SOREN SVEISTRUP'S CHESTNUT MAN

A woman's body is found, missing a hand, one morning outside her suburban Copenhagen house; found after her son rose, made himself breakfast, and went to the neighbours when his mother wasn't there to take him to school. The case is assigned to Naia Thulin, single-mother, youngest detective on the homicide squad, and unhappy possessor of a new partner, Mark Hess, recently returned to Denmark by Interpol, for reasons unexplained but which, given his uncooperative personality, she thinks she can understand. But the murder takes on a different importance when the sole clue, a child's chesnut man left near the corpse, gets connected to the disappearance, a year earlier, of Kristine Hartung, the young daughter of Rosa Hartung, a minister in the Danish cabinet. Now, just at the point Rosa is returning to work, Kristine's fingerprints are found on the chestnut man. The only problem is the man who confessed to Kristine's kidnap and murder is serving his sentence in prison.

The intricacy of The Chestnut Man's set-up is built upon masterly in this gripping twisty thriller from Soren Sveistrup, creator and writer of the ground-breaking Danish crime series The Killing. And there are similarities between that show and this, Sveistrup's first novel. Particularly in the close attention paid to the parents of crime victims, but also in the way that few characters are what or who they appear to be, which is the main device for raising suspicion and keeping the plot twisting away.

There are also some of the familiar Scandinavian tropes--an emphasis on children, on early abuse, on the failures of the state to identify or cope with it. There is the relatively ordinariness of political figures, and the way their own bureaucratic battling is mirrored by other situations: familial and also within the police, and the way family and work impinge on each other is mirrored starkly with Thulin's own situation. As the story opens, Thulin's boss, Nylander, is desperate for more detectives: he blames the growth of new departments, like the one battling cyber-crime. His only consolation is the addition of Hess, a cop no one else seems to want; meanwhile he doesn't know that Thulin has already applied for transfer to cyber-crimes.

I was also struck by the familiarity of the chestnut man motif. The Danish non-confrontational equivalent of conkers, the chetnut men are made of twigs and nuts. The idea of leaving them besides the crime recalls other thrillers, say Jo Nesbo's Snowman--and interestingly it was Sveistrup who wrote the screenplay for the film of Nesbo's novel. It's not just Scandinavian: CJ Tudor's Chalk Man, for example, and I suppose you might trace it back Thomas Harris, but in general the more innocently bizarre the killer's signature, the more chilling the killer's crimes.

The strong point of the novel is the relationship between Thulin and Hess, which progresses slowly and with its own twists, but works best because of the strong contrast in their personalities. There is lmost the sense they are presented as character sketches for actors: leaving some bits to be filled in by interpretation: some of the supporting cast are more fully drawn, but less interesting. Sveistrup runs the story well: the plot moves like that of a series, but never creaks nor barely stretches credulity; the guessing game is fair (and I came close, but no chestnut), and there are the by-now requisite multiple conclusions, which in this case grow progressively more upbeat until the final one appears to set the stage for a sequel. Which ought to be worth waiting for.

The Chestnut Man by Soren Sveistrup
Michael Joseph, £12.99  ISBN 0780241372104

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

BORGEN: BBC4'S SARAH LUND REDUX

The BBC have announced they bought the rights to another Danish TV series, Borgen: you can link to the announcement here. The series will air tonight, as The Killing did on Saturday nights, on BBC4. I'll try to catch it on Iplayer, that wonderful tool which for some reason the BBC cant make compatible with the latest version of Firefox (you can watch, but you can't store, suggest, or favourite).

Without pre-judging Borgen, the premise is interesting in a number of ways--the most obvious being that the most compelling part of the second series of The Killing, and almost the most compelling part of the first, was the political drama. In fact, in series two, it was as if the battle within the cabinet were part of a separate show, and though Nicholas Bro may have occasionally over-egged the pudding, his befuddled battle with the 'establishment' and the fights within the ruling coalition, were both extremely well done.

The Danes may be producing the best cinema in Europe right now, and their television seems equally strong. Not that it matters, because Borgen will be something the BBC can market to Sarah Lund fans because it's about a female political leader whose party takes power in a coalition which she heads as Prime Minister. When you consider, despite the strength of Sofie Grabol's performance, how the British response inevitably concentrated on her sweater, you can almost predict that whatever Sidse Babette Knudsen (another fine actress, as anyone who saw the Oscar-nominated After The Wedding can attest) wears is likely to do the same.

But there is far more to Danish film than sweaters and actresses--the country has such talent that even the Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was directed and written by Danes (and if you're looking for a fine political thriller to prepare for Borgen try The King's Game, written by the same pair of writers, Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, and directed by Arcel). So check it out tonight, or on IPlayer, or, if you don't have either, you can buy the Danish DVD with English subtitles on Amazon.

ASA LARSSON'S UNTIL THY WRATH BE PAST

The thaw is a crucial part of life above the Arctic Circle, and it is a dangerous life, so when the body of a young woman surfaces in a river, it is going to be written off as an accident or suicide until prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson has a vision in a dream, and realises she is dealing with a case of murder.

Asa Larsson's first two novels both won awards in Sweden, so it is interesting to see the chances she takes and different directions she pursues in her third. Martinsson is a compelling lead character, drawn to life in Kiruna (full disclosure here: my grandfather came from a nearby town, and I have never really felt the urge to settle there) despite the prospect of success in Stockholm, That Wilma Persson (a nice choice of name), the dead girl, participates in the story as a ghost, isn't new; it's a device that's won awards for mainstream writers in the English-speaking world, and ghosts have factored in Johan Theorin's work (set in Oland, oddly enough, because it's the other end of Sweden and it's where my grandmother was born). As a devide it frees Larsson from having to worry about making her book into a 'whodunit', but what makes it really effecticve here is the idea that a character as rational and driven as Martinsson, trying to come to grips with the irrational love she has for the area where she was born, it becomes particularly effective as part of the draw of the north.

Martinsson's romantic relationship with her former boss forms one of the one of the sub-plots here, and Larsson contrasts his handsome charm and city slickness with the more homey virtues of one of the male characters. The other big contrast is between Martinsson and Anna-Maria Mella, the police inspector, who has her own problems with men, including her police partner, which were detailed in the previous novel. It's no coincidence that Scandinavian work examines the pressure of work on the domestic lives of women (think about the Danish TV drama The Killing as a recent example, though it factored in the Martin Beck series 50 years ago) because they have long been established as equal in the workplace, yet the inbuilt prejudices are brought out most strongly in this extreme rural setting. Which leads to Until Thy Wrath Be Past's other real strength: its setting.

By setting I don't mean, in this case, the landscape or weather of the north, although Larsson's descriptions are often telling. Rather, it is the rural background; this novel could be transposed into the American south say, fitting somewhere into the territory of Erskine Caldwell or James Dickey's Deliverance, or perhaps more closely into the Maine of Stephen King, John Connolly or Michael Kimball. It is the people, and in the Krekula brothers Larsson creates two frighteningly vivid villains who are recognisable to anyone who has spent time in those rural areas with their undercurrent of repressed violence. Although Hjalmar, the oversized adolescent, a violent savant, seems familiar from other stories, but he is drawn with depth and sympathy, while the viciousness of Tore, the brother in control, is palpable, and made more so when it is unleashed in a very modest way, on Anna-Maria.

It's also fascinating, because the brothers are trying to protect a secret which has remained hidden for many decades, and which relates back to a time of what in Sweden was divisive (I'm thinking of how America's Southern gothics refer back to the Civil War). In the far north of Sweden, during World War II, the plight of the 'plucky Finns' was very close at hand, as were the Nazi trains moving men and materiel between Finland and Norway. The changing allies in the years between 1939 and 41 made choosing sides difficult all over the world, but the quiet role many Swedes (and indeed some Norwegians)and their businesses enjoyed while supporting the Germans has been a feature of many books, not least Asa Larsson's namesake Steig. That it should remain a somewhat contentious issue seven decades later speaks to its power.

Until Thy Wrath is a many-layered novel, deftly written and as best I can tell, well-translated by Laurie Thompson. And if the ghost story is indeed resolved, and the past revealed, it leaves enough of Martinsson's life unsettled to make readers look forward to the next one.

Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson
Maclehose Press, £12.99, ISBN 9780857050724
NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time
www.crimetime.co.uk

THE KILLING REACHES THE END OF THE BBC 4 LINE:

In the end, The Killing turned out to be a victim of its own success, and to a lesser extent, its own newly-found hype, as it leapt from the ghetto of BBC4 to mainstream attention (though most of the MSM seemed to be incapable of getting past the same tired points--yes the sweater is an unlikely fashion icon, and at £280 in London, it's unlikely to ever be one here!).

The problem for episode 20 was that the strength of the show was the slow build, the careful distribution of red herrings, and most importantly the combination of political intrigue behind the scenes on one hand, and the breakdown of families and relationships as a result of the crime on the other. But in episode 20, the show had to revert to what, at heart, it was...a whodunit, and reveal who did it, and why, and thus risk tearing down much of the latticework of plot and character that had been developed so carefully.

Because the revelation that Vagn, an almost too-obvious suspect for most of the programme, was indeed the killer raised far more questions than it answered. The most basic one being was he an incredibly clever serial killer, as Sara's boyfriend Bengt suggested (and she conveniently ignored for far too long) --as you would expect from someone who could kill a cop, hang a fellow mover in a Russia coaster's cabin, and indeed leave no DNA traces anywhere while murdering Nanna--or was he someone who simply killed Nanna out of misplaced family loyalty and surrender to an impulse? Unless you believe that his use of Theis for self-destruction was actually part of that fiendishly clever guy.

Similarly, a political subplot which sees civil servants murdered, evidence withheld or destroyed, policewomen stalked, and one party leader killed provides us with few answers. Who was calling the shots to keep Lund's investigation contained? Who was keeping her under watch? We are left to conclude that this is the way business is handled; Brix's exhortations to her not to pursue the ivestigation further (persumably lest she discover Vagn was a major-league serial killer and thus embarrass the police even further) are just business as usual. This is effective, if possibly far too subtly done to register with most of the audience.

These two strands comes together in the question of the car in which Nanna was found. It seemed to yoyo back and forth between people who kept spotting it and finding the keys in the ignition, as if it were a Copenhagen version of a Boris bike, but assuming Vagn found the keys and from them the car, how he managed to leave no traces is beyond me. Similarly, the chain which was found on Nanna: where did it come from? Was it a momento of his first killing? Why didn't Vagn find it? Was it something he gave Hanna when she was younger? Why didn't he find her passport? How did he know where to find the incriminating photo of him with Mette, and why didn't he remove it earlier? The story reveals itself to turn on the most improbably creaky coincidences, clues disappear (remember the ether which was used to drug Nanna?), and we have to hope that Vagn was wearing a mask when he shot Mayer, because if he wasn't it would have been a lot easier for Mayer to croak 'Vagn' than 'Sara 84' as a clue to his killer's identity.

This is what happens when a taut drama turns into an Agatha Christie novel, if only in episode 19. Otherwise, the twin engines driving the show stayed on course throughout. Was Troels a 'different' sort of politician, or was he corrupt, or better, could he be corrupted as Bremer said he would be? And could Sara Lund remain fixated on the killing, and ignore the rest of her life crumbling around her. The more obsessive she became, the more she alienated her boyfriend, her son, her horrible mother, the more popular she became, and she was true to herself in the end.

In fact, one of the most fascinating things about The Killing is the way in which each of the three main female characters is so self-contained. Sara's obsession with solving the crime subsumes all her relationships. Rie appears to believe she can mold Troels in the image she wants (of her politician father, perhaps) and doesn't credit him with either emotions (a weakness) or lack of them (a strength). And Pernille, sometimes Lady Macbeth, sometimes sphinx, fails to communicate her grief to Theis, thus initially prompting revenge and i the end being unable to stop Vagn from getting Theis' revenge. All three women, operating from their own motives, lose their relationships.

And in the end, that's what the show was about, and in that sense the English mis-translation of the title into The Killing may actually be better than 'The Crime', which is the literal translation from Danish. Because the point of the show is that the crime actually kills far more than just Nanna: it kills Lund's relationships, it kills Theis' family, and it kills Troels' relationship with Rie. That is really what the show was about, and it was presented with great precision--not only the way in which it was shot, but the way characters' make up changed from episode to episode to reveal their many sides, and of course in the way the series allowed actors to really work their roles. Apparently, BBC4 paid only $1,000 per episode for this excellence...one imagines series two of the show is going to cost them far more. And maybe Rie makes her comeback. I miss the show already...

A VERY DANISH KILLING

BBC4 has now reached the halfway point, ten episodes, of the exceptional Danish crime drama The Killing. It follows in the wake of the Scandinavian crime boom, the Swedish and British Wallander shows, the Millennium films, and the best-sellers by Mankell, Larsson, Jo Nesbo, and others. But in fact, it's already nearly four years old, first shown in Denmark in 2007, and while it shares many of the characteristics of its Nordic peers, The Killing has a lot more in common with a number of Danish films, and some other European series, than with that new wave of Scandicrime.

A high-school girl is found raped, tortured, and murdered, in a car sunk into a lake outside Copenhagen. The car belongs to the city's leading opposition political party, who are beginning a reform campaign in the mayoral elections. The case is picked up by detective Sarah Lund, on her last day on the job before moving with her son to Sweden, to live with her boyfriend and work in the Swedish police. It's a simple story, which begins to take on multiple layers of complexity and emotion.

Of course the first thing that stands out is the format, 20 one-hour episodes, like a Bizzaro version of 24, which allows those layers to develop. What this amount of time provides is the opportunity to approach the one thing which is hardest to do in the television format: inner feelings, and also allows the programme to deal in the 'real-time', or longer term, effects of the crime. Which by the way is what the Danish title, Forbrydelsen, means, not 'the killing'. This allows one of the three main strands of the narrative, the story of the family of the teenaged girl who's been killed, to carry equal weight with the other two: the search for the killer, and the effect of the crime on the politics of Copenhagen, especially as the reform mayoral candidate, Troels Hartmann, becomes a suspect.

The police procedural part conforms best to the nordic crime mould, especially since Lund (Sofie Grabol) is a good cop, both thorough and instinctive. Grabol is able to appear both inspired and overwhelmed at the same time, a rare talent in an actor, and is completely believeable as a cop, even when wlaking around in that Faroese sweater that apparently has become a fashion item in Demark. When the show begins, she is partnered with her successor, Jan Meyer, who appears to be neither of those things. She is also obsessive, to the detriment of her family; she is Martin Beck or Wallander. What is interesting is the way each relationship in each strand in the film is put under pressure: Lund's with her Swedish police psychologist boyfriend (as well as her new work partner); the victim's parents with each other in their grief, and Hartmann's with his girlfriend and campaign manager Rie.

The format makes it an actors' series, and the actors do not disappoint. They have the advantage of looking real, never like actors playing roles, which was the biggest fault with the BBC Wallander. Bjarne Henricksen and Ann Elenora Jorgensen, as the parents of the murdered Anna Birk Larsen, are spectacularly believable, which makes both her grief, and his ill-judged vengeance in the early episodes, powerfully moving. Crime dramas don't often stay focused on the families of the lost, unless revenge is the reason, and in this case the internal family crisis is every bit as much of a thriller as the hunt for the killer. There is also the subtle parallel with the single-mother status of Lund, whose son does not want to move to Sweden, whose ex has just reappeared on the scene, and whose mother appears to consider her a totally unfit parent.

The Swedish boyfriend was a figure of some humour, if I'm picking up on the use of accents—the precise formality of Swedish against the sing-songy, clipped words and slurred contractions of Danish. But his analysis of the killings, that they are the work of someone who has killed before, and who has planned carefully, is what provides the real depth of the second-half of the story, or at least will when Lund finally gets around to acting on the ideas (as of episode 12 she has still ignored what is presuemably evidence of other murders by the same killer).

It is also what makes Lars Mikkelsen's performance as Hartmann so stunning, because he has established himself as a decent man, as a cunning manipulator, as a put-upon victim and as a viable suspect, all in the space of four episodes. Mikkelsen is probably the most, if not only, familiar face to most English viewers, from Flame and Citron, Island of Lost Souls, or The Kings Game (all of which I reviewed, from the London Film Festival, for Crime Time) and in fact it is as if he has stepped out of The King's Game, a seriously over-looked political thriller. Because politics lies at the heart of everything the Hartmann does, and, we suspect, everything that is happening to him. In that, his relationship with Rie (played by Marie Askehave with some glamour, which in the context makes her immediately suspicious) is perfect: she is a political insider, her father is a power-broker, her glamour suggests the lack of ideals which Hartmann professes, but may psychopathically be betraying.

It's a rich mixture, whose intelligence makes it compelling viewing. The Killing appears to be gaining the kind of word of mouth traction that channels like BBC4 are supposed to provide. In much the same way as the Swedish Wallander and the exceptional first series of the French Spiral, it proves that there are all sorts of approaches to the crime genre, and that many of old formulae which have carried British TV for so long are no longer automatically 'the best TV in the world' as I've heard echoed for decades by people who appear ever to have seen a foreign show unless it were American. And of course, speaking of America, there have already been comparisons made to The Wire, but The Killing is a very different thing. Yes, both shows essay a novelistic approach, but the means are different, the formats are different, the societies are different, and the portrayals of corruption are different; it is less endemic in The Killing, as if the society still harbours hope behind its political corruptions. In The Wire, the killings were part of a more total breakdown. In The Killing, it may be only the suggestion of the fissures starting to show.

This article will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)