Mini reviews #18

The Allegations (2016) by Mark Lawson. Lawson’s novel provides an inevitable response to what the author considers the age of trial-by-public opinion. It’s exactly what you’d expect, and, if you agree philosophically with Lawson, you’ll probably enjoy it. He is a satirist for those who don’t wish to challenge the status quo. They might as well have one.

Fallet (STV, 2017). This 8-part Swedish television is the inevitable parody of Nordic Noir, and, while there are some missed opportunities, the overall result is inspired. An incompetent Swedish detective, the tortured, introspect Sophie Borg (Lisa Henni) teams up with an even more incompetent English policeman, the overly polite and reticent DCI Tom Brown (Adam Godley) to solve a ritualised and apparently religious murder with links in their own disparate pasts. There are a great many English and Swedish puns (some of which I certainly didn’t get, as my Swedish is poor), in the title sequence and throughout – the police chief is called Klas Wall, for instance, and a chunk of the plot is spent chasing around after a product called McGuffin. There’s also a great set of characters, my favourite of which is a dark, death-obsessed forensic scientist from Finland. A strong supporting cast includes Dag Malmberg of The Bridge fame. I hope there will be another series; I know that the Americans are planning to remake it although I can’t imagine that will end well. ‘Fallet’, by the way, means ‘The Case’. Which is perfect.

100 Greatest Literary Detectives (2018) edited by Eric Sandberg. I was thrilled to contribute to this volume, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory, and can’t do better than linking to fellow contributor (and superior blogger) Kate Jackson’s review. 

The Death of Mrs Westaway (2018) by Ruth Ware. Ruth Ware evokes Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier in this excellent fourth novel, proving herself the heir to both. The plot concerns an unscrupulous tarot-card reader who comes into an unexpected inheritance – unexpected because it seems to have been meant for someone else. The Westaway family at the heart of this novel is full of secrets and dilemmas, unravelling as quickly as one turns the pages. A highly recommended mystery thriller.

Social Creatureby Tara Isabella Burton (2018). Marketed as ‘[t]he missing link between Bret Easton Ellis and The Secret History’ (Emma Flint) and ‘[a] Ripley story for the Instagram age’, the influences on Burton’s debut are plain for all to see. The plotting is highly indebted to Patricia Highsmith, the characterisation to Bret Easton Ellis, and the graceful unfurling of the story to Donna Tartt. There’s also a very deliberate Gatsby vibe. Take four pastiches and mix in a truly unique social media-influenced type of language (everything is ‘so’ something and/or introduced with ‘Here’s the thing’) and you have Social Creature. It’s very good (but not original enough to be great), and it sticks with you. The central character is excellent. I can imagine this being filmed. I have no idea what the author will do for her second novel, because she can’t really repeat the tone here. But, as a debut, Social Creatureis hugely promising.

The Bridge series 4 (SVT/DR)

The fourth series of The Bridge is finally airing on BBC 2, so I figured this would be a good time to review it. The other day, flicking through an old issue of my grandfather's Daily Telegraph, I noticed that even the Telegraph -- just a few years after the rest of the world -- has noticed that Scandi noir is
not an eternal phenomenon.  The journalist in question hints that maybe, just maybe, Nordic Noir is on the way out...

Of course, Scandi crime in the UK is so past its peak that Jo Nesbo is writing about Scotland and Kurt Wallander bowed out on Swedish and UK TV in 2013 and 2016 respectively. But many of us wanted, desperately, for the saga of Saga Noren to tie itself neatly together.  The final series took a while to surface, and it's very aware of its own nature as a conclusion, slightly after the fact. Dead characters resurface, backstories are interwoven with the case at hand in a way more obvious than ever before, and minor recurring characters are finally given their own narrative arcs.

When Bron/Broen began in 2011, at its heart was the clash of two geographically and philosophically linked countries, made manifest in the strained relationship of the two co-investigators, the autistic genius Saga Noren (Sofia Helin) from Sweden and the overly emotional Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia) from Denmark. Bodnia left at the end of Series 2, and his annoyingly formulaic replacement, a drug-addicted cop with anger issues stemming from bereavement, Henrik Sabroe (Thure Lindhardt) ensured that Series 3 focussed more on a clash of personalities. Series 4 makes no pretence: the star of the show is Saga Noren. Nearly all the action takes place in Denmark, but this closing act is 100% her own.

You might remember that, at the end of Series 3, Saga was arrested for murdering her mother. She says, we know, and nobody else believes, that her mother committed suicide and made it look like Saga had killed her. At the beginning of Series 4, two years later, Saga is about to get out of prison, following a retrial at which her innocence was more or less proven. Of course, because this is The Bridge, something goes wrong at the last minute, and Saga ends up seeing a counsellor -- something that starts out amusing and ends up extraordinarily touching.

She also develops her relationship with Henrik and, in a heartbreaking scene, suggests that she might be in love with him. I want to add a note here: this is not like Sherlock or Dexter, both of which suggest that sociopathy can be 'cured' by the love of a good member of the opposite sex and the pursuit of nuclear bliss. It's much more sensitive, and much more grounded. And much, much more brutal. While Saga tries to help Henrik track down his missing-presumed dead daughters (just as he's grown to accept that they are not coming back), she also tries to learn the rules of social behaviour and cohabitation. It all culminates and in an absolutely perfect final scene, which contains precisely two words of ideally-crafted dialogue.

Meanwhile, there is a case. A serial-killer case which strikes close to home. Detectives in Denmark and Sweden are trying to find a link between disparate, apparently motiveless killings: an electrocution, a hanging, a poisoning, and so on. While the link is probably clearer to us than it is to them, it takes Saga Noren to communicate it. And, as usual, the variety of victims and locales provides a perfect excuse for a range of recognisable Danish and Swedish TV faces. Once the link emerges, so does another kind of link: to the Danish police force itself.

A big theme in this series is the construction of identity within familial and local community contexts. One subplot has a woman and her son fleeing an abusive husband, and running right into a cultish community and into the arms of an even more manipulative man. Another has two blue-eyed parents with a brown-eyed son. Everyone has noticed except, apparently, the father, and, of course, it's Saga Noren who actually voices the problem, as an aside in the middle of a routine enquiry. The big subplot is, of course, Henrik's on-off search for his long-lost daughters. For the first time, the cinematography emphasises just how long the bridge between the two countries actually is.

Taken as a whole, the series is cathartic. Every character -- whether they've been in the show from Day One or just for this series -- is given a conclusion, whether that's closure or rebirth. I think the pacing is bizarre. For example, the solution to the crimes under investigation is three-fold. Element one is revealed, thrilling chase included, at the beginning of episode 7 (of 8); element two comes out half way through episode 8; and the final element is crammed into the last five minutes. Meanwhile, we have languorous scenes involving Saga rifling through the paraphernalia of her childhood and learning how to let it go.

This is frustrating in the moment, but when this show does tension, it ladles it on so heavily that you lose yourself in the moment and forget any dissatisfaction. As I mentioned above, the series ends on such a perfect note that it's impossible not to give it one big, convoluted, utterly ridiculous thumbs-up.

Mini reviews #13

Gas Light (1938) by Patrick Hamilton. Describing itself as 'a Victorian thriller', Gas Light inspired the hugely successful Hitchcock film (which, amazingly, I haven't seen) and gave birth to the term 'gaslighting'. Until I read it, I didn't realise that the author also wrote the homoerotic psychological classic Rope. The play tells the extremely melodramatic story of a housebound wife in foggy London, who comes to believe that her husband is trying to drive her mad. The play is a hugely important precursor to the modern psychological thriller. However, even for a drama written 80 years ago, it feels slightly archaic in places; good, but more important than good.

Epitaph for a Spy (1938) by Eric Ambler. I'm incredibly impressed by my first taste of Eric Ambler. This early spy thriller, which is more of a detective story than later examples of the genre, stars a rather wonderful Hungarian immigrant, Josef Vadassy, who, taking his holiday snaps to be developed, discovers images of secret codes and weapons. Working with, but not really with, the French police, he stays in an hotel, knowing only that the enemy agent is among the other guests. The prose is fast-paced, funny, and, at times, beautiful. Although the culprit is fairly easy to spot, the denouement, on the rooftops of Toulon, is gripping.

Roseanna (1965) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The first in the series from the couple who invented Nordic Noir. A beautiful American tourist winds up dead in Sweden (true life inspiration: Sjöwall observed Wahlöö eyeing up just such a woman, and resolved to kill her off in Chapter One). Out of their depth, the local police call in the troubled Martin Beck and his murder squad. Beck enters an intense and uncomfortable international investigation, uncovering sex crimes, persecution, and betrayal. A bleak and uncompromising story, Roseanna is a pioneering novel that has influenced most western crime writers since. Essential reading, still fresh and powerful today.

The Twelve Deaths of Christmas (1979) by Marian Babson. Last month, I was sorry to hear of Marian Babson's death in December, and reminded of the only book of hers I've read: the ridiculously titled The Twelve Deaths of Christmas. It's a diverting enough murder mystery, nothing more and nothing less. Set around an 'old-fashioned Christmas', the narrative perspective alternates rapidly and it's difficult to spot the killer. I haven't read it since I was eleven, but I remember very vividly a death scene on the London Underground. Babson herself was quite a character, who loved cats and never owned a television; if you have access to the CWA's Red Herrings, check out the tributes in the latest issue.

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) by Andrew Wilson. Highsmith is the undisputed Queen of Suspense, an author we all want to know more about. Thankfully, Andrew Wilson's biography provides a detailed and nuanced account of her life and work. After reading this biography, I felt like I wanted to call Highsmith 'Pat', like I knew her in all her grubby, contradictory glory. It's not a happy story, but it's as compelling as anything she wrote.

Mini reviews #8

The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins. T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone ‘the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels.’ Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers made similar remarks. And — while each of those points is demonstrably not true — the remark holds, idiomatically. The Moonstone is a fascinating novel that blends sensationalism and realism. Most major crime fiction has its origins in this book (I’m looking at you, A Study in Scarlet), and the whole thing is compulsively readable. I’ve never met anyone who dislikes The Moonstone, and I think that every crime fiction fan should read it.

No More Murders! (1967) by Maria Lang. Enjoyable escapism from ‘Sweden’s answer to Agatha Christie’ — and, for once, the accolade seems well-earned. Reading this book in translation made me feel the closest I’ve ever felt to reading a new Christie book. It’s not quite the same, and Lang has her own voice, but the complicated plot, the sense of fun, and the poetic beauty of the setting all work brilliantly. I derived considerably more pleasure from No More Murders! than from the TV adaptation, which I also enjoyed.

Country House Murders (1989) edited by Godfrey Thomas. This is one of the best of those massive Michael O’Mara anthologies from the 1980s and 1990s. It features an impressive roll of authors: Christie, Rendell, Marsh, James, Allingham, Innes, Sayers, Wodehouse(!), Chesterton, Blake, Collins, Brand, Orczy, MacDonald, Doyle, Hare, Freeman, Barr, Wills Crofts, Carr, Ethel Lina White, and James Miles — only the last of which was new to me, and all stories are on the classic country house theme.  Besides featuring the titles you’d expect (James’ ‘A Very Desirable Residence’; Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of Abbey Grange’), it includes some unexpected delights, such as ‘The Man on the Roof’ by Christianna Brand, and ‘The Worcester Enigma’ by James Miles, in which Sherlock Holmes inspires Elgar’s Enigma Variations. So, now we know!

An Expert in Murder (2008) by Nicola Upson. Upson’s first book to feature Josephine Tey as a detective is set in the West End in the 1930s. It’s a nice nostalgic whodunit, with a really interesting plot. I did find, however, that the narrative didn’t really suit Tey — either as a writer or a character. Upson’s Tey bears no resemblance to Elizabeth Mackintosh herself, but is a kind of everywoman-Scottish-crime-writer, and the story architecture bears little resemblance to her own. I’d have enjoyed this more if the sleuth had been an original character… but, then, in all honesty, I probably wouldn’t have heard of it, let alone read it. So props to Upson.

Magpie Murders (2016) by Anthony Horowitz. The only thing worse than ripping off Dame Agatha is ripping off Dame Agatha without understanding what she was doing.

Crimes of Passion (Svensk Filmindustri)

Alternative title for this blog post: Unpopular Opinion Time!

Maria Lang (1914-1991) has been described as ‘Sweden’s Agatha Christie’ and although I haven’t read any of her work, I gather that she has a better claim to the title than Camilla Lackberg. A university professor (Lang was a pseudonym for Dagmar Lange), she was a prolific producer of traditional mysteries with occasional dark or provocative themes. Crimes of Passion (2013) is a set of six standalone films based on novels by Lang, designed as an antidote to Nordic Noir, with one eye firmly on the export market. Both at home and abroad, it was a spectacular flop. Here is the twist: I like the series.

As with each season of Wallander, the first 90-minute episode of Crimes of Passion was broadcast in Swedish cinemas, and subsequent instalments went straight to DVD. The mistake here was that the first episode is by far the worst. It is almost unbelievably boring, and it’s little wonder that the whole thing was panned on the strength of the first episode’s reviews. In fact, despite trying three times, I couldn’t make it to the end of this episode. I had to switch off two thirds of the way through. There is one very uncritical reason I persevered and tried Episode Two: because everything about the show is absurdly pretty and I like pretty things.

The series also flopped as a UK export. Broadcast late at night in 2014 on BBC 4, the station that picked up some of the grimmest gems of Scandi Noir, Crimes of Passion was sold to the public as ‘Mad Men meets The Killing.’ It isn’t. It just isn’t. It’s light, cosy, and nostalgic. It’s the opposite of The Killing. I can’t help but agree with the Guardian’s reviewer, Vicky Frost, who opined that there was nothing wrong with the series; it was just being sold to us in the wrong way and would be more at home on ITV 3 than non BBC 4. That said, I don’t think it would work on any ITV station unless it was remade in English, and I’m sure producers would find a way to cock that up.

Frost also takes the series to task for failing to pay more than ‘lip-service’ to ‘issues’:

When Lange first wrote her mysteries in the 50s, her inclusion of themes such as lesbianism, the suffocating reality of marriage for women, or the scandal of children born out of wedlock would have had real impact. Here, they are dealt with somewhat half-heartedly; Puck’s reservations about marriage dealt with by a cheery “Let’s do things differently!”. It feels more like lipservice to the era than, for instance, the serious questioning of society found in the Swedish crime-writing of Henning Mankell or Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Which is all the more frustrating given that one of its detectives is, unusually, a woman.

I do not know if Frost has read Lang’s fiction — again, I haven’t, and I'd like to hear from someone who has, because I’d love to know how she handles these issues. All I know, from a bit of Googling, is that the inclusion of a gay male couple in her first novel caused a few eyebrows to arch. I also know that Puck in the books (I’ll explain who she is below, but she’s the star of the show) just acts as an assistant to the main detective, who is the policeman. I know she only appears in a few books before being married off and replaced. I don’t know if Lang ever tried to seriously tackle societal issues. Three of the books have been translated into English, and maybe I’ll get round to reading them one day … if you’ve read them, would you recommend them? At any rate, there’s an argument and a place for escapist crime fiction in most societies.

So much for context. When it comes to the programme itself, the first thing to note is that every scene, every costume, and every actor is ludicrously pretty. The set-up is this: a very attractive PhD student called Puck (Tuva Novotny), and her very very attractive boyfriend-then-husband Eje (Linus Wahlgren, whose idea of emotional range is varying shades of the same goofy smile), help a very attractive policeman called Christer to solve murders in a 1950s Swedish mining town. Christer is played by Ola Rapace, AKA Stefan Lindman in Wallander (2005). But in that series, he was angsty, aggressive, and troubled. Here, he is an avuncular pipe smoker whose biggest problem is working out which unsuitable woman to sleep with next.

As for the plots, I think they’re quite good. They’re not great, but each time there’s a steady central mystery with a reliable reveal and enough impact on the unfurling story of Puck and Eje’s evolving, then strained, relationship. It’s rather sad to see, in the final episode, that Puck becomes a published writer — because clearly this was the screenwriters paving the way to have Puck take a central role in future adaptations. In the later books, the character is replaced by Lang’s equivalent of Ariadne Oliver, an eccentric mystery novelist. Of course, there won’t be any more episodes. This doesn’t bother me too much: I’m not invested in Puck, Eje, or Christer. I deliberately chose to watch something light after ploughing briskly through all of The Bridge, all of Wallander (that ending was marvellous, wasn’t it, and brutal?), and most of The Killing. Well, Crimes of Passion, with its nebulous 1950s escapism, couldn’t be lighter.

Here is a summary of the six episodes, and my thoughts on each:

1. Mördaren ljuger inte ensam (UK title Death of a Loved One) - lots of beautiful people are stranded on an island, then they start having sex and dying. I didn’t care for this one.

2. Kung Liljekonvalje av dungen (UK title King Lily of the Valley) - a bride-to-be vanishes on her way to pick up her bouquet! WTF? Puck, Eje, and Christer work out who is lying (clue: it’s everyone). I don’t remember much of this one.

3. Inte flera mord (UK title No More Murders) - Puck has married Eje, and now that he can’t say no, she gets a cat called Thotmes III, which promptly runs away and into a corpse, more or less in their back garden. Then a leading crime writer disappears. This was my favourite episode, partly because it was so much fun, partly because there was some genuinely interesting stuff about sexual ethics, and partly because ‘flera’ is my favourite Swedish word. 

4. Rosor, kyssar, och döden (UK title Roses, Kisses, and Death) — something to do with seances, and another unsuitable girlfriend for Christer. I found this episode boring, and fell asleep watching it.

5. Farliga drömmar (UK title Dangerous Dreams) — Puck becomes a stenographer for a Nobel prize winning novelist, who turns out to be rather mean. Then people start dying, and Puck starts to wonder why she was hired in the first place. This is a marvellously creepy episode with a locked-room feel (although the room is in this case the novelist’s highly-secure country estate). I would recommend this one.

6. Tragedi på en lantkyrkogård (UK title Tragedy in a Country Churchyard) — This is a ‘busy’ episode, as it’s trying to round up the series while keeping things open for more. It’s set at Christmas where a family celebration at the vicarage is disrupted by a missing person who proves to be a not-very-missing corpse. Eje is pretty useless in this one — he just swans around getting tempted by a glamorous widow — so Puck teams up with a little girl (who is, amazingly, well played by a non-annoying child actor). That character, who devours crime fiction including Maria Lang’s Inte flera mord!, reminded me of Josephine in Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. But there the similarities end. While I liked Tragedy in a Country Churchyard very much, one thing that irritated me was the fact that everyone was smiling in every scene. It’s like the director reminded the cast between takes that this was supposed to be light and frothy. So we have Puck and Christer flirting over a corpse, and grinning broadly as they describe just how the axe was wielded, and how the young girl nearly stepped in his blood. Weird.

No one gives a spectacular performance in Crimes of Passion and I don’t know if the screenwriters have done Lang justice or not, but the scripts are okay. The whole thing remains consistently watchable. If I was a knitter, this would be the perfect programme to knit in front of. It’s absolutely everything  people think ‘cosy crime’ is: entertaining, easy, and a bit pointless. If there had been more episodes, I would have watched them for sure, but I’m not deranged with grief that the show was cancelled.