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Iceland, happily, is not a country much given to murder. In fact whole years are said to have passed without a single homicide. But this fortunate reluctance to shed blood does not mean that Icelanders are uninterested in the concept and have produced some remarkable crime fiction writers to investigate it.
Heading the list is Arnaldur Indriðson, who, after eleven volumes in which his Detective Erlendur sought to bring murderers to justice, has begun a new series featuring Detective Konrád, a retired police detective who occasionally undertakes private work. Konrád took early retirement to care for his cancer-stricken wife and did not return to work after she died. Now he seems a bit at loose ends and is perhaps glad of the occasional call on his expertise. In the present volume, the second in the series, he is asked to look into the disappearance of the twenty-year-old granddaughter of a friend of his wife, who had become involved with the drug trade.
But the young woman's disappearance will not be the main focus of Konrád's attention. There is another, older mystery to consider. The reader learns about this before Konrád does, in the first chapter, where an aspiring but rather poor young poet is trying without much success to write an ode. He is distracted by a doll floating in the water beneath the bridge he is standing on, which leads him to some poetic thoughts that even he has to admit are unremarkable. He decides to rescue the doll, hoping to put it where the child who lost it will find it, but instead he finds the child herself, drowned.
Some thirty years later, Eygló, a spiritualist friend of Konrád's who conducts the occasional seance, tells him about having seen a manifestation of a little girl from time to time over the years and the various plot elements begin to move toward one another.
There is one further cold case that has been on Konrád's mind from the very beginning and that is the murder of his father who was fatally stabbed in the street by a still unknown assailant fifty-three years earlier. He is still troubled by it and by his mixed feelings toward his father.
All of these elements will move toward one another, but not rapidly. There really is little rush to find out why a child died thirty years ago, even if her spirit is haunting a medium. The question should be resolved, but whether any action can be taken at this point is dubious. Arnaldur has
long been interested in old crimes, the buried evidence of which appears to stand for some
suppressed elements in the Icelandic national conscience.
But the leisurely unfolding of events may irritate some readers of crime fiction. It is especially a problem in this book, which does not have the benefit of Arnaldur's usual translator. Since I do not have a word of Icelandic at my disposal, I do not know why this installment is so difficult to remain engaged with. I have no doubt that the translator has a full command of the language but what he does not have is an ear for dialogue. All of the characters sound the same and they do not
sound familiar with colloquial idiom. Interestingly, when I looked back at the reviews of translations of the Erlender series I found that the first efforts of each new translator were also found disappointing. Perhaps it simply takes a while for a translator to find the English that is both true to the original and convincing to the English-speaker's ear.
This is not to say that readers who have enjoyed Arnaldur's fiction in the past should give this one a miss. It has much to recommend it. But this is not the place to start a journey into the world of Erlendur and Konrád.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2023
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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