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)

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 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

JAR CITY: THE FILM

The Icelandic film Jar City has just opened in Britain, almost exactly one year after it debuted at the Ritzy in Brixton as part of the London Flim Festival. I wrote then, in my Crime Time film column, that it was one of the very best films in the 2007 Festival, certainly the best crime movie I saw. It's adapted, of course, from the novel by Arnauldur Indridason, originally released as Jar City in English, but since retitled, for reasons that escape me, Tainted Blood. If you're interested, I reviewed his latest, Arctic Chill, just recently here.

Indridason's detective, Erlendur (literally, no one) has a name which also reminds one of Henning Mankell's Wallender, and is very much in that Scandinavian tradition, which goes back to Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck, of cops as obsessive everymen, alienated from much of the world, whose persistence results in solving crimes whose implications reacher deeper into their societies than was at first apparent. Director Baltasar Koramakur (who also wrote the screenplay) emphasizes this with visual aplomb, presenting a heavy, gray landscape and dull, confining interiors which match the lives of both cops and victims. Everything lies in shadows, of dusk or dawn in a country with endless nights in winter, and it's as if it is somehow wrong that crimes should be revealed during this night. Ingvar E Sigurdsson, as Erlendur, all shaggy sweaters and plodding professorial glumness, establishes the tone of melancholy as the case of a murdered thug begins to coincide with a father's search for genetic information about his daughter's death from brain disease. Of course the plots are intertwined, but the story is all about family relationships, and the lengths Icelandic people will or won't go to protect them.

Remember, Iceland is a very small, very closed society, a point made at the Genetic Research headquarters, where it is explained that they provide a unique sort of sample. Remember too that Icelanders are known mostly by patronymics, their names, their very selves are defined by who their parents were, and in such a small society, this is a serious responsibility, and one that extends beyond typically Scandinavian reserve. Erlendur's daughter, perhaps a junkie, pregnant by an unknown father, tests the reality of this world as much as either of the deaths Erlendur investigates.

The Iceland of this movie is a dull, dreary place. It's landscapes are gaunt, hard, cold. The modern buildings only slightly less so. Even the Genetic Centre, which should be all gleaming glass and polished steel, seems more like a hiding place, an artificial world of concealment, producing its own shadows. The brilliance of Koramakur is not that he has made, as more than one reviewer couldn't resist from quipping, an 'Inspector Norse', but the opposite: his Iceland is not the cozy society whose gardens are upset by something as perverse as a crime. Cozy isn't a word that applies to his vision, even though his country is small, homogenous, and self-contained. This is a real, a tough, an unforgiving world, in which the pressures of protecting the things which society holds at its centre, can have tragic consequences. That a genetically on-passed disease lies at the root of the story, merely intensifies this, and there is the sense, as the film ends, that this is the sort of Nordic tragedy an earlier Erlendur might contemplate around a winter fire, once its been turned into a typically Norse saga of vengeance. But I just love the way the Icelandic poster (see above) makes it look like something completely different--Ibsen, if not Widerberg!