Dale Stahl wrote

Since basketball season is done and the rush to Advanced Placement exams is just beginning, Dale had time to drop a note to this little bit of the world.

Jo Nesbø is really good. His main character is a Nowegian detective, flawed but liekable, Harry Hole, alcoholic and a guy you just like despite it. Series of books starting with The Bat, which I have never found, including The Redbreast and The Devil's Star and The Snowman. Loved those three and highly recommend them.

I like this guy (Hole) better than Mankel’s Wallander (at least the later versions; Mankel getting a bit pedantic in his old age!)

The latest book by Nesbø is The Headhunters. My wife is currently enjoying it and I am eager to grab it when she is done! Not Harry Hole but intriguing suspense.

Read a great book by Fred Vargas featuring Commisarie Adamsburg, French Detective. Liked him, liked his team, liked the story of a monstrous old superstitious belief fueling a modern killer, and am going to read some of the older books in this series. French cops, like in Louise Penny’s novels in Montreal area, are always eating and drinking something delectable; makes one want to sip a drink and have a snack while reading!

Finally, if no one has done this, I highly highly recommend reading all of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammet’s works. The Thin Man, outstanding period piece. Great dialogue, great mystery great picture of America in 1932 or so. Chandler is the definitive hard boiled mystery writer. Philip Marlowe is my hero. I love every one of those books. The Long Goodbye, The High Window, The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely. Dialogue amazing, stories intriguing, must reads for any mystery fan!

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Bird Loomis and I wrote about The Snowman and Jo Nesbø, and we both liked it. So did most critics.

Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, aka Fred Vargas

 

I'll have to add Fred Vargas to my "to read" list. When I saw her photo, she wasn't the Fred I expected to see. She's also an archaeologist.

As for the classics, I remember well going back and reading The Thin Man books. I think it was in the days of actually-printed-on-paper-and-mailed newsletter, Reading. It was a treat as are the old movies. And the old movies of the Chandler books are also wonderful. I second the recommendations.

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Fast books, slow books

Bird Loomis writes from a Democratic enclave (Lawrence) in a Republican utopia-to-be (Kansas). Luckily, the Kansans still allow the importation of books from the outside -- even those from outside the USA. And they allow e-mail out of Kansas as well. Thank you, Bird.

Over the past few months I’ve read five books by two authors, neither of whom I’d read before. Jo Nesbo is the better known, with his series of Norwegian novels (deftly translated) about detective Harry Hole. The other is Rebecca Pawel, a native New Yorker, who writes a fascinating series of mysteries about a Guardia lieutenant in Franco-era Spain of the 1940s.

I’ve come to enjoy both authors immensely, but my approach to the books has been quite different. Nesbo writes long, fast-paced, intricately plotted mysteries. I thought that I’d just about had it with alcoholic detectives, but Harry H. has won me over, in part because his drinking is not a constant, and it’s integral to his character and his up-and-down personal life. I haven’t read his work in any particular order, which is a little, but not too, problematic. I find that I read the long Nesbo books at a whirlwind pace. I start, and even if I’m not on vacation I find it hard to put the book down. (Not quite the 6-day Girl with the Dragon Tattoo marathon for all three books, but close.)

Pawel, on the other hand, is a “few pages a night before nodding off” kind of author for me. Like KC Constantine’s Western Pennsylvania novels about Rocksburg and its fictional police chief, Mario Balzic, Pawel’s books are less mysteries and more character studies. And what a set of characters – most notably Lieutenant Tejada, from an aristocratic, Fascist family, and his wife, who comes from a communist background and constantly makes life challenging for the family (as does Tejada). Still, they love each other and their son, and the series develops these relationships slowly and unpredictably. They genius of Pawel’s work is to make a sympathetic character (Tejada) out of someone whom most readers would ordinarily detest. But like Harry Hole, Wallander, John Rebus, and others, he is a good cop and, ultimately, a fair-minded individual.

I think I read the Pawel books slowly because I need time to keep following the various characters, placed back in history, but mostly because I want to ponder the relationships of Tejada with his wife, child, family, and social class. To be sure, there is a mystery to be solved, but the books’ resolutions are more about how personal ties evolve than the solving of a crime. In many ways, there is more to savor here than in the latest Connelly or Child or Nesbo.

In the end, I have no desire to read just “fast” books or only “slow” ones – but good ones. Nesbo hooked me almost immediately; Pawel took more time, but ultimately both made me go looking for more volumes, ever eager to read more.

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• Jo Nesbo's web site
• My thoughts about The Snowman
• Monica Hesse's profile of Jo Nesbo in the Washington Post
• Kjetil Stensvik Østil's interview with Jo Nesbo in The Browser

• Ilya Marritz' profile of Rebecca Pawel in The Sun (New York)
• Steven Torres' interview with Rebecca Pawel on the blog named after him

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ála Stephen King

If Stephen King can make a classic car into an evil symbol, why not a snowman? Bill Watterson did just the opposite with snowmen in his comic strips. Jo Nesbø followed the Stephen King model in his 2010 book, The Snowman.
When I saw Nesbø's name on the shelf of new books, I recognized it. (That's the other reason I didn't need my "to read" list when I last went to the library.) Once again, I don't remember how Nesbø's fiction was recommended. Should I be keeping track of that too? Well, if you recommended this Norwegian writer, thank you.
The Snowman is a murder mystery focused on the search for "Norway's fist serial killer." According to a creepy Wikipedia article, there was one Norwegian serial killer, but nothing like the one in Nesbø's book.
The good guy in Nesbø's fiction is "antihero police investigator, Harry Hole," according to the book jacket. He gets a partner in this book who is a stunningly attractive young woman from across the Norwegian mountains (and cultural divide, evidently). There are several comments in the book about how the natives of Bergen are so different from the people of Oslo. Who knew that some Bergensians don't really think of Oslo as a capital city. Or that Oslo natives look down on people from Bergen. In spite of the prejudices in the Oslo cop shop, every male cop in the book except Hole drools over (and sometimes on) Katrine Bratt.
The killer the unlikely pair pursue seems to kill on the day of the first snowfall and builds a decidedly non-Watterson snowman at the site of the murder. As things progress, parts of the victims' bodies become parts of the nasty snowmen. (Maybe they were really snowwomen, since all but one victim was female. But Nesbø doesn't go there.)
The red herrings in the plot are good. At least twice I was tempted to think that Hole and Bratt had found the killer. But I could tell from the number of pages I hadn't read yet, that the story wasn't over. And the last line of the book suggests that the story isn't over yet. Look for a sequel.
I generally liked the book. Most of the story telling is good. The characters are interesting, although not as well-defined as I'd like them. But, there's too much story telling. I skimmed through the end of the book as Nesbø went on and on about the background of the killer. It was as though he'd gone to all the work of creating a back story and he couldn't leave it out of the book. I think he could have left it out.
Nesbø, who is described on the book jacket as "a musician, songwriter, economist, and author" has had three other books published in the USA. I think I'll keep his name on my "to read" list and look for another of his books someday. There's also a film based on his novel, Headhunters, that premiered in Norway and Germany this summer.
Have you read The Snowman or another of Nesbø's books? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world about your reactions.
BTW: Does anybody know what the Scandinavian "ø" does to pronunciation? Or what it's purpose is? It's a pain to type on an English keyboard. Rather like the little circle above some vowels (å). That's a mystery to me as well.

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• The author's web site
  
• Wendy Lesser's reflections on Jo Nesbø in Slate
  
• Barry Forshaw's review in The Indepdent (UK)

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