27th Street

Some time ago when I started reading the Wallander novels by Henning Mankell, I hadn’t realized there was a popular fiction genre known as Nordic Noir, featuring a host of messed up detectives. I haven’t read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson or any of his other books for that matter, nor have I seen the movie.  I’ve actually kind of avoided it, but I can’t exactly tell you why. It turns out there are quite a few “Nordic” authors of mystery fiction who have been gaining popularity. However, when I wandered through a local bookstore last week, I wasn’t looking for Nordic fiction. I don’t know exactly what I was looking for. I had started reading Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler in an e-book form a while ago, but that book really hasn’t caught my interest in the same way that Solomon Gursky was Here did, and so I’ve been avoiding it in the best way possible – by reading other books.

My eyes were attracted to the cover of The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen, sitting on a display rack in the fiction section of the bookstore. What attracted me was the first name of the author, Jussi, because I recalled that Jussi was the name of Kurt Wallander’s dog in the Mankell books and that Wallander had named Jussi after a Swedish opera singer. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. So I picked up the book. A Department Q Novel. On the back it talked about Carl Mørck, once one of Copenhagen’s best homicide detectives. He was shot up by some bad guys. One of his colleagues was killed and another paralyzed, and Carl was messed up with survivor guilt. The police force didn’t know what to do with him so they promoted him to head a new department – Department Q –  in which he was the only detective, a department that would focus on the coldest of the cold cases, the lost causes. He is given an assistant, a Syrian refugee named Assad who proves to be both talented and useful, as well as an interesting character.

Much of the charm of this book lies in the interplay between the cynical, damaged police detective Carl Mørck and his unlikely assistant, and their ability to piece together a case years after a squad of investigators had given up. The plot is highly unlikely but inventive and cleverly presented and from about a third of the way through the book becomes a page turner.  I enjoyed the book, and when I’m looking for more light fiction of the mystery-detective variety, I’ll happily read more by Jussi Adler-Olsen.