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Gunnar Staalesen is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction, and one of the most venerable, in terms of the length of his career. His voice as a writer is also, in a way, the most distinctively Scandinavian. His hero, Varg Veum, is a private detective but also a former social worker. And his cases inevitably reflect his background. Cold Hearts, the latest Veum novel to be translated (by Don Bartlett, for Arcadia Books), deals with prostitution, drugs, and murder, but the essential subject is the one Veum most frequently confronts: the impact of adult crimes on the children directly or indirectly involved. In Cold Hearts (the use of the word "cold" seems too tempting for publishers to resist for far-norhtern crime fiction, but the title is in this case a direct translation of the original Norwegian, and very apt for the topic) a former girlfriend of Veum's son approaches him to try to find a missing colleague (like the former girlfrien...

Maria Lang (pseudonym for Dagmar Maria Lange) published her first murder mystery in 1949 and continued to bring out one a year for 42 more years, plus some "deckare," as the Swedish call mystery novels, for children. She was definitely influenced by the British crime genre, and was repeatedly called "the Swedish Agatha Christie," though she also makes references to Lord Peter Wimsey in her books. She was definitely in the cozy branch of the genre, and reportedly clashed with Per Wahlöö in a meeting of the Swedish society of crime novelists, and quit the organization over the direction in which the genre was heading. There's a Swedish 6-part TV series that was made from some of the novels, which is being shown now on the U.S. MhZ World View network. I looked for some of the novels, to compare them with the series, and was only able to find one in English translation (Kung liljeconvalje av Dungen, literally King Lily of the Valley of the Shady Grove, a phrase from...

Parker Bilal's first crime novel, The Golden Scales, languished on my tbr pile for the past year, until I saw a review of the 2nd novel in the series, which sent me back to the pile. Turned out to be a good decision. Bilal is a pseudonym for literary novelist Jamal Mahjoub, whose other work delves into cultural conflicts of various sorts, apparently. His new crime series, featuring Makana, an ex-cop from Sudan now working as a private detective in Cairo (in the years prior to the recent Egyptian revolution and coup). The Golden Scales starts with a large coincidence, linking a preface that shows us an Englishwoman in 1981 who is desperately looking for her daughter, lost in Cairo. The novel proper begins in 1998, when Makana (whose private detective business is more than a little less than succesful) is hired by a prominent Egyptian developer (with a criminal background) to find the missing star of the football team he owns. The coincidence is Makana's brief encounter with th...