Arnaldur Indridason and the classic Detective Story

In an earlier post about David Lagercrantz's recent efforts to revive Stieg Larrson's Millenium series of thrillers, I began establishing a distinction between the thriller and the detective story. To clarify, I don't deny that the two genres overlap considerably. It is also true that other classifications or nomenclatures such as crime fiction, police procedural, noir, murder mystery, et cetera, complicate the issue further. But there are many writers who create works that emphasize that difference, and our joy in reading them is somewhat dependent on what to expect.

Here I intend to use my reading of two of Arnaldur Indridason's novels (Inspector Erneldur Sveinsson mysteries) to re-emphasize the difference that I had talked of earlier. Arnaldur's Erlendur novels can be called detective stories, crime fiction, police procedurals, noir, but not thrillers.

• A thriller, in its desire to serve the injunction to constantly thrill the reader, finds the adoption of a polyphonic structure expedient. There are multiple points of views in thrillers, belonging to various characters in there. 
• A detective story is concerned with providing different pleasures, those of slow dismembering of the complexities of a crime. You want to constantly check your own deductions, fed by the steady accumulation of facts around the initial crime, against the detective's deductions. The narrator of a detective story, therefore, has to be closely tied to the main detective. It is not a strict rule, but one that is very rarely broken.
• A thriller's initial crime has to be a high-stakes one. Those stakes should, preferably, be raised sometime in the middle of the novel. By the middle, we are, more often than not, talking of saving the world.
• A detective story's initial crime does not have to be a high-stakes one. It can be a simple murder. Borges, for one, liked detective story crimes to be clean, calling hygiene one of the glacial muses of a detective story. Basically, there needn't be any blood and gore; there needn't be anything in excess to the bare facts of the crime.
• There needs to more action and less procedure in a thriller.
• There needs to more procedure and less (even zero) action in a thriller. Which means that a detective story can be boring.
• The hero in a thriller needs to have a satisfying narrative arc in which some conflict in his personality is resolved. This is usually done by him finding love or sex, whatever he values more (Blomquist gets to sleep with Salander at the end of Lagercrantz's novel). Thrillers are likely to have sex scenes.
• In a detective story, the detective's personality flaws are sustained till the end and nothing is done to ameliorate his personal situation. He usually has a minimalistic personality, not impacted by the crime or the business at hand. (Sherlock Holmes of the earlier stories). Detective stories will not have sex scenes.
• A thriller, because of its need for props, is more connected to the world. It is a form that has greater political potential.
• A detective story doesn't serve thrill, and therefore doesn't have props. It doesn't concern itself with topical issues. It can deliver, at best, a generic moral lesson, and has a markedly low political potential.