A city is on the move, relocating, Kiruna, in the very north of Sweden. Ore mining has undermined the area, and the town has to be relocated a few kilometers. Rebecka Martinsson is a prosecutor in Kiruna, she gave up a top legal career in Stockholm for it. She suffers, her boss is jealous and bullies her. Her ex-boyfriend Krister, a dog handler at the Kiruna Police Department, has another, an Instagram influencer, who is cool, annoying and in need of love.
It’s May, but there are still days with heavy snowfall. The influence of the Russian mafia is always brutal. A dead man is found on a small island near the city, and there is also a corpse in his freezer, a shot in the chest, has been in there since the 1960s. The son of this dead man had a boxing career that brought him to America, he wants to know who killed his father.
The sins of the fathers: “Faedernas missgärningar” – the original title – fills half a dozen Martinsson novels. A far-reaching picture of society emerges in the tradition of the great novels by Dickens, Stendhal and Tolstoy. Weariness and inability to live, missed happiness and belated regrets, lack of feeling and desire, renunciation and devotion: Not every misery is finally resolved, not every injustice is punished: “Chance is God’s pseudonym if it doesn’t want to sign.” That could be the motto of the whole Martinsson saga.
Åsa Larsson, Who Is Without Sin. Translated from the Swedish by Lotta Rüegger and Holger Wolandt. Bertelsmann 2022. 591 pages, 22 euros.
Liewe Cupido was born in Bad Bollingen, Baden-Württemberg, grew up on the Dutch island of Texel, is an officer in the federal police in See Cuxhaven, where colleagues call him the “Dutchman”.. He is supposed to mediate in a tricky case – a man, found dead by a Dutch patrol boat, was taken to Holland for an autopsy, he was lying on a sandbank, which country it is not quite clear which country it belongs to. That is why the German police are claiming an explanation and demanding that the body be transferred. The dead man is a mudflat walker who was caught by the tide trying to cross a mudflat at low tide.
Mudflat hiking is precision work and requires careful preparation, the tide comes in quickly, and if you haven’t quite made it the route, the only thing that helps is “flooding”: You stick three bamboo poles you’ve brought with you together like a teepee and hang a net over them, into which you lies down. And now has to endure the hours until the tide goes out, in pitch-dark solitude, the gurgling water beneath you, the mud flats “like a huge black hole, a gateway to the underworld… at night you’re very small out there”.
The past of the mudflat hiking team is also a black hole, their friendship is shaken by old love and trauma. And the criminals produce on both sides – the prestige pressure among neighbors! – even associated trauma and collisions.
Mathijs Deen: The Dutchman. Translated from the Dutch by Andreas Ecke. Mare-Verlag, Hamburg 2022. 263 pages, 20 euros.
A criminal show, two star investigators meet in this novel. 1937, in the fashionable seaside resort of Saint-Jean-de-Monts: Georges Simonon and Friedrich Glauser (always dubbed Glosère by Simenon with all due respect), the fathers of Inspector Maigret and Sergeant Studer. They spontaneously start to develop a thriller together. A Swiss businessman named Müller/Miller died in the village under mysterious circumstances.
Ursula Hasler dreamed up this teamwork, delivering a melancholy reflection on the mechanism and realism of the crime novel, with its minimalist fabric of details (called “Sächeli” by Studer). Instead of his Maigret, Simenon brings in an amateur detective, Amélie Morel, a shadow of Miss Marple. Glauser has Studer brought from Bern to the Atlantic, where the sergeant is just as underdog as his author on the glamorous beach (which is discreetly and collegially endured by the bourgeois Simenon).
Ursula Hasler: The sheer truth. Glauser and Simenon write a crime novel. Limmat Verlag, Zurich 2021. 344 pages, 29 euros. (903-hasler-truth-10-cm.jpg)
It is very often the socially disadvantaged who are the perpetrators and have to be forced to confess, which torments Studer greatly. Simenon is also an underdog in his own way. He abandons the highly successful Maigret novels and now wants to create literature. The two meet a strange figure – a one-armed man with a mask, who offers himself Cassandra-like: “A prophecy for a sou! You won’t find out the truth that cheap anywhere!”
Of course, crime fiction doesn’t get that cheap. “Truth! One knows very well that the truth one finds is not the bare truth. But one knows very well the lie!”