The Pleasures of Stodginess
this article, about Arnaldur Indriðason's Inspector Erlendur series of novels, first appeared in Business Line's Saturday supplement, BLink
It begins with the discovery of a corpse. A brooding detective, usually male, and with a shattered private life, gets on the case. He has a team of two or three, and they do the basic work of identifying the corpse. The forensic report is likely to be delayed. The investigation proceeds so slowly that it sometimes appears to be not progressing at all. Interactions with the people closest to the victim provide contradictory information. The chief detective is equal parts dogged and realistic, and his possible failure sets a constant undertone.
Derived from Roseanna, the 1965 novel by Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the above template for police procedurals has remained useful to Nordic writers for almost five decades. And even more useful has been one Martin Beck, the detective Sjöwall and Wahlöö featured in nine more novels after Roseanna. Beck’s reticence, insomnia, dyspepsia, irritability, copious smoking and general detachment have, over the years, come to be seen as markers of the archetypical Nordic sleuth: consider Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, or Håkan Nesser’s Van Veeteren, two examples among many, of fictional detectives who had some of Beck’s essence distilled in them. Of course, such templates are also observed in deviations, and the fact remains that Nordic crime’s biggest international export is one that just cannot be clubbed with a group of dour, 40-something detectives. With her spiked hair, tattoos, and body piercings, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander doesn’t share much with Martin Beck, least of all the fact that she has a criminal streak and hates cops. But as much as Larsson revved up Nordic crime writing, making the congress between a Nordic procedural and an American action thriller conceivable, his success also brought attention to writers who followed the Sjöwall-Wahlöö aesthetic closely. Foremost among them is the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason, whose Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is an intensification of the traits that defined Beck, and whose Reykjavik police procedurals stumble along with the same dull intensity that one finds in the Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels.
Murder most rare
But how does one write murder mysteries in a country as peaceful as Iceland?
According to a ‘Homicide Map’ released by Brazilian think-tank Igarapé, Iceland is the third least likely country to be murdered in. Its homicide rate of 0.3 per 1,00,000 is less than half of even the Scandinavian countries. And the comparison becomes ridiculous when we consider the island country’s population — less than 3,50,000. That’s one murder per year.
Indriðason does not ignore the sanguine facts. “Murders were rare in Reykjavik” — explains the third-person narrator in Jar City, the first English-translated novel in the Inspector Erlendur series. Later in the same novel, Erlendur notes that the usual Icelandic murder is “not complicated”. This almost registers as a meta-ironic gesture, as if the detective, grappling with a terribly complicated case, is reminding the writer where they live.
Indriðason’s trick is to slow things down, spacing out the crimes and the crime-solving. If we go by Inspector Erlendur’s personal timeline, we find that a homicide case crops up roughly once in six or more months. Investigations are never particularly rushed and are often allowed to take months. There is only one instance in the entire series where Erlendur Sveinsson and his team feel rushed in trying to solve a case, and it is telling that the novel in which this happens, Arctic Chill, is the worst of the series. Racy thrillers aren’t Indriðason’s strong point, and it is for the good that his series embraces its slowness as definitive.
Indriðason also has the nous to craft some of the mysteries as murders that took place years, even decades, back. Consider Silence of the Grave, for example — the second in the series — where work at a construction site leads to the discovery of a skeleton as old as post-war Iceland; the related flashback and the current investigation climax together at the end. A similar template is followed in The Draining Lake, where reducing water-levels in a Reykjavik lake unearth a skeleton dating to the mid-’70s; the flashback, concerning itself with exchange students in East Germany and Cold War intrigue and whatnot, once again concludes in tandem with the current investigation at hand.
But if Iceland demands a crime writer like Indriðason to work around its realities, it also provides a scenario that is typical of the place and of interest: missing persons. Considering its dramatic topography and harsh climate, it isn’t difficult to imagine people going missing in Iceland. And if we accept that each skeleton unearthed today was a corpse forgotten yesterday, we arrive at a link between missing persons and murder.
Inspector Erlendur knows this link, and thinks of missing persons as a “distinctively Icelandic crime”. He has a personal history that leaves him with a strong reason to be fixated about disappearances. In his childhood, Erlendur and his younger brother were lost in a blizzard, and the rescue party could only find him. No trace of the brother’s body was found. Indriðason employs this backstory not only as a source of trauma for Erlendur, but also as the genesis of a lingering mystery, one which the series gradually moves towards solving. He ensures that we read these novels as much for Erlendur’s continuous fight with his personal demons as for the mystery in each one of them. The developments in Erlendur’s personal life form a parallel plot that holds interest novel after novel. We learn in Jar City that Erlendur was divorced years back, and that his relationship with his daughter, Eva Lind, and son, Sindri Snaer, are not the healthiest. Indriðason focuses more on the tumultuous relationship with the 20-something Lind: she is an unscrupulous person, a drug addict, and overtly hateful of her father. But we develop a soft spot for her as we learn to see her hatred as a response to Erlendur’s abandonment of the family: he has been a missing person for her. Erlendur is, on the other hand, irritated by the faults in her character, but also increasingly compelled to do his best to protect her from the big troubles that she repeatedly gets into. Indriðason uses the ebb and flow of this relationship in each of his novels. Since the basic conflict isn’t a complicated one, the nature of events he uses is unavoidably repetitive, especially if one binges on the novels. However, this repetition causes an effect that is definitely outside the realm of the writer’s intentions: it heightens the realism, offering us a kind of relationship that dodders on irreconcilable differences and yet cannot be wished away, thereby condemning the parties to suffer the same disappointments over and over.
The melancholy detective
Crime writers are often (excessively) credited with presenting a mirror to the societies they write about, and in that Indriðason is as common or as commendable as his contemporaries. He, too, writes about the stock social ills — sexual crime, domestic abuse, homophobia, false idealism, xenophobia, and so on. The absence of white-collar crime is explained by the fact that almost all of the Erlendur series was published before the banking crisis in Iceland — had Indriðason known enough about it, Erlendur would have surely found some murderous bankers as well.
With regards to the mysteries themselves, it must be said that Indriðason’s resolutions are more necessary than marvelous. This isn’t a problem, for if murder mysteries and police procedurals were two distinct categories in crime writing, Indriðason’s efforts would most definitely be classified in the latter. Though even among procedurals, he seems particularly wary of complications, and keeps his dull intensity slightly less intense than others. Also, as far as tracing police work goes, Indriðason is definitely inferior to Sjöwall & Wahlöö, and to Mankell.
But the uniqueness of the Inspector Erlendur series is in its sheer simplicity and its palpable distaste for cultivating or delivering shocks. The template we began with is followed in most of these novels, such that reading them becomes a sort of agreement with both the depredations and the joys of what is formulaic and repetitive in detective fiction. The sameness of structure and character, coupled with slow pace, comforts us, even provides a perverse pleasure. We look forward, for example, to the new excuse to justify the delay in the forensic report. It might be as simple as the forensic scientist being on vacation. At other times, it might be a bureaucratic loop; like with the skeleton in Silence of the Grave, which had to be transferred from the forensic scientist to an archaeologist. Indriðason is not averse to using fairly straightforward means for withholding information. He is more invested, instead, in imbuing his slow-burn narratives with the irremediable melancholia of their hero. What he achieves, accidentally, is a verisimilitude apropos the detective’s personal life, something that becomes the biggest draw for anyone who reads more than one of these novels.
In sum, Indriðason’s stodginess has its definite rewards, of the kind that are more difficult to find in today’s crime fiction.
It begins with the discovery of a corpse. A brooding detective, usually male, and with a shattered private life, gets on the case. He has a team of two or three, and they do the basic work of identifying the corpse. The forensic report is likely to be delayed. The investigation proceeds so slowly that it sometimes appears to be not progressing at all. Interactions with the people closest to the victim provide contradictory information. The chief detective is equal parts dogged and realistic, and his possible failure sets a constant undertone.
Derived from Roseanna, the 1965 novel by Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the above template for police procedurals has remained useful to Nordic writers for almost five decades. And even more useful has been one Martin Beck, the detective Sjöwall and Wahlöö featured in nine more novels after Roseanna. Beck’s reticence, insomnia, dyspepsia, irritability, copious smoking and general detachment have, over the years, come to be seen as markers of the archetypical Nordic sleuth: consider Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, or Håkan Nesser’s Van Veeteren, two examples among many, of fictional detectives who had some of Beck’s essence distilled in them. Of course, such templates are also observed in deviations, and the fact remains that Nordic crime’s biggest international export is one that just cannot be clubbed with a group of dour, 40-something detectives. With her spiked hair, tattoos, and body piercings, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander doesn’t share much with Martin Beck, least of all the fact that she has a criminal streak and hates cops. But as much as Larsson revved up Nordic crime writing, making the congress between a Nordic procedural and an American action thriller conceivable, his success also brought attention to writers who followed the Sjöwall-Wahlöö aesthetic closely. Foremost among them is the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason, whose Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is an intensification of the traits that defined Beck, and whose Reykjavik police procedurals stumble along with the same dull intensity that one finds in the Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels.
Murder most rare
But how does one write murder mysteries in a country as peaceful as Iceland?
According to a ‘Homicide Map’ released by Brazilian think-tank Igarapé, Iceland is the third least likely country to be murdered in. Its homicide rate of 0.3 per 1,00,000 is less than half of even the Scandinavian countries. And the comparison becomes ridiculous when we consider the island country’s population — less than 3,50,000. That’s one murder per year.
Indriðason does not ignore the sanguine facts. “Murders were rare in Reykjavik” — explains the third-person narrator in Jar City, the first English-translated novel in the Inspector Erlendur series. Later in the same novel, Erlendur notes that the usual Icelandic murder is “not complicated”. This almost registers as a meta-ironic gesture, as if the detective, grappling with a terribly complicated case, is reminding the writer where they live.
Indriðason’s trick is to slow things down, spacing out the crimes and the crime-solving. If we go by Inspector Erlendur’s personal timeline, we find that a homicide case crops up roughly once in six or more months. Investigations are never particularly rushed and are often allowed to take months. There is only one instance in the entire series where Erlendur Sveinsson and his team feel rushed in trying to solve a case, and it is telling that the novel in which this happens, Arctic Chill, is the worst of the series. Racy thrillers aren’t Indriðason’s strong point, and it is for the good that his series embraces its slowness as definitive.
Indriðason also has the nous to craft some of the mysteries as murders that took place years, even decades, back. Consider Silence of the Grave, for example — the second in the series — where work at a construction site leads to the discovery of a skeleton as old as post-war Iceland; the related flashback and the current investigation climax together at the end. A similar template is followed in The Draining Lake, where reducing water-levels in a Reykjavik lake unearth a skeleton dating to the mid-’70s; the flashback, concerning itself with exchange students in East Germany and Cold War intrigue and whatnot, once again concludes in tandem with the current investigation at hand.
But if Iceland demands a crime writer like Indriðason to work around its realities, it also provides a scenario that is typical of the place and of interest: missing persons. Considering its dramatic topography and harsh climate, it isn’t difficult to imagine people going missing in Iceland. And if we accept that each skeleton unearthed today was a corpse forgotten yesterday, we arrive at a link between missing persons and murder.
Inspector Erlendur knows this link, and thinks of missing persons as a “distinctively Icelandic crime”. He has a personal history that leaves him with a strong reason to be fixated about disappearances. In his childhood, Erlendur and his younger brother were lost in a blizzard, and the rescue party could only find him. No trace of the brother’s body was found. Indriðason employs this backstory not only as a source of trauma for Erlendur, but also as the genesis of a lingering mystery, one which the series gradually moves towards solving. He ensures that we read these novels as much for Erlendur’s continuous fight with his personal demons as for the mystery in each one of them. The developments in Erlendur’s personal life form a parallel plot that holds interest novel after novel. We learn in Jar City that Erlendur was divorced years back, and that his relationship with his daughter, Eva Lind, and son, Sindri Snaer, are not the healthiest. Indriðason focuses more on the tumultuous relationship with the 20-something Lind: she is an unscrupulous person, a drug addict, and overtly hateful of her father. But we develop a soft spot for her as we learn to see her hatred as a response to Erlendur’s abandonment of the family: he has been a missing person for her. Erlendur is, on the other hand, irritated by the faults in her character, but also increasingly compelled to do his best to protect her from the big troubles that she repeatedly gets into. Indriðason uses the ebb and flow of this relationship in each of his novels. Since the basic conflict isn’t a complicated one, the nature of events he uses is unavoidably repetitive, especially if one binges on the novels. However, this repetition causes an effect that is definitely outside the realm of the writer’s intentions: it heightens the realism, offering us a kind of relationship that dodders on irreconcilable differences and yet cannot be wished away, thereby condemning the parties to suffer the same disappointments over and over.
The melancholy detective
Crime writers are often (excessively) credited with presenting a mirror to the societies they write about, and in that Indriðason is as common or as commendable as his contemporaries. He, too, writes about the stock social ills — sexual crime, domestic abuse, homophobia, false idealism, xenophobia, and so on. The absence of white-collar crime is explained by the fact that almost all of the Erlendur series was published before the banking crisis in Iceland — had Indriðason known enough about it, Erlendur would have surely found some murderous bankers as well.
With regards to the mysteries themselves, it must be said that Indriðason’s resolutions are more necessary than marvelous. This isn’t a problem, for if murder mysteries and police procedurals were two distinct categories in crime writing, Indriðason’s efforts would most definitely be classified in the latter. Though even among procedurals, he seems particularly wary of complications, and keeps his dull intensity slightly less intense than others. Also, as far as tracing police work goes, Indriðason is definitely inferior to Sjöwall & Wahlöö, and to Mankell.
But the uniqueness of the Inspector Erlendur series is in its sheer simplicity and its palpable distaste for cultivating or delivering shocks. The template we began with is followed in most of these novels, such that reading them becomes a sort of agreement with both the depredations and the joys of what is formulaic and repetitive in detective fiction. The sameness of structure and character, coupled with slow pace, comforts us, even provides a perverse pleasure. We look forward, for example, to the new excuse to justify the delay in the forensic report. It might be as simple as the forensic scientist being on vacation. At other times, it might be a bureaucratic loop; like with the skeleton in Silence of the Grave, which had to be transferred from the forensic scientist to an archaeologist. Indriðason is not averse to using fairly straightforward means for withholding information. He is more invested, instead, in imbuing his slow-burn narratives with the irremediable melancholia of their hero. What he achieves, accidentally, is a verisimilitude apropos the detective’s personal life, something that becomes the biggest draw for anyone who reads more than one of these novels.
In sum, Indriðason’s stodginess has its definite rewards, of the kind that are more difficult to find in today’s crime fiction.
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