RAGNAR JONASSON'S ISLAND

It is 1987. Benedikt thinks he is in love, and has driven up with Katla to her parents' cottage up in Iceland's Westfjords. Everything is going perfect for the young couple, but days later Katla is found dead, and eventually her father is arrested, charged and convicted of her murder. At the same time, CID detective Hulda Hermansdottir is expecting a promotion, but realises quickly although she is the most experienced detective on the force, the job is going to go to Lydur, with less experience but crucially, a man. And it is Lydur who breaks the Westfjords killing.

Ten years later, Benedikt agrees to a reunion with his three best friends from that time, to mark the anniversary of Katla's death. They travel to Ellidaey, one of the uninhabited Westman Islands, with a single holiday cottage atop the high cliffs. Over the weekend, one of the four falls to her death. Hulda is sent to investigate, but it's not until she's back in Reykjavik and the body has been examined that it becomes evident she has been pushed off the cliffs, and murdered. And when the connection between the killings is recognised, Lydur, now her boss, insists on keeping his hands on her investigation. Meanwhile, Hulda is coping with the loss of her daughter, to suicide, and her husband, to a heart attack. She has travelled to the United States, trying to find the father she never knew, an American soldier who never knew he had left a pregnant woman behind in Iceland.

The Island is the second of Ragnar Jonasson's novels featuring Hulda; his 'Hidden Island' series. The first, The Darkness, was a tour de force, with one of the most audacious and moving endings I can recall. This one is a prequel, set some 15 years earlier. It is not necessary to have read the first novel to appreciate this one, and there are no spoilers that would affect your enjoyment of The Darkness. But it is interesting, that having read the first adds a certain depth to Hulda's character, which is useful because, despite the new twists to Hulda's tale, she is not as central to the crime stories as she was in the previous book.

This is not like other Scandinavian crime writers who've gone back to series characters in their earlier days—Mankell with Wallander, Jonasson's fellow Icelander Idridason with Erlendur are good examples—in an effort to write about someone who is, in effect, a new character. Jonasson is, in effect, building his protagonist in reverse; Hulda is a sympathetic character whose virtues as a cop are also her problems as a person, and who has had to battle simply to establish herself as both person and police.

Another of the fascinating angles to Jonasson's writing has been the way his 'Dark Island' series, which preceded the first Hulda novel, reflect his love of the classic whodunit form; he was a translator of Agatha Christie while still a teenager. This book could be looked at as Jonasson's version of And Then There Were None, a murder on an island with a finite number of suspects, and as in Christie its less a police procedural than a character study, though when the policeman realises something about the character, the unknown truth comes out in testimony. He doesn't cheat on the mystery; though the solution becomes fairly evident about two-thirds of the way through. But he brings in secondary plot lines that keep Hulda's investigations intriguing, and, as in the first book, he ends with multiple ironies that strike a note of sadness.

While I tore through the novel, the way I did whodunits when I was younger, I admired the writing, but wondered a bit about the translation, something I hadn't done in the earlier books. When you get cliches, especially if repeated, you wonder if phrases like 'avoided like the plague' or 'trusty car' are equally cliched in their Icelandic versions, or if the easy English equivalent is being used. Since I don't know the answer to that in Icelandic, I can't make a judgement, but it is a question. It is not something that slowed me down as I read this excellent novel, and, knowing Jonasson is moving back even earlier in Hulda's career for the next book (see my Shots interview with him here) I look forward to that one with great anticipation.

THE ISLAND by Ragnar Jonasson

Michael Joseph, £14.99, ISBN 9780718187255

Note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

RAGNAR JONASSON'S WHITE OUT

Just before Christmas, and for the first time in twenty-five years, since she was sent away to relatives in Reykjavik when she was seven, Asta Karadottir has come home, to a lonely house near the lighthouse in Kalfshamarsvik, on the north coast of Iceland. She had reason to stay away; her mother and younger sister Tinna both met their deaths in falls off the cliffs overlooking the sea; it was after Tinna’s death that Asta was sent away. Now she has come back, and two days later she lies dead in the same spot, at the foot of the same cliffs.

Ari Thor Arason gets a call from Tomas, his former mentor on the Siglurfjordur police. Now based in Reykjavik, he’s been assigned the investigation of the death, and has requested Ari Thor as his support. It makes things awkward for Ari Thor, now reconciled with his grilfriend Kristin, and with a baby due in a few weeks. The prospect of spending Christmas apart doesn’t seem a good idea to him, so he brings Kristin along, hoping things will be cleared up swiftly and cleanly.

Of course they won’t be. Ragnar Jonasson was a translator of Agatha Christie into Icelandic, and his Dark Iceland series of Ari Thor mysteries are redolent of the kinds of characters, situations and plots that define Christie. This one is basically a locked-room mystery: four suspects had dinner with Asta the night of her death, all of whom she knew as a child: the now-elderly caretakers, brother and sister Oskar and Thora, the house’s owner, Reynir, whose father was one of Iceland’s wealthiest men and who continues the tradition, and neighbour Arnor, who looks after Reynir’s horses and helps Oskar with the lighthouse. Forensics soon determine that Asta did not jump, but was murdered, and that she’d had sex soon before.

From that set-up Jonasson weaves a tale of past sins coming back to haunt the present, with overtones of ghostly activity. As with Christie it’s not so much a question of clues as elimination, of digging up the motivation that reveals the killer. But what makes the story work so well is that it is really, at heart, about families—not just the problems with Asta’s family (who also worked for Reynir’s father) but Arnor and his wife who have their own difficulties, and of course Tomas, who moved to Reykjavik to save his own marriage, and the ongoing relationship of Ari Thor and Kristin. The reflections are amplified by the crime, but they are also fascinating because of the surface practicality with which Icelanders, and you might say Scandinavians in general, approach matters of the heart.

Part of what made that interesting was that I read the novel, and wrote this, in Iceland,

where you can feel that Nordic tradition, going back to the first ‘courts’ of the Icelandic ‘thing’, where the crimes punished most heavily were incest and infanticide. (Note: the former is not part of the plot). It speaks of isolated people, who keep themselves to themselves, yet are as little immune to the pains and passions as anyone else. Being in country, as it were, also makes clearly some of the fascination readers find with explanations of Icelandic life in general, unique in our Western tradition, and Jonasson does that very well indeed.

The present resolves itself satisfactorily, while the past remains ambiguous (though I prefer to take Asta’s opening memories literally as truth), and Jonasson also builds for the future, as Ari Thor himself, simple, bright and well-meaning, has much to work out. There is something slightly less than cozy about these mysteries (and if you read Jonasson’s brilliant The Darkness you’ll understand why –if not my review of it is here) yet they work because the lives of the people involved are not cozy at all. They are real, and tether the mystery to reality.

Whiteout by Ragnar Jonasson

translated by Quentin Bates

Orenda Books, £8.99 ISBN 9781910633892

MIKE HAMMER'S WILL TO KILL

It's the mid 1960s and it's a somewhat mellower Mike Hammer. Though some things never change for the hard-boiled dicks, especially when they prowl the mean streets down by the waterfront in the early hours of a cold winter morning. Mike is catching a smoke and catching up with his thoughts when a body, or half a body to be precise, drifts past him on a slab of ice. Some men attract trouble, and Mike Hammer has always been one of them. 

But this is a different sort of trouble, and a different sort of story Max Allan Collins has finished working off pages and notes from Mickey Spillane. It turns out the body belongs to a butler, who worked for the Dunbars, a wealthy family up the Hudson near Monticello. And it turns out the late Mr. Dunbar was a friend of Captain Pat Chambers, Mickey's buddy. Dunbar's been dead three years, and his four children all still live on his estate, await an inheritance that won't kick in until they reach 40. When the state police rule the butler's death is ruled accidental, Pat's not so sure, but there's nothing he can do officially. So the man who can do more unofficially goes up to Monticello to look into things on Pat's behalf.

The butler didn't do it, but the fact that it was done to the butler ought to signal you that this is in not a typical Mike Hammer. In fact, it's more like a cozy who-dun-it, with a raft of suspects worthy of Agatha Christie for Mike to sort through, a will whose value would increase as the number of beneficiaries decrease, and soon more bodies are dropping. There are a couple of Hammer set-pieces; the most interesting at a casino, which plays a bit like Bogart as Marlowe at Eddie Mars' place. And though there are only two women to find Mike irresistible (Velda is also back on the scene) and Mike only is able to resist one, it's far less violent and less steamy than it might have been.

In Agatha Christie who dun its, the puzzle revolves around someone who is not who or what they say they are; often these characters are disenfranchised nobility trying to get or sometimes innocently getting their just desserts. Hammer's world isn't quite so predestined as the English, but it will not be a spoiler to say that, as with Christie, the story hinges on people who are not quite what they are supposed to be; sometimes this makes things clearer when Mike figures it out, sometimes it gets figured out for him. And there is a nice little twist at the end, where Hammer's sense of justice rears its head unexpectedly.

As I said, this is a mellower Hammer in some ways. He's more erudite, and actually corrects people with some unlikely facts. The changes in society brought on by the Sixties are just offstage, for now Luckies and Pabst are not quite declasse. Watching the way Max has worked to finish Mickey's work, and had to adjust to Hammer's changing world, I've sometimes questioned things: for me the Hammer with a deep-down rage will always seem the most authentic Mike. But this novel is intriguing precisely because, in the setting of a who-dun-it, a different side of Hammer that makes sense in terms of age and changing times suggests itself. It really seems like the kind of thing Mickey would have come to had he finished his original idea.

The Will To Kill by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Titan Books, £17.99, ISBN 9781783291427

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

CAMILLA LACKBERG'S SCENT OF ALMONDS

Stockholm police detective Martin Molin is headed out to an island, a week before Christmas, to spend a couple of days with his girlfriend Lisette and meet her family. He doesn't feel ready for this, and the gathering does nothing to relax him. Lisette's grandfather Ruben is a self-made millionaire, and is dying. The family gathered round him, two sons, their wives, and four grandchildren are there to suck up to Ruben and jostle for bits of inheritance, all except for Lisette's brother Mattias, who seems to care only for his grandfather with genuine affection, and their shared love of Sherlock Holmes stories.

At dinner the first night Ruben is poisoned, and a storm cuts the party off from contact with the mainland. Molin lumbers into action, interviewing the family members, and discovering webs of intrigue, jealousy, theft, and romance: just what you'd expect in such a setting. And when there is a second killing, he seems overwhelmed by the intransigence of the family and his inability to point to a killer amongst this large locked room.

This is the title story of Camilla Lackberg's collection, in the coziest of cosy styles. It is very much in the fashion of Maria Lang, in fact almost a seasonal inversion of her first novel, which became the first Crimes Of Passion episode Death Of A Loved One. Did it not precede those TV movies by seven years, you'd almost think it was a deliberate attempt to cash-in; as it is though, I see it as conscious hommage. And then there's Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None; Christie spawned a lot of Swedish imitators. But Lackberg's style is far more reticent than Lang's, despite being so much more modern: indeed were it not for the mobile phones that register no bars of signal while the cast is trapped on their island, you might think this was written fifty years earlier.

Lackberg has some interesting situations, none moreso than the relationship between Molin and Lisette. So when it happens that Lisette is also carrying on a periodic affair with her cousin, the revelation is placed so far offstage as to register barely a bump in Molin's plodding psyche. That Lackberg's own husband is named Martin Melin leads me to believe they both must have interesting senses of humour!

The story moves in circles, a series of interviews interspersed with a series of big meals, described lovingly, and endless coffee-pauses for Molin with the caretaker and his wife. All this would be fine were the story itself a thriller—but the dual twists (both murders turn out to be suicides) come about when Molin at the very last moment, just before they board the boat back to the mainland, 'suddenly remembered seeing this done in a Sherlock Holmes movie'. Oh, okay. And the two suicides were depending on someone figuring that out? But as Molin says to Lisette, as they part 'The whole situation has just been so...stressful'. Indeed.

The Scent Of Almonds and other Stories

by Camilla Lackberg, translated by Tiina Nunnally

Harper Collins, £6.99 ISBN 9780007479078

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