Julia Keller, Cultural Critic at the Chicago Tribune has written a wonderful assessment of the Scandinavian Literary Crime Scene. Read: Tortured tales of Nordic mystery leave ‘Beowulf’ far behind
A Top 10 Crime Fiction List from C.J. Box
January 8th, 2010 § 0
LINK: From guardian.co.uk, Wyoming writer CJ Box’s top 10 US crime novelists who ‘own’ their territory in which he gives us his thoughts on everything from Carl Hiaasen’s Florida to Sara Paretsky’s Chicago, and identifies the US’s best criminal tour guides.
Steig Larsson’s Widow still not receiving royalties
January 7th, 2010 § 0
The Financial Mail Women’s Forum recently posted a good article on the Stieg Larsson estate. How can it be that the widow of the second-bestselling author in the world isn’t seeing any of the royalties? Read the full article The Girl who didn’t Inherit a Fortune: Widow of bestselling Swedish author Stieg Larsson has not seen a penny of his £20m.
January 2010 New books: Snow Angels by James Thompson
January 2nd, 2010 § 0
Snow Angels by James Thompson.
Release Date: January 7, 2010
Publisher: Penguin/Putnam Adult
This is the first book in a new series featuring Finnish Police Inspector Kari Vaara by an American-born writer who has lived in Finland for many years.
The publisher’s release information says:
“Kaamos: Just before Christmas, the bleakest time of the year in Lapland. The unrelenting darkness and extreme cold above the Arctic Circle drive everyone just a little insane . . . perhaps enough to kill.
A beautiful Somali immigrant is found dead in a snowfield, her body gruesomely mutilated, a racial slur carved into her chest. Heading the murder investigation is Inspector Kari Vaara, the lead detective of the small-town police force. The vicious killing may have been a hate crime, a sex crime-or one and the same. Vaara knows he must keep this potentially explosive case out of the national headlines or else it will send shock waves across Finland, an insular nation afraid to face its own xenophobia.
The demands of the investigation begin to take their toll on Vaara and his marriage. His young American wife, Kate, newly pregnant with their first child, is struggling to adapt to both the unforgiving Arctic climate and the Finnish culture of silence and isolation. Meanwhile Vaara himself, haunted by his rough childhood and failed first marriage, discovers that the past keeps biting at his heels: He suspects that the rich man for whom his ex-wife left him years ago may be the killer.
Endless night can drive anyone to murder. ”
Considering the great crime fiction to come out of Scandinavia recent years, this book looks to be an exciting read and a welcome addition to the body of Finnish crime fiction available in English. With the exception of the Detective Sergeant Timo Harjunpaa novels by Matti Yrjänä Joensuu (first, The Priest of Evil, followed by To Steal Her Love) there are in fact very few available titles in English coming from or even being set in Finland.
Moral deduction
September 1st, 2009 § 0
GK Chesterton
I like crime detection by moral deduction, a technique practiced by Father Brown in the G K Chesterton stories…After a decade on the probate bench, I began to see the characters in will and trust contests as moral archetypes: the prideful one; the envious one; the angry one; the greedy one; etc. And I do believe that Chesterton has a point, that we are governed by our wretched excesses of the spirit, that our spirits are visible through our actions, and that we can divine a great deal of the workings of a crime from a keen observation of the character of the suspect, or the characters of multiple suspects. And in the probate arena, these qualities are easily observable, as indeed these qualities may lead to heinous crimes, attested by Agatha Christie’s plots as well as many other writers.
Welcome to Hypercrime
August 30th, 2009 § 1
Hypercime is a new blog-format magazine for the Crime Fiction devotee. It is our hope that this will be a fun, vibrant and insightful source of information for enthusiasts of all varieties of crime fiction, as well as a place to get news on upcoming book releases, author interviews, retrospectives, and other features.
My name is Leland Buck, and I am launching Hypercrime because I’m a writer, and a former bookseller, and I believe that as long as there are at least two people in this world, there will be crime fiction. I find it fascinating that despite all the advances in science and technology in the last century that the stories of Conan Doyle, Christie, Marsh, and Sayers (to mention only a few) still thrill and delight. No advance in science or technology can eradicate good and evil, and the rise of the computer and DNA sequencing, like fingerprinting a century before, only add to the flavor of intrigue and the need for smart sleuths who can still plumb the depths of depravity to find their quarry. I’d like to believe that for every person in the world who wants to shoot, stab, poison, or in some other way assist in the demise of another human being, that there are a thousand people who would wish to read how their favorite sleuth tracked down the murderous villian. (And yes it does strike me that 1 in 1000 is a frightful but not implausible ratio.) Crime fiction is about the good and the bad in all of us, and as such is a window through which the world can be viewed in all its darkness but without having to discard our belief that the good guy will always prevail.
And who are these GOOD GUYS? Crime fiction gratifies us not only because of the complexity of deviousness of the crime. The modern crime novel can have any hero, male or female, of any race, religion, native language, or from any country. The hero can even be a serial killer.
Crime Fiction is a very broad, very diverse classification which has come to include a number of character types, and spans numerous classifications and genres. This too only adds to the excitement.
So, whether you are an occasional reader, or a committed fan, we welcome you to subscribe to our RSS feed, add us to your Google Reader, or just visit us from time to time to see what’s new in Crime Fiction.
