The Keeper of Lost Causes - Jussi Adler-Olson

I find it deeply disturbing to find a book in my Kindle library (which Amazon politely tells me I purchased on August 29, 2014) that I have no idea why or how I bought it (or even when, but Amazon tells me what I actually do not, did not … know).

I suppose this was when Tony was going through his “Nordic detective tales” phase.  He did buy me several of these murder-under-the-midnight-sun series, including Wallander; maybe starting with Wallander, I don’t remember.   I discovered Stieg Larsson all on my own.   (NB the only film version of this to watch is with Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube, and Peter Andersson, produced by Yellow Bird in Sweden … as close to perfect, as could possibly be). 

Anyhoo …. Published in 2011, long after Silence of the Lambs, with a fairly Lamby-endgame, that stretches suspense to tedium as one drags oneself to the close.   The central characters hold your attention.   The downfall is a plot that begins unlikely, develops to convoluted, devolves into irrelevances which churn  up so much chaff that the who-what-why of the murder(s)(?) becomes clear way to soon, and winds up far too late.  Contrived dead-end inaction.

Carl Mørck is a lovely, world weary, character, and I may at some juncture try another of these solely for that reason.  However, if your looking for something Nordic-y; you know, all gray seas and skies, drizzle, snow and slush, then Larsson, and Wallander first.   It is striking how bleak, ugly and depressing these writers see their reality, their fellow men, and I assume, themselves.  (One is led to observe that if Shakespeare actually knew any Danes, and they were at all like this writer and his characters, that Hamlet is, as I always suspected, a man with a hilarious sense of humor who is not in fact melancholy, but a cynic – a very, very funny one.)  There is an overwhelming sense of death by cold, pressed concrete unloveliness, places where blades of grass rise only to die.   It is always winter, never summer, and spring is muddy and chilly … and so are the villains … and the heroes. 

Maybe that’s what Tony found so compelling; the villains and the heroes are at their core, the same.  Driven, single minded, unattractive persons with torturous pasts who differentiate themselves only in how they act out their peculiar obsessions.  Is the dividing line between “good” and “evil” that simple? Can we only tell the difference by whether we hurt ourselves or others as we wrestle and war with our particular demons?