he brutally ax-murders a pawnbroker and her sister–and discovers, to his horror, that he has violated not a mere social construct but the unfathomable Moral Law Within. His escape from the crime scene is as suspenseful as anything in Hitchcock. The scenes of his psychological duel with the canny police detective Porfiry Petrovich have been imitated endlessly yet never matched. But if Dosteovsky had written only the heart-wrenching scene in which the prostitute Sonya reads to the murderer from the Gospels, he could have retired after a life’s work well done. {I read this in high school but had forgotten its wonderful scenes. I may have to dig through it again.}

2. The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes: This is a wonderful read and a forgotten genre classic. Two retired servants, The Buntings, find their respectable middle-class London life about to collapse into poverty. Then the same night a serial killer called The Avenger strike again, the mysterious Mr. Sleuth arrives to rent a room. Is it possible their new lodger and the murderous Avenger are one and the same? What’s so mesmerizing here is not just the suspect, but the way Mrs. Bunting’s desperation to hold onto her middle-class respectability compels her to become his tacit accomplice. {I’d never heard of this one but will check it out now.}

3. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain: The gold standard for American noir, this is also a stark, incisive portrayal of human desire stripped of every spiritual gloss. Depression-era drifter Frank Chambers takes one look at diner waitress Cora and falls for her hard. The two want desperately to be together, but there’s the small matter of Cora’s husband. While most of Cain’s work were made into films, such as Double Indemnity, and often improved, this is not the case here. The story is still most powerful in its book form. The murder scene remains shocking. The sex scenes will put starch in your collar with nary a foul word. But it’s the depiction of petty weakness and selfishness as the motivation for unconscionable wrongdoing that’s uncomfortably seductive and reminiscent of our own lives. {Never read the book, just saw the two movie versions. I’ll have to read this now, though.  PS: The title comes from Cain’s own desperation of  the postman’s rings when dropping rejection letters.}

4. The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham: Sweet-natured war widow Meg Elginbrodde is about to marry a self-made millionaire when she receives photos suggesting her first husband migth still be alive. One of Allingham’s Albert Campion mysteries, her usual cast of appealing characters is overshadowed by the murderous treasure-hunter Jack Havoc.  He is the embodiment of a post-WWII atheistic materialism that Allingham understood to be nothing more than a new kind of superstition. Havoc is a remarkably original invention, the prototype of the soulless but philosophical killing machines who populate modern thriller novels and films. His final confrontation with the consequences of his worldview is deep, moving and spectacular. {This is a different twist from Allingham’s pleasant Campion series; reading it you feel the depth of her awareness.}

5. The Secret History by Donna Tartt: I love the scope and vision of this novel, its precise characterization and its beautiful prose. Richard Papen hopes to leave his working-class origins behind when he enrolls at an exclusive college in Vermont. Accepted into an elegant clique that centers on a charismatic Classics professor, the group’s immersion in ancient culture leads them to a moment of Bacchic ecstasy and murder. Erudite and compelling, the book is at once a riveting crime story and, I suspect, a meditation on the famous snowstorm scene in Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain;” a coming-to-terms with the cornerstone of human savagery on which even the greatest civilization stands. {My friend Melissa gave me this one birthday and it was engrossing and hard-hitting.}

Readers: Which ones have you read? Which ones will you give a try?