Crime and the world

Agatha Christie, PD James, Raymond Chandler — the world of crime fiction that was once about murders in English cities and countryside or gritty American hard-boiled detectives was blasted open in 2005, with the publication of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . Reading crime was never the same again.

As the years rolled by, our bookshelves groaned with books by Scandinavian, Italian, Japanese, French, Korean and other new and exotic names, available in translations. With the help of better translations and robust marketing these books have become a part of our crime fiction reading universe.

The writing in this new world was as much about building atmosphere and placing unusual characters in it, as it was about mystery and detection. Take Keigo Higashino, the Japanese writing sensation who dazzled with his debut The Devotion of Suspect X . Higashino is a master in creating memorable characters.

In his new novel Newcomer , police detective Kyoichiro Kaga is investigating the death of a woman, found strangled in her apartment. The book, gently written, unfolds episodically. As each suspect is interviewed, his or her world is prised open by Kaga. There is a fascinating cast of characters — a feuding pair of mother and daughter-in-law, a pregnant woman at a pastry shop, a clock repair shop’s owner whose dog provides a clue. Newcomer is clever and intricate with wonderful dialogues and descriptions of Tokyo.

Larsson’s Millennium series also opened the floodgates of Nordic Noir for readers the world over. Set in typically dark and desolate Scandinavian landscapes — even the cities seem gloomy and mysterious — the detectives are tortured souls dealing with the worst of human depravities. In The Katharina Code by Jørn Lier Horst, set in Norway, Detective Wisting is obsessed by the 25-year-old unsolved case of the disappearance of Katharina Haugen. Why did she leave behind a partially packed suitcase, what had she tried to say with the string of numbers and shapes she had doodled on a writing pad? The case comes alive again when new crime detection technology points to Martin Haugen, Katharina’s husband, in another unsolved kidnapping case. Twisted, atmospheric, terse, The Katharina Code is vintage Nordic Noir.

In fact, cold cases coming alive is an interesting new thread running through recent novels. In Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Department Q series, Carl Mørck, a homicide detective in Copenhagen, is now tasked with solving cold cases. A case takes up his attention — that of a politician who had disappeared. With the help of Assad, his somewhat astonishing assistant from Syria, he finds more conspiracies than anyone had imagined. Delightfully translated, with flashes of humour, The Keeper of Lost Causes is a great start to the Department Q novels leading up to the seventh and latest, The Scarred Woman .

Crime writing today is also about delving into some very disturbed minds. Tana French, the Irish-American writer, had done this earlier with her Dublin Murder Squad books. In Wych Elm , a standalone novel, she tells the story of happy-go-lucky Toby, who is the victim of a brutal assault. When he takes refuge in his childhood home Ivy House to recover, the past comes flooding back with the discovery of a skeleton stuffed inside a huge wych elm tree in the garden.

French peels open Toby’s mind gradually, and layer by layer, one encounters memories that had been left to fester and rot, much like the body in the tree. Slow, but unrelenting, Wych Elm is as much the story of a crime as the unravelling of a man.

Many books now also place this gradual revelation of the mind against a stunning and bleak landscape. As settings for dark and evil crimes go, Iceland, with its endless winter landscape, is just perfect. Ragnar Jonasson’s latest in the Dark Iceland series is Whiteout . A young woman has fallen or thrown herself off a cliff near a lighthouse. What makes it bizarre is that both her mother and young sister had died in exactly the same way at the same spot. As Christmas draws near and ice and snow pile up everywhere, the story takes almost an Agatha Christie-like tone.

From the cold, isolated extreme of Iceland, Jane Harper’s novels take us into the Australian outback — shimmering with heat and unforgiving. Her latest, The Lost Man , begins with the discovery of a man’s body at the old Stockman’s Grave in the midst of the great desert. Puzzlingly, his car, in perfect working condition and stocked with food and water, is not more than 10 miles away. As his estranged brother starts asking questions, old family wounds reopen and forgotten crimes come to light. And all through this the bush country looms out there, beguiling with its own stories and myths.

The journey around the world with crime fiction does not end here. There are the old masters of Nordic Noir to turn to — Håkan Nesser, Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell. Then there is Qiu Xialong’s 10-book Inspector Chen series set in China, Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series from Italy, Leila Slimani’s page-turners from France. There are interesting books set in India by authors such as Jerry Pinto ( Murder in Mahim ), Sujata Massey, Abir Mukherjee, Tarquin Hall and more...the list is long.

Written originally in English or translated, readers everywhere now are treated to stunning glimpses of other worlds and other people — all united by the darkness lurking in the human soul.

Sudeshna Shome Ghosh is an editor based in Bengaluru

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