Category Archives: Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström

Putting the mockers on (or thoughts on the CWA International Dagger Award 2011)

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Friday night (well Saturday morning my time) at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate the winner of the CWA International Dagger award for 2011 will be announced.

Of the seven shortlisted novels I have read six (but ran out of puff for the seventh) and definitely have my favourites though I am almost reluctant to speculate on a winner given my notoriously poor form with such matters. Though perhaps it is a smidgen narcissistic to believe that my actions could have a negative outcome on the results?

The six books I have read (in order) are

So….there are three books (marked with *) that I would be happy to see win the award and only one that I would genuinely grizzle about if it were to win (marked with ^). Until two days ago I was madly hoping for a win by Needle in a Haystack but having finished Death on a Galician Shore this week there’s now stiff competition in my heart. On balance though I think Needle offers a more well-rounded reading experience through tackling some weightier issues and being more tightly written. So I’m still crossing my fingers for a win by Mr Mallo and hope this hasn’t put the mockers on his chances. Of course Jean-François Parot’s The Saint-Florentin Murders, which I didn’t get around to reading, might be the best of them all and if it wins I’ll have to accept that the judges knew best, though it probably won’t stop me taking issue with them ;)

I am a little disappointed in this year’s shortlist as it doesn’t quite live up to the high quality of last year’s and I can think of a book or two that I’d have rather seen included (in particular Shuichi Yoshida’s Villain (Japan) and Liza Marklund’s Red Wolf (which even if it isn’t her best work is vastly superior to Three Seconds in my humble opinion). But I’m still genuinely thrilled that there is such a depth of translated crime fiction on offer to us pathetically monolingual readers and applaud the CWA for acknowledging this under-appreciated aspect of fiction which (hopefully) helps to ensure we will have more translations in the future.

 

The half-way point

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As of the end of June I had finished 84 books (and abandoned another eight) which is a pretty good start to the year. I consider anything I rate 3 stars or above to be reading time well spent and 70 (or 83%) of the books I’ve read have fallen into that category this year. While this is obviously good news for my reading it does make choosing ‘best of’ lists quite hard. Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise is, once again, collecting ‘best crime fiction books of the year so far’ lists and after much struggling I’ve come up with 10:

Left off this list (because if I didn’t stop at 10 I’d have listed the lot) were a whole load of great books. Most of these are listed on my 2011 reviews page (a few books have not been reviewed but that can’t be helped)

Review: Three Seconds by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström

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In brief the book is about two men. Piet Hoffmann is living a confusing triple life in which his wife thinks he works for a security firm when in reality he is former criminal and current undercover agent for the Swedish police and has infiltrated a Polish drug-running organisation. At the very beginning of the book he is present at a drug deal which goes wrong when one of the trigger-happy participants shoots the buyer who, it turns out, was another infiltrator (this time of the Danish police). Ewert Grens is the dysfunctional-but-brilliant policeman who is called in to investigate the death. Apparently his reputation and methods (which mostly involve lying on the floor and thinking) scare the willies out of the police people responsible for handling Hoffman. They are, as it happens, not as above board as one might hope for in one’s law enforcement officers and they work to ensure that Grens does not discover Hoffman’s presence at the shooting or the reason for that presence. Even if they have to sacrifice Hoffman to save their own skins.

Genre fiction tends to be driven by either plot or character or, if the reader is really lucky, both. For me, Three Seconds was neither. If anything it was driven, at funereal speed, by a series of excruciating details. I’ve been kept on the edge of my seat by books about banking, horse-racing and dentistry not because those subjects interest me in the slightest but because the author made me interested, at least for the span of the book. Here there were just details. Never. Ending. Details. About how to swallow lots of drug-filled condoms (and how to regurgitate them again), how to weigh and cut drugs, how to insert a digital recorder into your anus, how to take over the drug distribution channels inside a country’s prison system. At the end I am closer than I ever wanted to be to excelling at a career as a drug distributor but do not consider myself particularly well entertained.

There was probably a gripping story somewhere in Three Seconds but at an actual 56,820 seconds long it was bloody hard to find. This book needed a serious amount of editing, especially in its first two thirds. It also needed some characters with depth so that I cared enough to learn their fate. I admit I started the book not liking Grens due to his behaviour in the previous book which was at odds with the ‘honest cop’ persona created for him. Perhaps if you haven’t read that book or are more easily able to forget his behaviour in it you will not find Grens the pathetic hypocrite that I did. But seriously the man can barely function enough to hold a minute-long conversation for heaven’s sake so I found it a stretch to accept his depiction as brilliant or honest. Hoffman, in the end, is shallow too. There’s so much time taken up describing what he does that there’s little time for why and that is mostly of the whiney ‘none of this is my fault’ kind of stuff that bores me witless. If a character can’t be honest with himself when his thoughts are being depicted as Hoffman’s are early on in this book then I’m not terribly interested in anything else he does.

Although I did start the book feeling less than favourable to Ewert Grens I was really looking forward to it as its predecessor was one of only four 5-star reads I’ve had this year. That, and the fact the book has won many accolades in its own right including being shortlisted for the 2011 CWA International Dagger Award, is why I kept on listening long past the point at which I would normally have given up. But even though I persevered to the end I missed whatever it is that others have seen in this one. For me it read like one long information dump and lacked the connecting human warmth I look for. It probably didn’t help that there’s no victim to speak of and barely a female presence in the entire thing (seriously the woman with the biggest presence in the story has been in a vegetative state for twenty years). The final third of the book actually had a vaguely decent pace and storyline but by then I’m afraid the damage had been done for me and I sighed with relief when it was all over.

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This book has been reviewed far more favourably almost everywhere including at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime, How Mysterious, Kittling: Books, Mysteries in Paradise

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My rating 2/5
Author website http://www.roslund-hellstrom.com/
Translator Kari Dickson
Narrator Christopher Lane
Publisher Quercus [this edition 2011, original edition 2010]
ISBN n/a downloaded from audible.com
Length 15 hours 47 minutes
Format mp3
Book Series #5 in the Grens and Sundkvist series (though only 3 have been translated into English and Sundkvist plays only a very minor role in this outing)
Source I bought it

Review: Box 21 by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström

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Box 21 (published in the UK as The Vault) is not for the faint of heart. It’s not even for the mid-strength of heart. It is strong stuff. There were things about it that I thought were excellent, one thing that didn’t work, and many things that made me very, very angry. Basically, there’s not a lot of middle ground with this book.

Though dark and extraordinarily sad the plot is quite outstanding. There are two main threads, both involving Stockholm detective Ewert Grens. In the first Grens is on the trail of Jochum Lang, a criminal of the nastiest kind who is being released from prison on the morning the book opens and Grens’ sole objective is to send him back there as soon as possible. Twenty five years earlier Lang caused an injury to Grens’ colleague (who was also his girlfriend) which resulted in massive brain damage. She has been institutionalised and unable to recognise him or communicate with him since the incident and Grens s proven pathologically incapable of recovering from the incident himself. When Lang is sent to sort out a young heroin addict who has upset Lang’s criminal bosses, Grens sees an opportunity to arrest Lang again.

The second thread is one of the saddest stories I have ever read. Lydia Grajauskas and Alena Sljusareva are two Lithuanian girls who have been tricked into leaving their country for lives as whores (not the waitresses they believed they would be), the property of a man they call Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp. As the book opens the girls have been working for him for 3 years, servicing 12 clients every day and have become fractured souls in the process. On this particular day Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp beats Lydia so badly that neighbours call the police and she is hospitalised. This enables her to put her long-dreamed-of escape into action.

These threads unfold and intertwine expertly. The pace is fast, and the action credible. The ending is horrific but, in the best noir tradition, is entirely suitable. Although the violence and abysmal treatment of the two women is described in quite graphic detail it never felt gratuitous to me. There was no revelling in the descriptions here, merely a factual accounting of events and their impact that would surely make even the toughest reader weep. I have read books dealing with this theme before but none has touched me in quite the way this one did; keeping me awake, making me seethe with anger and feel impotent that there is nothing I can do about the real-world examples this fiction is surely based on.

The characters, even the minor ones, are vivid. Lydia and Alena are credible in addition to being heart-wrenching and that’s not an easy combination to achieve. But they will stay with me, especially Lydia, and her truth. Ewert Grens will, unfortunately, stay with me too. He is a self-absorbed, dysfunctional, cowardly, bigoted, hypocrite. I regularly fall in love with fictional characters but it’s very rare for me to fall in hate; Grens is an exception. While he is the worst of the bunch there isn’t a remotely decent male in the entire book, which is the only real qualm I have about it. I shy away from unintelligent generalisations about any population group and I know in my heart that all men are not the bastards they are collectively depicted as here (though I might have argued differently in the wee hours of this morning as my anger at the book’s resolution swirled around my un-sleeping brain).

I baulked at giving a book which made me feel so wretched, a book in which there is no lightness, no levity and never even the merest suggestion of a happy ending a five star-rating. But in the end I had no choice. Box 21 does everything I could ask of fiction: it transported me into another world, it introduced me to people I will never forget and it explored social issues thoughtfully and so credibly that I have lost sleep.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As I lay awake being haunted by Lydia and Alena last night I looked up what I could about real-world human trafficking. The best site I found was HumanTrafficking.Org which lists each country of the world in which trafficking takes place (either to or from) and lays out the legal and other efforts to control it. It didn’t do much for my insomnia but I did feel better informed. I’m also looking for a credible charity to donate to that works in this area. If anyone knows of one let me know, it would be good to find one close to home (having discovered that Australia is a large destination country for human traffickers) but I’ll consider them all.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This book has been reviewed at Kittling Books (where Cathy prompted me to put the book on my TBR shelf where it sat for 2 years plastered with a post-it that read “don’t read when sad”), Petrona and Reviewing the Evidence

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 5/5
Author website http://www.roslund-hellstrom.com/
Translator none named (so I have to assume the authors did it themselves as the book was originally published in Swedish)
Publisher Picador [2009]
ISBN 9780312655341
Length 393 pages
Format horrible floppy paperback with really thin yucky paper
Book Series It is the sequel to Beast which was also published in English but there are several earlier books which have not been translated (so far).
Source I bought it