Streaming Pt. 1

Tromsø, Norway

Having declared myself a writer again (read unemployed) and having settled on a genre--none of that literary fiction for me--I have spent the last two weeks or so immersing myself in mysteries. For a binge watcher 30-day trials are the thing, so I got one for Mhz network which has a decent collection of international mysteries primarily set in Western and Northern Europe, Turkey, and Italy. There may be others but the visual language of TV mysteries adapted from books is so similar that it is hard to tell at first glance. Regardless I am a fan of the Scandinavian ones as an outcropping of my decade-long interest in the their crime fiction. I skipped right over the Dragon Tattoo business, mainly because I never read anything aggressively advertised on the one train, and started with the prolific Henning Mankell series based around Det. Kurt Wallander. He died in 2015 but is survived by his leftist politics, plays, charity work, and a sizable catalogue of books including over a dozen mysteries featuring Wallander and his daughter Linda. I think I read them all in order or at least whichever ones had been translated into English and were available at the time. I was unemployed and needed an escape.

At a tattoo party, yes for real, I was introduced to the Martin Beck series written by Per Wahlöö. Both Beck and Wallander have been turned into series with varying degrees of commercial and artistic success. I read several of the Beck novels, but had trouble getting them at bookstores. There were still bookstores at the time and I was a loyal patron. This lead to basic searches for Nordic crime fiction which yielded Det. Erik Winter (Åke Edwardson), the grim put upon Icelandic Inspector Erlendur (Arnaldur Indri∂ason) and finally a female sleuth Tóra Gu∂mundsdóttir(Yrsa Sigurðardóttir). By basic search I mean I went to bookstores around the city, found the mystery section, and read all the last names until I found ones that looked Nordic: two adjacent letter Ss, "son" at the end of a name, vowels with accents. Then I'd check covers to see if there were any visuals suggesting midsummer, general cold weather, Gotenburg, a bridge and the like. I would also ask the booksellers, still the best search engines.

Murderer not Pictured

I had always been a big mystery fan, but mostly British and mostly on television. I loved the scenery-the manor houses, follies, rolling ominous countrysides, moors, stables, crumbling priories, higgledy-piggledy grave stones, druids. None of things I would see when I finally went to the UK. But the locations were important as well. There is something appealing about a contained location, a village celebration with its provincial characters or a firm's weekend retreat with associates and partners locked in a battle for control. It's even better if everyone is trapped because of the weather! The scenery is as much a character as the murderer, the victim, the suspects, and the nosy detective or amateur sleuth. 

I've never read an American mystery novel. I don't see why I would. There is nothing mysterious to me about crime in this country--it all makes perfect sense. Crime is the way we conduct daily life. It's our political system and our economy. The setting is brutality in which there cannot be, in my mind, any real mystery. Crime yes-and hardboiled. Mystery hardly. And definitely no escape from the familiar. 

But in the Nordic mystery...

(To be continued)