Life after Larsson: Two new Euro-crime novels attract American readers
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Henning Mankell: Swedish yes, but far from Larsson
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The steady output of American crime novel series with hackneyed heroes and predictable plots is overloading the book shelves these days.
Readers must becoming jaded because they are turning in large numbers to inventive works from abroad for something more stimulating. I offer the "Millennium Trilogy" of Sweden's late Stieg Larsson and its enormous sales as proof.
There are plenty of other worthy choices reaching our shores as well. Here are two such candidates.
By Kate Atkinson, (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $24.99)
Great Britain's Kate Atkinson is among the select few of literary novelists who are turning their talents to the crime book format.
Booker Prize winner John Banville shows the way with his Dublin-based novels written under the pen name Benjamin Black. Ms. Atkinson retains her own name for a quartet of works ostensibly about the efforts of private detective Jackson Brodie, but in truth about larger subjects.
The title of the fourth comes from a lesser-known poem by Emily Dickinson, then concludes with the often-cited "Hope Is a Thing With Feathers." Ms. Atkinson makes no excuses for her taste in the finer parts of the English-language tradition.
It's a tradition she's steeped in as well as talented in using. Her language is witty, stylish and droll with a few sharp digs aimed at contemporary society.
"He was a big guy, with a mean expression on his face, barrel-chested like a Rottweiler. Add to that the shaved head, the weight-lifting muscles and a St. George's flag tattooed on his left biceps, twinned with a half-naked woman inked into his right forearm, and, voila, the perfect English gentleman."
Enter Brodie, a half-hearted detective with a messy past that includes bad luck or bad choices with women, and the English gentleman is soon writhing in pain after Brodie decks him for abusing a little dog called "The Ambassador."
First Published March 27, 2011 12:00 am
