The Bat by Jo Nesbø

 “You’re a tiny bit damaged every time you unravel a murder case”, says Harry Hole in his debut thriller.
“Unfortunately, as a rule there are more human wrecks and sadder stories, and fewer ingenious motives, than you would imagine from reading Agatha Christie.” The worldview presented here is certainly starker and bleaker, with good and bad in a more complex dialogue than in the British school of crime writing.

Norwegian police detective Harry Hole is in Australia to investigate the murder of a young Norwegian woman, who he quickly realises is the victim of a serial killer. The investigation takes him into seedy underworlds and showcases police corruption, racial tensions, and institutional homophobia (although, in the latter case, he shows us his manly heroism by indulging in it).
 
I do not think this book has aged as well as it might have since first publication in 1997. We are meant to admire Hole for fondly remembering homophobic persecution he inflicted on a gay adult as a child and noting that he hadn’t been very nice (he has evolved and is a nice liberal), just a few pages before joining in extensive homophobic police jokes that pretty much result in the one gay character – who is of course wildly attracted to our hero – ending up dead and mutilated.
 
The novel features racism in a very deliberate way, and has some commentary on the dangers of othering, which struck me as similar to the way in which Val McDermid presents transgender issues in The Mermaids Singing, published just two years before The Bat.
 
The most famous critic of the Christie school of crime writing was Raymond Chandler, who sought (how successfully depends on who you ask) to move the crime novel away from artificiality and towards the real world in all its grim, messy reality. Nesbø seems to be following his lead, but his narrative devices, which may enhance the real-world social commentary, present a self-consciously fictional world.
 
At least half the characters have a habit of going off into long and involved stories, each spanning several paragraphs and multiple pages. Sometimes, these are reminiscences which serve as fables from which a clue or psychological point can be extracted. More often, they are bits of history or localised (Australian) legends used as cautionary tales. Everyone is remarkably erudite!
 
I’m not trying to criticise this aspect, because I found these moments among the most engaging. And, honestly, the last thing I expected when settling down with a landmark Norwegian novel was to learn so much about Australian culture and heritage. It’s all told in a pacey, engaging way.

In summary, I enjoyed The Bat, but with some reservations. It is an impressive thriller with an understandable wide appeal, and makes reading more - seeing the character and the series evolve - an extremely attractive proposition.

Mini Reviews #7

A Blunt Instrument (1938) by Georgette Heyer. Sorry -- I'm not convinced. After a few laugh out loud lines like 'His Lordship did not answer because he was dead', which I'm not convinced were supposed to be funny, I read this in a pretty bad mood. And for what it's worth, the solution is obvious literally from page 2. Heyer is being heralded as writing gentle social satires in her detective fiction, but I don't buy that. A Blunt Instrument exemplifies the conservatism and laziness that we like to think it critiques.

Dead Air (1986) by Mike Lupica. An investigative journalist takes to... investigating... when his ex-girlfriend is murdered. The case leads him into the glamorous and impossibly bitchy worlds of American television and evangelical Christianity. This is an amusing read. I first read it at the age of eleven and saw the twist coming a mile off.

Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) by Walter Mosley. The first case for hardboiled African American war veteran Easy Rawlins. Set in Los Angeles in 1948, this novel takes all the tropes and conventions that Hammett and Chandler coined and exposes their limits, developing Rawlins as a distinct voice in search of an identity. A compelling and brilliant read.

The Snowman (2007) by Jo Nesbo. The seventh case for Norwegian sleuth Harry Hole. Someone is building snowmen, sinisterly unexplained and facing towards houses from which people disappear. And soon bodies -- or, rather, bits of bodies -- turn up. This is a fast-paced and atmospheric novel that takes us all over Oslo and gets us fully invested in the unfortunately-named hero.

Sleep No More (2017) by PD James. A beautiful new collection of 6 short stories by the late crime queen. It's easy to scoff at the publishers for bringing these out 6 at a time, instead of in one go, and always in time for Christmas. But the books are so pretty one can almost forgive them. James was not a great short story writer, and if you read anthologies, you have probably come across some or all of these before. Of note is 'The Murder of Santa Claus', narrated by a hack crime writer who explains that he is 'no H.R.F. Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a P.D. James.' Poor thing. That story is a bit of a satire on golden age crime as James perceived it, as divorced from the horrors and ethical overhauls of international war. I've never agreed with James's hot takes, but she expressed them in a relatively entertaining manner.