Påskekrim – Norway’s crime weekend

From regular guest blogger Colm Redmond

A high proportion of Clothes In Books’ followers may be wishing they lived in Norway, this weekend. Since 1923 there’s been a tradition there of publishing and reading crime stories over Easter, and latterly of dramatising them on radio and tv. This may sound like a joke, but it’s not. Påskekrim, or Easter Crime, is a real thing.

Some sources claim the origin lies in an April Fool. It was certainly a publicity stunt: a crime novel was advertised with a bogus front-page newspaper story, on Easter Sunday, reporting an overnight mail-train robbery as though it were a real crime. It caused a sensation, and big sales for a novel in the supposed off-season for publishing, and started an annual trend that continues. In 1923, Easter Day was April 1, but I don’t see any other evidence for its being expressly an April Fool.

This Easter on NRK (the Norwegian equivalent of BBC) they’re showing a couple of Poirots for Påskekrim and already during Holy Week they’ve shown all four episodes of Hinterland, the highly-regarded Welsh contribution to the Subtitled Crime genre that was on BBC Wales and S4C last year. Infuriatingly, it has still not been on UK TV apart from that, but it finally starts on BBC4 on April 28.

I watch a lot of crime fiction on TV, particularly the modern Scandinavian strand, but rarely read it. To celebrate Påskekrim 2014, I decided to read a Norwegian crime book. This one features a middle-aged male detective, but unusually, he is neither particularly grumpy nor an unreconstructed male chauvinist and overactive womaniser: he seems to be just nice, as opposed to “nice despite these so-called charming little human weaknesses” as is the norm.

the book: In The Darkness by Karin Fossum

published 1995 as Evas Øye,  English translation 2012 by James Anderson

[Inspector Konrad Sejer is honouring a promise to give a young boy – whose father disappeared some months ago – a ride in a police car.]


‘It’s so quiet in the garage,’ the boy said suddenly.

‘Yes. A pity Mum can’t do car repairs.’

‘Mmm. Dad was always in there doing things. In his spare time.’

‘And all those nice smells,’ Sejer grinned, ‘oil and petrol and suchlike.’

‘He promised me a boiler suit,’ he went on, ‘just like his one. But he didn’t have time before he disappeared. The boiler suit had fourteen pockets in it. I was going to wear it when I was working on my bike. It’s called a mechanic’s suit.’

‘Yup, a mechanic’s suit, that’s right. I’ve got one myself, but mine’s blue, and it’s got FINA on the back. I’m not sure it’s got fourteen pockets. Eight or ten perhaps.’

‘The blue ones are nice, too. Do they have them in children’s sizes?’ he asked precociously.

‘I’m not sure about that, but I’ll definitely look into it.’...

[Eva is talking over lunch to a childhood friend she’s just bumped into after 25 years.]

‘Naomi Campbell – you’ve seen her, haven’t you – she appeared in something thigh-length and minced out on to the catwalk on the skinniest legs I’ve ever seen. The woman looks as if she’s made entirely of PVC. When I look at those kind of girls, I wonder if they ever go to the toilet and shit like normal people.’

Eva exploded with laughter and sprayed vanilla sauce over the tablecloth.

observations: Nine of the ten subsequent Sejer books were published in English before they bothered getting around to In The Darkness (the Norwegian title literally translates as Eva’s Eye). It’s fair to say that fans do not rate it at the top of Karin Fossum’s oeuvre, but I thought it would make sense to start with the first in the series. It’s better on story than writing, as you will gather from the extracts - unless it’s a bad translation. Fossum was a successful poet before publishing this first novel, but I can’t say you’d guess.

The narrative is quite blunt. Conventional and chronological, except for a lengthy flashback in the middle that’s neatly justified by its being the account someone produces when interrogated. Many incidents that can’t possibly be Relevant To The Plot are described in a level of detail I find bizarre and unjustified, but then… I am not really the target audience.

Nonetheless I enjoyed it a lot. I’d guess it would appeal to lovers of female US procedural writers, rather than Agatha Christie fans. No red herrings or scatterings of clues, the point is not particularly the reader’s attempts to work out the solution. But it’s distinctly un-violent and inexplicit by the standards of those fat blood-soaked American books, and missing the endless pages about crimefighters’ home lives. So I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to.

Unfortunately I seem to be unable to find a single picture of a man in overalls on the entire internet, so we’ll have to make do with Sophia Loren in the outfit she wore when working as a weldor between acting jobs in 1954. Probably. (Weldor is a real word; in fact welder, very strictly speaking, is the wrong word for a person who welds. Eutectic is a word too: it describes a kind of welding process. Those particular kind of welders/ors had a National Association who chose Miss Loren to be their pinup.)

The other picture is of course Naomi Campbell, also in fishnets, wearing her cosiest winter coat, not particularly looking like she’s made out of PVC. Although, to be fair, I’ve seen pics where she does.

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