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)

GUNNAR STAALESEN'S WHERE ROSES NEVER DIE

When I reviewed Gunnar Staalesen's Cold Hearts three years ago (you can link to that here) I responded to Jo Nesbo's blurb calling Staalesen a 'Norwegian Chandler' by suggesting he might better be seen as a Norwegian Ross MacDonald, though I thought his character was a bit more of a blank slate than Lew Archer's. Where Roses Never Die reinforced my idea, but it's more effective than Cold Hearts precisely because its detective Varg Veum fills in a lot more of that seemingly blank slate.

Staalesen's work is actually a bit more Noir than almost all of what is sweepingly called Nordic Noir, primarily for its moments when Veum deals with his drinking problems, and when his typically Nordic depressive detective moves through what is a great setting for a mystery: an architect designed group of houses facing in on each other, a metaphor for the people who live there and indeed for the crime Veum is hired to investigate.

Maja Misvaer hires Veum to investigate the disappearance of her three-year old daughter from a sandbox outside her home some twenty-five years earlier. The statute of limitations is about to expire, which means the policewill formally close the case, and she wants Veum to take one last look. Veum rouses himself from his own grief and his alcoholic stupor, and begins asking questions and turning over rocks and discovering connections which go back far into the past, and which merge into another case, a robbery of a jewellery store in Bergen a few years earlier.

This is very much like MacDonald at his best: buried secrets come to the surface, the past haunts the present, and Veum, who was a social worker before becoming a detective, seems to take a high moral view which implies the consequences small break downs in personal morality can have. And a case which seems set to focus on child abuse turns into something different.

Bergen is a strange setting, and not necessarily a very noirish one, but Veum moves among its lowlife and shows us the underbelly even in a small relatively prosperous town in a social democracy welfare state. This goes back to the very start of the great Scandinavian detectives, and Staalesen works very comfortably within it. There are moments which sometimes stretch credibility, of coincidence and of violence, but there are also a number of moments that are moving, and the story underneath unveils itself with a few surprises. Staalesen remains relatively unknown and hugely undervalued here; he deserves more attention.

Where Roses Never Die by Gunnar Staalesen

translated by Don Bartlett

Orenda Books, £8.99 ISBN 9781910633090

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

THE CRIME VAULT LIVE: EPISODE 3, IAN RANKIN

The third episode of The Crime Vault Live podcast is now available for downloading: here's a link via The Crime Vault website, it's also available on ITunes, Soundcloud, and many other reputable sources for downloads off the interweb.

Mark Billingham and I are joined by the great Scottish writer (and former music journo) Ian Rankin, who jumps right in on our discussion of TV adaptations of detectives--off the news of a new series of adaptation of Mark's books, though NOT starring Thorne--and we talk about both versions of Rebus as well as the travails of transferring characters you create from page to screen.

Also reviews of new books by, uh, Ian Rankin, Stephen King, Tess Gerritsen, and Jo Nesbo; the audio book of JK, whoops, Robert Galbraith's Career Of Evil, and discussion of new detective shows on TV, including River and From Darkness, and the influence of Scandi Crime on those and other series. Along with Ian's brilliant analysis of the Scandinavian crime marketing technique which no one in Britain can match.

And if you imagine there was a pint or two (or maybe a whiskey too) don't let the picture fool you....before the pub we didn't look like an oldies band about to play a community centre near you...

JO NESBO'S BLOOD ON SNOW

Olav is a fixer, working for Daniel Hoffman, formerly Oslo's biggest heroin dealer, now in competition with someone called The Fisherman. Olav 'fixes' problems for Hoffman, which usually means eliminating someone. He's just completed a hit when Hoffman gives him a new assignment: to 'fix' his wife Corrine, who is having an affair. Olav hesitates, not because he's opposed to taking care of someone who's made a mistake, but because he senses extra risk in getting involved with Daniel's personal life. But still, he has little choice, so he starts to stake out Corrine, and that's where everything begins to go wrong.

On the surface, Blood On Snow reminds one of Headhunters: a character forced to work out a seemingly intractable problem on his own, with major questions about love and trust getting in the way of his judgement. Olav is a different kind of main character, of course, introspective and private and not greedy, as opposed to very publicly successful and avaricious art thief in the earlier novel, but the books are similar in their sense of narrative drive, but in this book the headlong rush is slowed by Olav's nature, and Nesbo shows a deft touch with the contradictions in his character. Olav's in love with an ex-junkie he 'rescued', who's a mute working in a supermarket; but he someone feels Maria is too good for him.

It's getting near Christmas, and what Nesbo has done here is create a classic film noir storyline, complete with an angel and a femme fatale, and in Olav he's made an almost perfect film noir hero: a romantic underneath his hard shell, who can't help himself from falling into the self-destructive web of hopeless love. What becomes evident is the linkage between our modern noir and classic fairy tales, and again Nesbo's style in this book: simple and restrained, emphasises the point. And even though you can see where it is going, he manages to take you by surprise at least once, and he ends it in a scene of beautiful sadness. 

It's a piece of finely crafted writing, a slighter-seeming novel that may as good and more powerful than any he's written before. Movie rights have been sold, Leonardo DiCaprio is mentioned and would be all wrong for the role, but like Headhunters, Blood On Snow will adapt well to film. If the well-judged book is just left alone.

Blood On Snow by Jo Nesbo

Harvill Secker £12.99 ISBN 9781846558603

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

EXIT: MADS MIKKELSEN ON THE RUN, MORE FILM AT NORDICANA

When I wrote about the Danish film A Hijacking I suggested that the theme of business ethics and its relation to social morality was part of many recent Scandinavian films, among them Exit. In A Hijacking the conflict was between a businessman's social responsibility to the crew of his vessel and his ingrained desire to 'win' the negotiation. As it happened, I had just seen Exit earlier the same day at the Nordicana festival, and though the two films weren't part of a double-feature, the connection was obvious.

Exit begins Mads Mikklesen explaining, in voice-over, how negotiating is all about knowing your opponent's weakness, and that every opponent has one. The movie opens with Mikklesen, as Thomas Skepphult, and his partner in a firm called Nova Investment forcing out the man whose family's firm it had been, because he has done something that crossed their ethical boundary while completing a deal with another firm. The ousted man, Morgan Nordenstrole, goes back to his office and blows his head off with a shotgun.

Seven years later, Nova is trying to exit that deal, and cash in their profits, but another investor, the super slick Gabriel Mork, holds them to ransom on theexit. At the same time, Thomas' mentor and partner, Wilhelm, announces he wants to retire, and shows Thomas a hidden compartment in his safe, in which is a tape which Thomas believed had been destroyed. That night, Wilhelm is murdered, and because his death would save Thomas millions on the price of buying him out, Thomas becomes the top suspect and is arrested. But while trying to contact his lawyer, someone else gets on the line, and Thomas realises he's been set up, and nothing is as it seems.

On the one hand, Exit is a complicated, sometimes repetitive, innocent man on the run film, in the tradition of Tell No One or Headhunters, and it wouldn't surprise me if it hadn't hadn't provided some inspiration for Jo Nesbo's tale. As with the Harlan Coben novel (and the French film) Thomas is lucky to have a professional to call upon for help, in his case a cousin who is some sort of security operative, and helped also by the insane incompetence of the Swedish police. Detective Malm, played with a wonderful sneer of suspicion by Ia Langhammer, has decided the case from the first, and after that point, no amount of killing, shooting, fire, or kidnap can distract the cops' attention. Which is great if you're an accused murderer on the run. Especially one played by Mikklesen, who is fast becoming the most sado-masochistic character in movies: public-school boy perverse torturing James Bond (and getting his come-uppins, so to speak) in Casino Royale, getting beaten to a pulp more here than in The Hunt, bloodier than Valhalla Rising.

It also never seems to occur to the police to see whether Thomas is still running his business, which he is trying to do using his assistant Fabian von Klerking as a go-between. Eventually Fabian (Alexander Skarsgard) has to go to Mork (whose name, at least in English, suggests murk and angel at the same time; John Rabaeus, playing him, is excellent, and looks a bit like a classier version of William Forsythe) and Mork, it turns out, did the nasty to Fabian's father. But he overcomes his distaste out of loyalty to Thomas, and this impresses Mork. It also suggests that there is something about the aristocracy, the old Sweden, as signaled by Fabian, that is not only worth admiring but has been lost. Although I was wondering if the burned out 'P' in the 'Prince' sign in the inevitable seedy bar Thomas is forced to visit was some sort of comment on the Swedish royal family.

As I said, the plot involves some repetition (here review imitates life), and a good deal of twisting. Thomas repeats the same sort of gambit a few times, and indeed there are two escapes via powerboat, which is stretching it for any movie not set in Hong Kong. Questions of loyalty and trust are paramount, from Wilhelm's wife Louise, to Thomas' own wife Anna (played with some relish by Kirsti Eline Torhaug). Samuel Froler is excellent as the psychopathic villain, and even better is his henchman Ahmed (Hassan Brijay) who might have walked out of one of the Pusher films

Which is one of the strongest points of Exit. At times it has that grainy darkness of 70s American crime films, and which the Pusher films share, but it is also very carefully one of the most noirish films to come from the sadly misnamed Nordic Noir pantheon. It is exceedingly dark and shadowy, and for most of the film the only light comes in scenes set in Thomas' home, where the sunlight streams in over water and through picture windows. But mostly it takes place in places where natural light never shines, or at night, or both, and that sets the mood. When the film reaches its visceral climax, it's full-scale Fall of the House Of Usher, which I found symbolic. Director Peter Lindmark has a nice visual command which helps give depth to what otherwise would be just a pacy thriller with a few too many longeurs. And when the ultimate betrayal is revealed in the final twist, it too is a shadowy picture in a reflection of a dark room. It doesn't get more noirish than that.

Exit is available on DVD from Arrow Films on 8 July

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

JO NESBO'S LEOPARD

The Leopard opens with Harry Hole in Hong Kong, losing himself after having triumphed over the Snowman, but having lost his love, Rakel, and her son Oleg in the process. But there's another serial killer on the prowl in Norway, and they need Harry back. The lure of the chase doesn't get Harry to return, but the impending death of his father does, and he heads back to Oslo to find himself caught in the middle of a battle for control of the investigation, between his boss Hagen, and the Kripos boss, Mikael Bellman. Meanwhile, the bodies keep turning up.

Jo Nesbo has pulled out all the stops for this one, though in some ways more is less. There are three continents, a chilling execution device, and an action-packed finale that almost screams out for film adaptation. If this is an opening, or widening, of Hole's appeal, it's a brave thing to do, because Nesbo is already being compared, inevitably, to Henning Mankell, and by setting parts of the book in Africa, and titling it The Leopard, he invites such comparisons (recall The Eye Of The Leopard). In fact, the Harry Hole who returns from Hong Kong, and must stay sober rather than lose himself completely is much closer to Wallander than the Hole of earlier books; less abrasive, more vulnerable, more sympathetic. There's also an element of homage to Thomas Harris here, not just with the arcane torture devices, but also as Hole goes back to the Snowman, and to Katrine Bratt, the brilliant but twisted cop from that book, to help him find this new killer.

But it's also uniquely Nesbo. The plot involves many aspects of rural Norway, and in effect offers two villains, but the most interesting battle is not between them and Hole but between Hole and Bellman, who is the most chilling of all the villains in the novel, even though (or perhaps because) he is a cop. As the labyrinthine plot moves forward, the chess game between Hole and Bellman proves in some ways more suspenseful and dangerous than the pursuit of the killer—the affinity between Harry and the killers he pursues is far closer than that to cops like Bellman.

This conflict brings out the most abrasive parts of the Hole who won so many followers originally, and they may be disappointed in a kinder, gentler Harry. Though, since Nesbo's now billed on the cover as 'the next Stieg Larsson' perhaps Harry needs to be as irresistible to women as Mikke Blomqvist? His relationship with Kaja Solnes, the cop sent to bring him back to Norway from Hong Kong, isn't totally convincing, but it does offer its own shadowy twists, and their last scene is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. Which in the end is what it's all about, and though this is a typically long novel, Nesbo has the ability to keep complicated plot lines going, keep characters in conflict, deal with red herrings, and even in translation make it all feel immediate. He's not the next Stieg Larsson, though he deserves to be that successful, but he does have some of the same ability to convey a wider perspective on the Norwegian world. He's more like, as I suggested earlier, a cross between Mankell and Harris, though Hole is a character either would envy. And in the final scenes of The Leopard, I again thought of Thomas Harris, with a strange echo of Hannibal Lecter and new directions for the character. With Nesbo on top form, that's something to look forward to. It something the very seductive cover of the German edition suggests...

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo
Harvill Secker, £12.99, ISBN 978184655401

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

JO NESBO: THE SNOWMAN INTERVIEW

My interview with the Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo, author of the exceptional Harry Hole novels, is now up as my latest American Eye column at Shots; you can link to it here. Or, if that's too much effort, read it now:

If there is a first division for crime writers who are part of the current Scandinavian boom, Jo Nesbo must surely be at its forefront. There's no template for a hard-boiled Norwegian crime writer, but Nesbo does look a bit like the rock star is also is in his native country, a mix of influences which reflects the cultural openness of a small but intensely literary nation. His novels starring the maverick Oslo police detective Harry Hole, of which five have been published in English, have been incredibly popular in Britain. Possibly this is because they occupy a sort of middle ground between the image of the depressive detective as pioneered by Sweden's Sjowall and Wahloo, and continued by Henning Mankell or Iceland's Arnauldur Indridason, and British variations on the theme, particularly Scots detectives like Ian Rankin's Rebus or his TV cousin, Jim Taggart. But I also see a lot of comparison to Michael Connelly's detective Harry Bosch. Jo was in town in March, to promote The Snowman, the fifth Harry Hole novel published in translation here. It's a book which reminded me very much in tone of John Connolly, so I began by asking about his influences, and if he sees the comparisons...

JN: Actually, I never read much crime fiction, so I can't really say. I've been catching up the last few years; I didn't set out to be a crime writer, I just wanted to write stories. My biggest influences from English were Dickens, Anthony Burgess, Hemingway and Charles Bukowski.

MC: THAT'S AN ECLECTIC MIX

You think so? And a couple of crime writers, because they were good writers: Jim Thompson, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke.

THAT'S VERY INTERESTING, BECAUSE I CAN SEE A DIRECT LINK BETWEEN THOMPSON AND BUKOWSKI, WHO COULD HAVE BEEN A THOMPSON CHARACTER, OR MIGHT HAVE LIKED TO BE! AND A LITTLE BIT OF BOOKS LIKE POP. 1280 IN HARRY HOLE

Hole is a very moral character who fails terribly. Morally, though, Harry gets back on his own feet. I just saw Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, which is very hard-edged, but there's a lot of that moral redemption in that.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE ORIGINAL, ABEL FERRARA'S BAD LIEUTENANT, WITH HARVEY KEITEL?

No, this is the first I've heard about it. Is it as hard-edged?

OH YES, AND HOW.

Then I'll have to watch it. (INFORMATION IS EXCHANGED THEN THE INTERVIEW RESUMES) And I was influenced more by film and graphic novels. Frank Miller's comics, The Godfather films, Scarface. But I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, so when I came to those films I thought of them as old rather than brilliant. The pace is so slow, but still it is so good. When you're young you get bored, and you don't realise that you're seeing the origins of what you love. It's like young people today saying The Beatles are not that interesting. They think Michael Jackson invented rock and roll!

AND YOU SHOULD KNOW BECAUSE YOUR OWN ROCK GROUP, DI DERRE (English translation: That There) WAS BIG?

At our peak we were probably the biggest band in Norway, apart from Ah Ha. (WE THEN SIDETRACK OVER A LONG DISCUSSION OF A HA'S MAGS, WHO WORKED WITH ME IN OSLO ON A TRACK MEET BEFORE HIS BAND BROKE, AND WHO HAS WORKED WITH NESBO—THEN GET BACK TO DI DERRE)

I still play 50-60 gigs a year. Just me and a bass player, except in summer when the full band gets together to play festivals. It's a hobby now, I do it for fun. My music is sort of folk pop, not Norwegian ethnic folk, a bit of zydeco influence, and the songs are telling stories.

BUT YOU DON'T WORK MUCH MUSIC INTO THE HARRY HOLE NOVELS

Ah playlists! I try to be careful about that. I don't want to be one of those writers all giving you their top fives!

IT'S AN INTERESTING MIX OF INFLUENCES, BUT IT IS REFLECTED IN YOUR BOOKS, A COMBINATION OF BLACK AND WHITE MOVIES AND DICKENSIAN PROSE

Well, I try to create an original image, not ready-made movie stories. Milan Kundera said the novel has the right to exist only to the extent of its being able to do so. I don't know if this is totally true, but I look at books like Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, which doesn't need adaptation, because it seems to reflect a movie, or the movies, yet it works both ways, as novel and film. You try to use the tools you have, but they come from everywhere. For example, you can let the criminal speak without seeing him, and you do that in movies too, especially in horror movies.

IT MAKES FOR A CLASSIC ANTAGONIST IN THE LATEST HOLE NOVEL IN ENGLISH (AT THIS POINT, NOT HAVING THEN FINISHED THE LATEST HOLE NOVEL, THE SNOWMAN, I GUESS AT WHO THE VILLAIN ULTIMATELY WILL TURN OUT TO BE, BUT JO ISN'T TELLING—IT TURNED OUT I WAS RIGHT) BUT AS USUAL, THE BIG CONFLICT IS BETWEEN HARRY AND THE POLICE BUREAUCRACY

Well, everyone is in conflict, and that's where suspense is. The criminal versus the police, and the conflict within the police—not just whether the crimes will be 'solved' but in what WAY they will be solved, what compromises will be made. How much is the hero willing to pay to get the job done? It's the struggle within himself which is almost always of more interest than the struggle against the villain. It has to do with salvation, will the hero get his salvation in. That's why we're interested in The Bad Lieutenant, will he do the right thing in the end? And then there's a third level, which is that personal conflict, especially in the work place, are something anyone can relate to. The work place is unique in that it's where colleagues both cooperate and compete.

IT'S WHAT MADE TOM WELLER SUCH A COMPELLING ADVERSARY FOR HARRY

Exactly. Many readers say they miss him.

ODDLY, YOUR BOOK HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED OUT OF SEQUENCE IN THEIR ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS.

This is the only place that happened. Devil's Star was the book they'd read in the UK, and they liked it, and were sure it would be well received, so they started with that. We didn't offer them the first two novels, partly because the quality of Devil's Star was higher, but mostly because the first one is set in Australia...

AND REFERENCED IN THE LATER BOOKS

Yes, but it's less about the serial killer and more about seeing Australia through the eyes of a Norwegian. And the second is in Bangkok. Because I wanted more to look at Norwegian society, and because that's probably of more interest than Hole's perceptions of Australia, we started in English in the middle. The Redbreast was a bit heavier, maybe not such a good place to start, so that was the second book, and they've gone in order from there.

AND WE'LL LOOK FORWARD TO THE NEXT ONE!

Thanks.

THE HARRY HOLE NOVELS

1. Bat Man (1997)

2. The Cockroaches (1998)

3. The Redbreast (2000—English translation no. 2, 2006)

4. Nemesis (2002—English no. 3, 2008)

5. The Devil's Star (2003—English no 1, 2005)

6. Redeemer (2005—English no 4 2009)

7. The Snowman (2007—English no 5, 2010)

8. The Leopard (2009)

NO MELTDOWN: JO NESBO'S SNOWMAN

The Snowman is the fifth Harry Hole novel to appear in English (though it is seventh in the series—the first two have not yet been translated) and was published in Norway in 2007. That these five translations have appeared in only six years is a reflection of the cult following Jo Nesbo has already built up, starting with critical acclaim which has, justifiably continued. Much of this is down to his detective. It's not just that Harry Hole's name looks and sounds better in English, and is far more suggestive, than in its original Norwegian. Hole also has much more affinity to the British audience than most of his nordic counterparts. Although he can give Beck or Wallander a good run in the angst-ridden morose worldview sweepstakes, there's also an alcohol fuelled self-destructiveness about Hole that recalls abrasive Scots. If Resnick drank more vodka, maybe. But you could say Hole's half Taggart half Rebus, and the link from Aberdeen to Bergen is not that tenuous at all.

Especially because The Snowman is set, in part, in Bergen, which is where Hole's new partner, the frighteningly bright and efficient Katrine Bratt, has just transferred. She joins Hole just as he has figured that the disappearance of a young mother, and her scarf left behind wrapped around a snowman, is connected to other disappearances, and that a serial killer is working. The links go back a long way, and all the way to Bergen, and there are letters addressed to Hole himself that make sure he will lead the investigation. Bratt, seemingly the careerist, provides the kind of sharp contrast with Hole that Tom Waaler once did, if in a different way, and it's when they go to Bergen together and Hole uncovers a long-dead corpse that this contrast is at its most telling.

This could be the book where Nesbo moves from cult hero and big seller to mega-stardom, because although it is as compelling as any of the previous books in the series, and Hole's private demons and public difficulties are just as acute, it is also the fastest-paced, and in some ways most conventional thriller yet. Some of the elements are standard enough to be predictable; including at least one major twist and the identity of the killer (in fact, when I was interviewing Nesbo, at a point when I was only part-way into the book, I asked if my guess about the villain was correct and he maintained an admirably straight face). But as Nemesis showed, Nesbo knows how to maintain tension and then crank it up. That Hole's own relationship with Rakel, his ex-lover now engaged to someone else, and her son Oleg, factor into the plot is perhaps inevitable, but this has always been the major conflict of the Hole books, the struggle between 'normal' existence and the drive to do what he needs to justify himself to himself.

Critics often look at the Scandinavian crime boom as if it were a homogenous mass, all depressive detectives and breaking down of welfare states, but the reality is that Nordic crime fictions ranges from relatively traditional who dunnits (although it's hard to find anything you might call 'cozy') to the kind of thing Nesbo has produced: deep novels with social comment set within a framework to Thomas Harris thrillers than the detectives to which he's often linked (by myself as well as others). But what makes it work is the idea that Harry Hole is actually very close to the old fashioned hard-boiled private eyes: an idealist whose hardened crust conceals vulnerability and sensitivity. Miichael Connelly worked another Harry, Harry Bosch into a police setting, and the conflicts, personal and bureaucratic, that such a setting creates for such a character have been emphasized even more in Nesbo's hero. It's a self-destructiveness that, perversely, makes Hole so appealing, but it's Nesbo's ability to weave that character, written engagingly with a sharp eye toward his world, into more and more involved ploys that make these books work so well.

The Snowman by Jo Nesbo Harvill Secker £12.99 9781846553486

NOTE: Look for that Jo Nesbo interview at Shots, and here on IT, soon....

HARRY HOLE'S ENGLISH THIRD, JO NESBO'S THE DEVIL'S STAR

Catching up with Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole series has been one of the pleasures of my reading year, and with this third novel published in translation (English readers joined the series in media res, as it were, in order, unlike, say, the Wallander books) Nesbo has taken his craft, and his hero, to another level. The Devil's Star is impressive because it accomplishes a number of difficult feats, not least the rehabilitation of its hero.

When the novel begins Hole is at a low ebb, drinking again, thrown out by Rakael and cut off from her son Oleg. His failure to solve his partner's murder, to convince anyone that she was killed by his corrupt colleague Tom Waaler, has turned him back to the sauce, and his police career is doomed. Even so, because of a shortage of detectives on a holiday, Harry finds himself working with Waaler what turns out to be a case of serial killings, ordered precisely on the pentagram known as the devil's star. This is the strongest part of the book, because Nesbo can make Harry's pathos real, palpably so. He never pulls his punches, or seeks the reader's sympathy; the moments where Harry behaves in the self-destructive way drunks do have the ring of real desperation.

Harry snaps out of his lethargy to pursue the killer, to break the code that the murders suggest, and here the novel becomes more familiar, standard serial killer fare. What is interesting the way the stories of the various victims, suspects, and cops all intertwine, creating any number of red herrings, including some that go back to World War II, the subject that will not die in Scandinavian crime. But when the crimes are 'solved', and Waaler demands one act from Harry to prove he is really on his side now, the story picks up again.

Its weak point is that we aren't convinced why, except perhaps because of his massive ego, Waaler would want Harry on his criminal 'team', and we know for a mortal certainty that Hole would never agree to join. So when Harry finally goes renegade, having found the real killer and taken possession of Waaler's fall guy, we aren't surprised. But what Nesbo does at that point is to ratchet up the tension: everything is working in Waaler's favour, and given the despair that permeated the first third of the book, the possibility that, in the end, Waaler might win and Harry might lose still seems real.

Nesbo has created one of the great detectives in Harry Hole, and what is most impressive is the way he's able to make Hole seem like a different person as he's reflected in the actions and vision of various characters. He is a sympathetic character who rarely asks for sympathy, a Wallander with a touch of Marlowe's idealism, and a hidden resevoir of white knight charm. And Nesbo is very happy to work on complicated plots and old-fashioned, if un-traditional clues. Hole (no puns intended, as you will see) may be the first detective since Charles Willeford's Hoke Mosely to solve a case based on a Holmesian analysis of anal stimulation. It's that willingness to take risks with the familiar tropes of the format that makes Nesbo so good, and makes me look forward to my next Hole novel, The Redeemer, the fourth appear in English.