Death in a Cold Climate

I returned last week from a short but amazing trip to the Arctic Circle, of all places, and have now just about thawed out enough to blog about it. The plan was to fly to Tromso in northern Norway, and then take a short cruise on a ship delightfully called the Trollfjord in search of the often elusive Northern Lights and the special character of places like the North Cape.

All I really knew about Tromso before I arrived was that it is home to a major university at which my much-missed friend Bob Barnard was professor of English literature for a number of years. Bob wrote a book set in Tromso, and I dug out the paperback copy of Death in a Cold Climate that he inscribed for me a good many years ago, and re-read it. With great enjoyment, I may add. It's a crisp story, told with the economy of style that I discussed here a couple of weeks ago. The plot, concerning Inspector Fagermo's hunt for the killer of a mysterious young Englishman, is quite different from Nordic noir, but there are a number of scenes, notably the final one, that pack a punch. Bob hit on a very clever way of concealing the culprit. And there is plenty of that trademark Barnard humour, especially in his portrayal of a disreputable English professor...

As for Tromso, it was bathed in sunshine when the plane touched down. The city occupies an island, and I found the landscape quite magical. A windy walk on a long bridge took me to the modern and architecturally dramatic Arctic Cathedral, which is mentioned in Bob's book, and then to the cable car which reaches up to the top of the snowy mountain overlooking the city. Standing outside at the top in a gale did take some doing (but was preferable to the alternative of plunging a few hundred feet) but was made worthwhile by some stunning vistas.

It's more than twenty years since I was last in Norway, and then I kept to the south, places like Bergen, Oslo and some of the fjords. But I was impressed with Tromso and could see why Bob and Louise enjoyed their time there. The atmosphere of the frozen North is quite inspirational, and although unlike Bob I won't be writing a Norwegian novel, I did come up with an idea for a short story influenced by something I came across during my visit to the "gateway to the Arctic". Just need to find time to write it...

Death in a Cold Climate -review

Death in a Cold Climate is a new guide to Scandinavian crime fiction published by Barry Forshaw, a highly experienced journalist who is one of our most prolific commentators on contemporary crime fiction. Barry’s various publications include a massive two volume encyclopaedia about British crime fiction, to which I contributed several essays, and he was kind enough to write a foreword to the recent Murder Squad anthology Best Eaten Cold. He also produced The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction.

Barry has been an enthusiast for crime fiction in translation for years, and when I heard that he was publishing a book on this subject, I was keen to get my hands on it. It is published by Palgrave Macmillan, who have produced a number of learned tomes about the genre over the years, and Barry’s style of writing here is, therefore, a little more academic than in, say, The Rough Guide. But it’s still perfectly accessible.

He makes a number of interesting points – for instance that “the rendering of Scandinavian literature into English offers problems to their translators that are subtly different to those encountered in other languages”. This is something I hadn’t thought about previously, and there are fascinating comments about the nature of translation from the wonderfully named Sarah Death, a senior literary figure in Sweden as well as a translator, that I’d like to explore further one of these days.

The emphasis is very much on books written in the last twenty years or so, and as a result there’s no mention of writers such as Jan Ekstrom, Ella Griffiths and Poul Orum, who may be in danger of being overlooked by present day fans (though this is where bloggers can come in: I recall, for instance, that Maxine, aka Petrona, has highlighted Griffiths’ work on her terrific blog.) But any writer of a book such as this needs to be selective - there is really no alternative. Barry Forshaw has produced a valuable guide to a branch of the genre that has become deservedly popular andI wish him every success with it.