Hellfire - Karin Fossum

 

It's been a while since my last Fossum.  This instalment in her Sejer series dates from 2014 but is set ten years earlier.  Two one-parent families prepare for Christmas.  Bonnie and Simon, a care worker and her young son; and Mass and Eddie, a middleaged woman and her twenty-one year-old with mild learning difficulties.  The following summer, an horrific double murder is discovered in an abandoned caravan.  Sejer and Skarre investigate.

Fossum is very much the Ruth Rendell of Nordic Noir.  Her characters' psyches are explored in detail while the Confucian cop goes quietly about his business.  Like Rendell, Fossum never fails to draw me in, whatever her subject matter.  Hellfire is one of her best.

Black Seconds - Karin Fossum

Helga Joner's ten-year old daughter disappears on her way to the local shop. Inspector Sejer therefore starts his investigation as a missing person inquiry. As time passes, and Ida remains missing, the chances of finding her alive diminish.  After a while the child's distinctive yellow bike shows up, undamaged. Some time later the body itself is found, badly damaged but not sexually assaulted, and dressed in a brand new nightgown. Bizarrely, she seems to have been frozen.


There are suspects - in Ida's family and in the local community. Ida's cousin Tomme pranged his car the same night Ida disappeared - are the two events connected? And then there's the local eccentric - the grumpy, monosyllabic village idiot Emil Johannes, who rides a three-wheeler motorbike with a trailer that could easily accommodate a child.


Black Seconds won the prestigious Martin Beck Award in 2002 and it is easy to see why. It sits wholly within the Beck tradition - patient, productive police work and understanding of human frailty - rather than the lurid psychopathy of Jo Nesbo. The scenes in which Sejer questions Emil Johannes are beautifully done and utterly riveting. I'm a big fan of Fossum - many of her other novels are reviewed here - and Black Seconds is one of her best.

He Who Fears the Wolf - Karin Fossum

I have blogged before about how poorly promoted Karin Fossum is in this country. Since Steig Larsson, anyone with so much as a vaguely Scandinavian name has been snapped up by a publisher and launched with a barrage of ads in the Press, heralding the debut of the new Nesbo. Few have made it to a second contract. But here is Fossum, already a successful series writer before the Girl even thought about getting her Dragon Tattoo and - more importantly - all the signature tropes of the best Scandi Noir: deep, dark secrets; focus on the excluded; and gruesome deaths. Yet where, other than Goodreads and here, do you see her mentioned?

This is the second Inspector Konrad Sejer novel, first published in 1997. The cover is as uninspired as ever; I can only assume she somehow upset the art department at Vintage. Inside, however, is the best of her novels that I have so far read, and I am was already a big admirer. All the action takes place on a single day. An old lady is murdered, a bank is robbed, a hostage taken, and a chubby kid from the boy's home reports seeing the local lunatic who has escaped again. Over the course of twelve hours or so, Sejer investigates and indeed solves all. But Fossum gives equal space to the offenders and the relationship that develops between them. I won't say more for fear of giving the final twist away. It is a very good twist, worthy of Nesbo himself.

The Murder of Harriet Krohn - Karin Fossum

There is a trope in Scandinavian noir in which the protagonist appears rarely.  The later works of Hakan Nesser are almost entirely devoid of Inspector Van Veeteren.  Indridason also manages most of his translated Inspector Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli series with very little Erlendur and no Oli whatsoever.

This, it seemed, was going to be the case with The Murder of Harriet Krohn.  Her series investigator, Inspector Konrad Sejer, doesn't appear in person (he is mentioned in the press early on) until page 187.  He then disappears again for a couple of chapters.  I thought that was it.  But I was wrong.  Fossum is by some distance the finest writer of all the Scandi noir lead players, a Norwegian Barbara Vine if you will.  Her interest is the evil that good men do, not simply the restoration of balance through justice.  Here, her interest is the wretched Charlo, who kills to try and break out of the wretched spiral of his life.  He knows perfectly well that he has done wrong.  He is fully conscious that he has a moral debt to pay.  He tries to put his life back together, to become again the good person he once was.  He re-establishes contact with his estranged teenage daughter.  He finds an interest they can share and love together.  He takes on menial labouring work to try and exorcise his guilt.  He even visits the grave of his victim, not to gloat or weep but to try and understand what happened between them.

Fossum goes to great lengths to make us empathise with Charlo, even giving him a crippling disease.  Thus when Sejer finally gets into his stride and questions Charlo our sympathies are equally divided between two fundamentally good men.  This sequence, lasting thirty pages or so, is a magnificent piece of writing, an object lesson on how these things should be done.  There is no trickery, no slight of hand, just diligent, effective questioning from Sejer and Charlo calculating how close he can stick to the truth without confronting the ultimate truth of what he has done.

I was reminded of Crime and Punishment - so strong were the resonances, I cannot believe Fossum did not seed the prompts deliberately.

I've said it before, but I wish she was better published.  Vintage is a great publisher, I look out for Vintage publications - so why is this cover, like all Fossum covers, so feeble?  And why that pathetic font?  Surely the way the author's name is done would sit more comfortably on a children's book.

In the Darkness - Karin Fossum

Karin Fossum is one of the leading lights of Nordic Noir. She has won all the prizes and is up there with Mankell and Nesbo in Scandinavia.  It is such a shame that she is so poorly published in English.  You never find her books in major bookshops and the product itself looks cheap and frankly manky.

In the Darkness dates from 1995 and is ostensibly an Inspector Sejer novel (her other protagonist Skarre hardly features).  In fact Sejer appears to do very little - until everything falls into place at the end and you realise just how clever a book this is.  The final twist came out of nowhere but, for me, was just perfect.  In many ways I was reminded of Nesbo's standalone novel Headhunters, which I've raved about before on this blog (I still haven't plucked up the courage to watch the movie for fear of disappointment).  It's no secret that Nesbo is a Fossum fan - the endorsement on the moon above is, for once, genuine.  Indeed he pays homage in Headhunters to one of the more startling moments here.  I won't go into detail, because the last thing I want to do is give any plot away, but toilets are involved.  Nesbo's cyclical structure, so different from the linear arrangement of the Hole novels, is surely also influenced by In the Darkness.

A magnificent achievement.  My interest in Nordic Noir, which was slipping a bit after a couple of imported duds on TV, is reinvigorated.

Bad Intentions - Karin Fossum

Bad Intentions (2010) is the eighth in Fossum's Inspector Sejer series.  I had previously read the seventh, The Water's Edge (2009) and the standalone novel Broken (2008), both of which I rated highly.  Indeed, Fossum was my personal discovery of the year 2010.  Why is she not featured on this blog as often as other purveyors of Nordic noir?  Because she is seriously badly published in the UK by vintage.  The covers are uninspiring (I mean, just look at it) and they seem to do almost zero marketing.  You never find them in major national bookstores and happening on one in your local library, as I have done for all three aforementioned, is pure fluke.

Fossum, who is Norwegian, writes psychological crime in the manner of Ruth Rendell.  She eschews serial killers and conspiracy.  In this novel we are not sure if there has been a crime at all.  If there has been, we know for sure whodunit, but not exactly what has been done or why.  There is no gore, no startling twists, and yet Fossum holds our attention from the first sentence to the last.  She is a major writer and deserves to be better known.  I mean, the least Vintage could do is give her an English-language website.