MARK BILLINGHAM'S CRY BABY

Cry Baby is Mark Billingham’s twentieth novel, and the seventeenth featuring Tom Thorne. This makes me feel old, because I still recall vividly the impact Sleepyhead made back in 2001, and he had amply delivered on the promise of that novel. I’ve been lucky enough to work with the man some might dub lazily The King Of North London Noir, but I think it’s a telling and indeed brilliant stroke that Billingham has chosen this landmark book to be a prequel to the Thorne series.

Set in 1996, Thorne is a DS, and still reeling from the effects of an earlier case where he didn’t follow or trust fully his instincts. Now he finds himself caught up in the abduction of a child, a child whose father is a career criminal currently in prison, and a case on which the force is under extreme pressure to get a result, and quickly. So although Thorne wants to use and trust his instincts, his commander doesn’t agree, and doesn’t trust him.

This uncertainty is part of what makes the story work so well. There are suspects, false leads and unexpected discoveries. There are leaks to the tabloid press which work against solving the case. And there is throughout the self-questioning of Thorne as he encounters a mother faced with the greatest loss imaginable, and her friend, who was looking after the boy and her son when, just for an instant, she missed them. The contrast of the two women, unlikely friends whom tragic loss separates, is part of the beauty of the story: Billingham is excellent with character and with setting, the contrast of their lives is not just that one woman lives in a council flat with her husband in stir, and the other in a nicer part of North London, with her divorced husband father out, but the way in which their statuses drive them apart. The subtleties of distinction have always been the meat of Billingham’s books, he has the detective’s eye.

Which is where Thorne is different from many of the other detectives with whom he is linked, some of whom influenced Mark when he started writing. The instinct which Thorne felt in his previous case is a sign that, like say, Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck, he is a detective, by nature; it defines him above any other human qualities. But unlike Beck, he is, or wants to be, a more ‘normal’ person outside the job, always one of the key dilemmas detectives in police procedurals often face. Some, like John Harvey’s Resnick or Henning Mankell’s Wallender, appear to succeed; others like Marlowe or Graham Hurley’s Joe Farady battle throughout their series, with different ends. I find it interesting that Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason (Erlendur) brought their detectives to a recognisable end, then began prequel series with them as cops on the beat.

For Billingham, this taking Thorne back to 1996 is case specific, and as such it works brilliantly to reveal Thorne’s inner core. As a story on its own, it delivers too; with an unexpected twist at the end which casts a chilling shadow over the story, and a brief coda set in the present which reflects perfectly on Thorne’s self, as both person and detective.

One you ought to read.

Cry Baby by Mark Billingham Little Brown £20 ISBN 9781408712412
This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

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)

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S SHADOW KILLER

It is Rekyjavik, in the summer of 1941, after what one character calls 'the British invasion' of the island, and the Brits are in the process of handing over occupation of the strategic country to the Americans, who although still neutral, need to protect their convoys. When a traveling salesman is found shot dead in his flat, Iceland's only homicide detective, Flovent, is teamed up with a Canadian military policeman, Thorson, whose parents were Icelandic and who speaks the language. Thorson is necessary because the victim has been killed with a bullet from a Colt automatic, which means the killer very well could be an American soldier.

The Shadow Killer is the second in Indridason's 'Rekyjavik Wartime' series. It takes place before the first, The Shadow District, which began with a crime in the present day and flashed back to another murder which Flovent and Thorson investigated. This book shows how the two were brought together, and also shows the transition in Icelandic society, which was such an important theme in his Erlandur novels, also coming together with the influx of British and especially American soldiers. In such an homogenous, inward society, this impact, on social norms as well as economic life, was immense.

These changes have been part of most of the very best of Scandinavian crime fiction, going right back to Sjovall and Wahloo's Martin Beck: how these small, structured societies have adapted to the changing modern world. Indridason's first book, Jar City (aka Tainted Blood) was specifically linked to the unusual genetic 'purity' of Iceland, and with this series set some eight decades ago, he has a smaller, more distinct petri dish to play on his themes of Icelandic society under the pressure of change. And because it's wartime. it also allows him to revisit another recurring theme in Scandinavian crime: the ambivalent record of the Nordic countries during World War II, during which Noway and Denmark were occupied by the Nazis, Iceland by the Allies, Finland fought the Russians, and the Swedes stayed neutral. This legacy does not disappear: it played a part in one of the Rebecka Martinson films recently aired on British TV.

But the murder might be a simple case of jealousy, as the dead man's girlfriend was playing around with soldiers while he was away on his selling trips, and had just moved out with a British soldier while he was gone. Neat as such a theory would be, there are shadows hanging over the investigation, and German-supporting Icelanders popping up. With Thorson and Flovent having to move between both American intelligence and the British, as well as understand Icelandic mores, the mystery becomes more and more complicated, yet its solving may be more complicated than the mystery itself.

Indridason has produced a multi-layered thriller that delves delicately, almost discreetly, into its characters. He writes with tremendous feel for them, and uses action to let those character reveal themselves. It's a mistake for Brits to label the likes of Flovent or Thorson 'depressive detectives': they are people, and that realisation has always been what makes the best Scandianvian crime fiction work so well. That it is used in such a complicated historical setting marks yet again just how talented this Icelandic novelist is.

The Shadow Killer by Arnaldur Indridason
Harvill Secker, £14.99 ISBN 9781911215073

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S SHADOW DISTRICT

When the body of a woman is discovered in wartime Reykjavik's 'shadow district', suspicion falls on American soldiers, who have brought changes to the social life of the Icelandic capital. So the investigation is handled in tandem, by an Iceland cop, Flovent, and an American MP named Thorson, a Canadian solider seconded to the Americans because he actually speaks Icelandic. Murder investigation is literally a new thing for the Icelandic police, and they are still feeling their way around an investigation; Thorson, of course, is a soldier not a detective.

In modern Reykavik, a 90 year old man is found dead in his bed. A few days later, when an autopsy reveals he was suffocated, and the police investigate, all they find are some cuttings from that murder case in World War II. At which point Konrad, a retired police detective, is asked by his former colleague Marta to, unofficially, take a look.

The underlying theme behind Arnaldur Indridason's novels, explicit in some like his first in English, Jar City, has always been the uneasy conflict between traditional Iceland, a society sealed almost hermetically for centuries, and modern Iceland. His detective Erlendur loves to eat horse head; his colleague Sigurdur Oli loves all things American. Indridason wrote a stand-alone contemporary thriller involving Americans and Nazi bomber lost in 1945; the cold war figures in Draining Lake. World War II was the catalyst for this change, and that is the engine which powers this exceptional story, as its two strands grow closer and intertwine. And the connections are not what might at first appear to be.

The Shadow District takes us back to a society that seems more like Ibsen, if not Dickens, than the modern Iceland in which Erlendur worked, and it's significant that Konrad is a retired cop, someone who still has a foot in the past. It's not even that he is a typical Scandi 'depressive detective' the way Erlendur was so brilliantly drawn. He's a quiet old man, trying to connect the past and the present. There's more than a hint of Conrad too in the way the story plays out, as it very quietly becomes more and more dark, with twists and shocks, as well as the sadness of the years that passed between crime and punishment. Indridson is easily the finest of the contemporary Nordic crime writers, and though the label 'Nordic Noir' is slapped on anything written north of Schleswig-Holstein, this comes closer than most to living up to it. At any rate, it's one of the finest crime novels of this or any year.

The Shadow District by Arnaldur Indridson

Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781911215059

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

RAGNAR JONASSON'S SNOW BLIND

Ari Thor Arason is a trainee policeman who on an impulse accepts a posting in Siglufjordur, in the far north of Iceland. He leaves his medical student girlfriend behind in Reykjavik, and arrives in the small and isolated village, once busy with the fishing industry but now just a sleepy bywater, where he is told 'nothing ever happens'. Of course, within weeks there are two corpses – one a famous writer found dead at the foot of the stairs of the local theatre on the eve of an amateur production, the other a woman living with the man playing the lead in that production, discovered almost naked, bleeding red into the newly-fallen snow.

Ragnar Jonasson's novel is very much a traditional murder mystery, closer to Yrsa Sigurdardottir than Arnaldur Indridason, which gains much from the isolated setting, in which a whole town is trapped, in effect, by the snow. Amateur dramatics and murder in an isolated setting make it sound very Agatha Christie, but as with Sigurdardottir it's the nature of the people in their isolated society, a world of extremes of light and darkness, that perhaps makes difficult the shadings of gray. It's a tangled web, with each character's back story suggesting more knots, and the past is woven deeply into it: thefts and murders, abuses and illicit loves: sometimes it seems as if no one in this Icelandic milieu possesses a life free of serious damage. And that includes Ari Thor, whose relationship with his girlfriend seems unlikely to survive the great distance, both real and metaphoric, between them.

Ari Thor is an oddly unfinished character, which may suit his relatively naiveté, but it stands in sharp contrast to the more telling bits of exposition the various suspects and victims receive. There's a fascinating dynamic between him and his boss, Tomas, whose live and let live attitude sometimes seems to take on a more sinister connotation, and sometimes seems almost comic: casting him in the film version is an amusing exercise.

In some ways, because Ari Thor 'solves' both deaths, but doesn't get a full measure of justice, this becomes the story of his adjustment to a world much different from the 'big city' of Reykjavik; an adjustment which was at the heart of Indridason's Erlendur series too. The novel's end leaves that story unfinished....

Snow Blind by Ragnar Jonasson

translated by Quentin Bates

Orenda Books £8.99 ISBN 9781910633038

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S REYKJAVIK NIGHTS

After the haunting brilliance of last year's Strange Shores (see my glowing review of it here), we thought we had seen the last of Erlendur, and one of the very best Nordic detective series. But Arnaldur Indridason has brought Erlendur back, albeit with a twist. Reykjavik Nights is a prequel, apparently the first in a series approaching the detective's early years on the police force.

It's a daring move (though it worked for Star Wars) because Reykjavik Nights is a book that works on two levels, but far more successfully for those who've followed the series already. If you're a reader new to Erlendur, this is simply a novel about a dogged, lonely policeman driven to keep poking at the corners of a seemingly inconsequential accidental drowning of a homeless drunk. But he was a drunk Erlendur had encountered, and his curiosity has to be satisfied. New readers might find it a little slow, because the story builds at Erlendur's own pace, and they may wonder too about the outward dullness of the character, and his social awkwardness. And they may not understand that the story is set in the Icelandic past, in a country not yet as 'modernised' as it is today.

But readers who know Erlendur will spot the differences in the two Icelands. More importantly, when they read about the young Erlendur, they will see him in light of the character they know, and they will watch the seeds of that man being planted, and in some cases starting to sprout. There will be moments when those readers may, like I did, wish a little prescience into the young Erlendur, so his life might turn out differently. Of course, that would take away the fascinating character who made the series so compelling, and as Indridason is reminding us, the smaller decisions we make early cannot be undone, and the reasons we make them are already embedded in our characters as much as they shape the characters we become.

I found Reykjavik Nights compelling, a very knowing piece of perfectly pitched writing. I am tempted to recommend that new readers go back and work their way through the series before tackling this prequel, but I suspect that, if they move on, they will experience a similar frisson of knowledge about Erlendur, only from the other side of the picture. And it's the picture of one of the most compelling detectives anyone has written, anywhere.

Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason

Harvill Secker, £16.99 ISBN9781846558122

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

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S OPERATION NAPOLEON

On the surface, the glacial surface, Operation Napoleon is very different from the Erlendur novels which have been so successful for Arnaludur Indridason. It's a fast-moving thriller, about a Nazi bomber lost in an Icelandic storm in 1945, which the Natnajoekull glacier gives back in 1999. And it's an airplane that the US wants desperately to retrieve, and retrieve in absolute secrecy.

Indridason handles the thriller neatly, building the plot elements slowly, with the same misdirection thrown out by the authorities—the thriller element, will the Americans get the plane, and more important get away with what they do to protect their secrecy, is well done, but the real thrill is in the mystery, as we weave our way through the misdirections thrown out by the authorities.

But the real story is the struggle of a young woman, an Icelandic bureaucrat called only Kristin, to find out what has happened to her brother, leading a rescue party, who stumbled across the recovery operation, phoned her, and was tortured and left for dead. And that struggle illuminates, in stark detail, some of the differences between the Icelandic and America character, in the wake of the whole debate about Iceland's role as a key point in the military web of the USA. It is a case of simple versus complicated, nuanced against simple, straight-forward against very crooked indeed. And it's one Indridason obviously relishes.

He stacks the deck somewhat, in a playful way that for me undercut the suspense. The two intelligence agents chasing Kristin are called Ripley and Bateman, who are of course two of American fiction's most memorable sociopaths. Which makes a comment, in its way. The original commander, trying to recover the plane back in the Forties, is called Miller, which suggests the simplicity of the so-called 'greatest generation'; and the two Icelandic brothers who originally witnessed the crash seem to share some values. While his replacement in 1999 has a Lithuanian name, Vytautus Carr, which kept me thinking of Red October, while the man he puts in charge on the ground is called Ratoff, which seems a bit of overkill.

If the secret, once revealed, is a little anti-climactic, and somewhat unconvincing (it all happened, obviously, despite the crash) it's an audacious plot that reflects back on the roots of our modern malaise; perhaps the greatest generation weren't all so great after all. It's impressive to see Indridason turn from the slow build of tone in the Erlendur series to something far more staccato, and do it so well.

Operation Napoleon by Arnauldur Indridason

translated by Victoria Cribb

Vintage, £7.99, ISBN 9780099535638

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S STRANGE SHORES

With all the verbiage expended on so-called 'depressive detectives' from Scandinavia, its often overlooked that the so-called depression of everyone from Martin Beck to Harry Hole is neither exclusively Scandinavian, nor is it firmly in some sort of Nordic tradition. Indeed, part of the appeal of this strand in detective fiction has been the way it sheds light on the roles of individuals within societies who have watched the balance between personal responsibility and societal responsibility shift, with crime often the result.

But the traditional sort of Nordic depression, something different from Germanic angst, was founded on the basic idea of the individual battling alone in the dark and cold world. It is what we hear in the music of Jan Garbarek, it is what we found in Ingmar Bergman, those of us old enough to have been entranced by each successive film questioning our place in the universe, not just society.

This is what I have found in Arnaldur Indridason, and perhaps more than any of the current crop of crime writers from the North, his Erlendur is a throwback to that kind of Scandinavian world. And to my mind, Strange Shores is a detective novel Bergman could have felt very much at home filming. I'd been wondering about Erlendur's fate as his colleagues worried about his car spotted on the eastern Icelandic wilderness, and masterfully, Indridason has traced his footsteps.

As always, Erlendur is searching for some clue about his childhood, about the disappearance, and presumed death, of his younger brother when they got lost in a sudden storm. His almost morbid interest in other disappearances is piqued by the story of a young woman, Matthildur, who disappeared in a storm on the same night 60 British soliders went lost in the Eskifjordur valley. Her ghost was said to haunt her house, and to have moaned when her husband Jakob, killed by another storm while fishing, was buried.

The story is simple. Erlendur goes back and forth among the older people of the area, those who remember Matthildur and Jakob, prodding and poking them to turn over buried bits of the past. Staying in the now-derelict cottage where he lived as boy, and where his brother disappeared, and getting colder every night, he moves almost relentlessly, with the quiet fervour of a man seeking to know what is ultimately unknowable.

Much of Scandinavian crime fiction is about changing societies, and Erlendur has always stood for the older style of life, even in Iceland, the most remote of those nations. But here the story is all about the past, all about the grave things that can be hidden in even the smallest, most tightly knit, communities. It is about the basic drives to find meaning from life, when life is harsh and death a constant presence. Erlendur will 'solve' the mystery of Matthildur, and he will discover something about his brother, and remember more about himself. The ending, if inevitable, is written with an absolutely deft and honest touch—avoiding the melodramatic or romantic. It is for Erlendur the culmination of his life, or anyone's, and it resonates in the reader's heart long after the book is done.

Strange Shores by Arnaldur Indridason

Harvill Secker, £12.99, ISBN 9781846557118

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

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S BLACK SKIES

It's been a busy couple of weeks for the Reykjavik police, while Arnaldur Indridason's detective Erlendur has been completely out of touch while on holiday in the lonely eastern part of island where he grew up. The compression of time in published fiction means that while readers wait and wonder what has happened to the moody Erlendur, Indiridason has now written two novels, each starring one of Erlendur's supporting cast. In the previous one, Outrage, Elinborg took centre stage, and as I wrote at the time (you can link to that here), her dilemmas, and the case, encapsulated Indridason's recurring theme of conflict between the older traditional Icelandic life, and the new.

Black Skies, which features Sigurdur Oli, is very much rooted in the new Iceland, the boom country which famously went bust in a perfect foreshadowing of the global economic crisis. Oli himself is very much entrenched in a new Icelandic identity: he spends most of his time aping all things American, especially sport. In my own identity as an American sportscaster I began wondering if Oli's TV in Iceland, or his computer, actually could pick up my commentary on Channel 4, or Five, or Eurosport. Although Oli has disdain for most things Icelandic, in another sense, in his aloof loneliness, he seems a much more traditional figure: substitute hamburgers for horses' heads and he's as shut-off as Erlendur.

But he's dragged into a very modern-seeming case when a friend asks him to do a favour for his sister's wife and her husband, who are being blackmailed with photos taken while experimenting with wife-swapping. When Oli goes to visit the woman blackmailer, he finds she has literally just been murdered, and though he can't chase the baseball-bat killer, his dogged pursuit winds up uncovering other crimes, a possible second murder, and a number of small betrayals of his trust. Meanwhile, one of Erlendur's informants has supplied him with a small bit of film depicting his own abuse as a child, and he is in the process of extracting revenge on his abuser.

As the first case expands, Oli finds himself in almost over his head with the world of fast-moving high-finance, looking on with disdain at the conspicuous consumption which seems to be fuelling it. He's also forced to face the breakdown of his own relationship, and re-examine the way he saw the divorce of his own parents. That story acts as a parallel of sorts to the story of Andres, the abused child, and yet again provides the contrast with the old: Andres' only happy times was when he was taken from his mother and raised briefly on a farm, away from the 'modern' Iceland.

Oli's doggedness finally solves the murder, which turns out to be unconnected with the larger issues of money-laundering and speculating, and the possible second murder, another out in the old Icelandic wilderness, which may have done the killing itself. And Anndres' story resolves itself too, with a touching ending that acts as a coda to both stories, reminding us that beneath the trappings of our lives, how basic the needs of human existence really are.

Oli makes the perfect protagonist, in a sense, because he doesn't mull through these issues himself, as Erlendur would (Erlendur actually strikes me as being perhaps closer to John Harvey's Resnick, or Graham Hurley's Faraday than his Swedish forebears). This means the reader is free to make the connections and draw the conclusions for himself. This is why I think Black Skies is one of, if not the best, of Indridason's books. And, of course, we still don't know what's happened to Erlendur.

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason

Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781846555817

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

KORAMAKUR AND WAHLBERG'S CONTRABAND

In Contraband, Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a smuggler who was the best in the business, but has now given up the family trade (his father was a smuggling legend, now in prison) and gone legit with a home security business and a wife Kate (played by Kate Beckinsale, with the names the same so she wouldn't miss her cues) and two cute kids. He's also got a dumbnuts brother-in-law who has to dump a shipment of cocaine he's smuggling, and now has the bad guys coming after him. Unless Farraday agrees to come out of retirement and make one last run to Panama.

Stop me if you've all this before. You could hardly not, because there is very little in Contraband that isn't well-worn, including a wholesale rip-off of Once Upon A Time In America that is so unimaginative it needs to be called 'hommage'. But this shouldn't be surprising, because the film is itself a remake of an Icelandic movie directed by Oskar Jonasson and co-written by him and the crime novelist Arnauldur Indridason. What makes it interesting is that the Icelandic version, 'Reykjavik-Rotterdam', starred Baltasar Kormakur (director of the Indridason adaptation Jar City, as well as 101 Reykjavik), as a far less-glamorous smuggler, and it's Kormakur who directs this film, and directs it well.

Kormakur is excellent at cross-cutting between stories to emphasise both suspense and parallel sturctures, and visually he's good at finding establishing and transition shots, particularly of the highways and lights of New Orleans and the canals and backstreets of Panama, that play on what's happening in the story. Which needs some playing, because the story is where the main problems lie, as it gets more and more complicated, with Farraday winding up smuggling counterfeit money, cocaine, and a Jackson Pollock. Part of it is that it is, shall we say, playing homage to different parts of the genre at the same time: sometimes taut caper movie, sometimes family crime drama, sometimes claustrophic on-ship mystery, sometimes comic thriller. In the mix, a few things get lost, like logic: for example, why would the captain who dislikes and is suspicious of Farraday allow him free reign of the ship, particularly when it has trouble in the canal. And why, after getting a tip of what he is smuggling, would he not simply lock him in his cabin, rather than giving him a few hours to take care of business. We don't see how Farraday does that, but when we see the results we know it had to have been a complicated process. Similarly, it's hard to believe that in the denouement someone, especially the ship's obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness Captain Camp, (really, and he's played by JK Simmons) wouldn't simply give Farraday up. It's also really obvious from the start that Farraday's best friend (Ben Foster) is setting him up--perhaps Foster is just too creepy to be believed as a hero?

The cast in general is good: highlights are very indulgent bad guy turns from Diego Luna and Giovanni Ribisi as bad guys. Ribisi, interestingly, is the only one of the major actors who tries to put on a New Orleans accent: one of the anomalies of Hollywood's New Orleans is that the city is filled with nasty southern gentlemen, redneck crackers, Cajuns, and blacks who all speak with the drawl, but the stars, particularly Wahlberg never do (think of Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy or Nicholas Cage in Bad Lieutenant). Sometimes it's as if the slums of New Orleans were Southie in Boston, and then David O'Hara wanders in from a Scottish gangster film. It's good to see a part for Lukas (Witness) Haas, and there is Shannon Maris, a native New Orleans actress, in a small role playing straightperson to Wahlberg.

The highlight is, as ever, watching Kate Beckinsale try to act: her finest moment comes when, having just been killed, she's being wrapped in a plastic curtain, and in extreme close up, we see her finger move. It is a perfectly executed piece of existential theatre in the most meaningful sense. Otherwise she mostly plays good wife scenes like 'don't go to the underground meeting tonight, Victor,' and makes a dozen frantic calls into her mobile, as if she's left her Ipad in her agent's office. Wahlberg ought to be worried; he seemed headed in a Bruce Willis-style career path, but too many parts alongside Beckinsale and he could find himself cast as the thinking man's Jason Statham.

But it's all a lot of fun, and Kormakur handles it as such. It's always good to find a film where a Jackson Pollock painting is a throwaway, literally--but apparently that's in the original too. You might say the film is a load of Pollocks, but it's too much fun for that. I saw it in Paraparaumu, where I was one of five in the cinema--apparently even Mark Wahlberg can't smuggle a film into New Zealand.

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S OUTRAGE

With this novel, Arnaldur Idrisason sends his detective Erlender on leave to pursue his own obsessions in remote eastern Iceland, and leaves to Detective Elinborg the investigation of a young man stabbed to death in his own apartment in Reykjavik. The man, Runolfur, is wearing a woman's T-shirt, a woman's shawl lies under the bed, and a large dose of rohypnol, the date-rape drug, is in his system. As Elinborg investigates, with the sometimes tendentious help of Sigurdur Oli, she's led to a woman who appears to have herself been drugged by Runolfur, and brought back to the apartment. She has no memory of the night, but she called her father for help. Is it a case of modern date-rape leading to murder?

Or is there something else going on? The theme running through Indridason's books is usually about the old Iceland versus the new. Erlender is very much the old, symbolised by his traditional horse-head eating habits. His daughter, with her drug problems, is one representation of the new, and in this novel Elinborg seems to encapsulate the dilemma. She is very much of the new Iceland, a working mother who prefers the life of the 'big' city to the traditional monotony of village life. And as she investigates this case, she gets caught up in the barrier between the mores and values of the village, and those of the big city. Clues deal with foreign cooking, and much is made of the differences between the recipes Elinborg writes about (in her sideline creating cookbooks) and the lackluster diet in the sticks. Food makes for a wonderful contrast, and so does family.

In the investigation, we find family ties playing crucial roles, and the same is true for Elinborg at home. Her adopted son has left the family, and her own son seems set to follow. He's active on social networking sites, where the traditional reticence and privacy of Icelanders seems to have disappeared. Yet her younger daughter, Theodora, takes it all in stride. This precocious child is, in many ways, the most interesting character in the book—full of both modern wisdom and a seemingly ageless attitude toward change.

In effect, Idirason is building Elinborg's character by reflection of those around her; it is not easy, and in fact works best when she clashes with the clumsier police methods of Oli. She works, like Erlender, on instinct, and her instincts are good, and she also seems to be able to use a female empathy in balance with authority to reach some people. Indriason has given her what amounts to a very traditional kind of murder mystery to solve, and, in the end, the solution is something tangential to the main investigation, something that only someone with a sensitivity to Icelandic mores would be able to solve.

But the book's most interesting character remains Erlender, even though he appears only in one or two moments when Elinborg considers him—she reminds me of Wallander or Martin Beck with their mentors at those times. So when it is revealed that Erlender appears to have disappeared: his rented car found abandoned in a church yard, there is, typically for Iceland and for anyone who knows Erlender, little worry. But we know that some sort of investigation is going to follow, and in that sense it's good we've grown a little closer to Elinborg, and enjoyed this novel, because we're already looking forward to the one that will follow.

Outrage by Arnaldur Indridason
Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781846555503

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S HYPOTHERMIA

It was Indridason who, in effect, broke the bank with the CWA Daggers; his win instigating a rule change restricting books in translation to their own foreign ghetto. From the Daggers point of view, this was probably a good thing, because Hypothermia is not only Indridason's best novel yet, it is the best one I've read so far this year, and will take some beating.

Hypothermia opens with a straight-forward suicide; a woman, despondent since the death of her mother, found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage. There is nothing suspicious about the death, but when one of her friends gives Erlendur a tape of a séance which the dead woman had attended, seeking to communicate with her mother and know about the world beyond, Erlendur becomes fascinated with her death and, on his own time, investigates what would have brought her to the point of suicide. Meanwhile, he is also re-opening a couple of old missing-person cases, because the father of one of them is dying.

Those who understand the tropes of crime fiction might immediately guess the cases are connected, but they are not, at least not in any forensic sense. But what connects them, besides Erlendur's one-track fixation on closing the cases, is the sense of understanding. The missing children are a boy and girl, and by this time in the series Erlendur's own missing children, a boy and girl, are back in contact with him. And of course the central event in his own past, the night when he and his brother were lost in a storm on Hardskafi mountain, and his brother never found, haunts him. In fact, the heart of the book may be when Erlendur finally reads to his daughter an account of his and his brother's disappearance, and the empty part of himself becomes sadly evident.Just as much as Maria, the woman who has hung herself, Erlendur is looking for an answer to questions which may be unanswerable, which is why he has devoted his life to seeking answers that can be found.

Which of course he will do here. The book is billed 'A Reykjavik Murder Mystery', and there is enough old-style detection here to make this story almost cosy, the tale of a cleverly-worked out killing. But there is nothing cosy about the heart of the novel, which is about the real way people react to death, and to loss, and the way a shutting down, or closing off, a coldness toward the world, can have intense consequences. This is one reason Hypothermia, which also presents a clue in the murder mystery, may be a better title for a book called Hardskafi in Icelandic. This is a book about emotion, about love, about loss, and about closure. It doesn't have a 'happy' ending, but it has the kind of ending that reflects exactly what it is saying about life and death. Indridason has been building to this point, carefully, with his previous books, yet you don't need to have followed them to appreciate this one. But Hypothermia will take on added reasonance if you have. It is a fine novel, the best yet in a very strong series, and as I said the best I've read thus far this year.

Hypothermia
by Arnaldur Indridason
translated by Victoria Cribb
Harvill Secker £11.99 ISBN 9781846552625

NOTE: This review will also appear at www.crimetime.co.uk

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S DRAINING LAKE

In many ways, The Draining Lake is my favorite of Arnaldur Indridason's Erlendur novels, and the most ambitious. The discovery of a corpse found buried in the eponymous lake, with an outdated Soviet radio transmitter weighing it down, starts an investigation whose roots go back to the heyday of the cold war, when Iceland was (before the Fischer-Spassky chess match put it firmly on the map) a backward island important to both sides only because of the American airbase at Keflavik.

There are distinct echoes in this novel of Halldor Laxness' The Atom Station, with the echoes of geopolitics rebounding on the narrow world-view of Icelanders, and Indridason, while not revealing who the corpse is, tells its back story convincingly, the tale of committed Icelandic communists studying in East Germany in the mid-fifties, of naiveté in both politics and love, and ultimate disillusionment. That story is portrayed convincingly, with young Tomas' idealism tinting the narrative, and we, the audience, knowing better.

Meanwhile, the investigation of the corpse shows Erlendur and his team at their most persistent, especially as they deal with the diplomats from the US and the 'new' Germany. There is a wonderful scene where the German ambassador explains that Iceland is seen as 'the back end of the world' in terms of diplomatic service, and when he proves less than forthcoming, an irritated Erlendur finally asks her 'what did you do wrong?' and when she doesn't understand, asks 'why were you sent to the arsehole of the world'. When his colleagues later chastise him, Erlendur lights up a smoke as says 'this arsehole-of-the-world stuff gets on my nerves'.

Of course that isn't all that gets on his nerves. The troubles with his drug-addicted daughter, and the distance of his relationship with his son, provide a counterpoint to the story told in flashback; meanwhile his platonic relationship with Valdegur, which began in Voices, is causing her husband to telephone him with threats. Erlendur is haunted by his lost brother, and there is in this novel a palpable sense of the isolation of Icelanders in the almost hermetically closed society of the small, cold island. This was part of the theme of Jar City, but here it is developed with the contrast of the enforced repression of the GDR, not that they are parallels, but each comments on the other: particularly when Oli, the young cop, reveals a strong conservative bent. If Hanning Mankell thought of Wallander as being about the anxiety of modern Swedish society, you could very much make the case that Indriason is following in his footsteps. But the wallander novels set outside Sweden are, to my mind, Mankell's least successful; Indridason's venture to East Germany works better, and makes Erlendur more compelling as a result.

The Draining Lake
Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Bernard Scudder
Vintage, 2008, £6.99 ISBN 9780099494140