The Night Man

Jørn Lier Horst

Translated by Anne Bruce

Michael Joseph, £18.99

 

Review by Rosemary Goring

There is a formula that few writers of crime fiction dare defy: start the novel with a gruesome discovery or event – dog-walkers are the commonest finders of corpses, a good reason never to get a dog – and only once the reader’s pulse is racing can the storytelling begin.

Few are better at the gut-wrenching opener than Jo Nesbø, but then his imagination verges on the sadistic. For the most part, the authors of Scandi-noir – a genre distinct from all others – are gentler on their readers. Certainly, there’s less sense of them revelling in the gore that drips from their pages.

In recent years, Norwegian crime writer Jørn Lier Horst has taken on the mantle once enjoyed by the late Henning Mankell. A former police detective, Horst began his literary career with a novel based on a troubling case he had once worked on. That debut, Key Witness, introduced the detective William Wisting who, 17 novels later, remains at the helm. Horst has written other books, including many for children, but it is the Wisting novels that have brought him an international audience. BBC Four’s adaptations promise to spread his fame further.

Horst’s latest in the series, The Night Man, is translated by the Scottish translator Anne Bruce, and demonstrates why he has become so popular. It also typifies what makes Scandi noir distinctive.

It would not be fair to say that weather is the most important element in the Scandic signature, but it certainly plays a part. One of the pleasures of a crime novel set in Norway, Sweden, Finland or their neighbours, is that even before a crime is committed, it comes with an inbuilt shiver: an atmospheric backdrop of sleet, snow, ice and fogs that make the British variety look as scary as dry ice.

The Night Man begins as the Norwegian coastal town of Larvik – Wisting’s beat – is waking up. The place is shrouded in a fog so deep a bookseller walking to work can barely see a few steps ahead.

The silence is eery, but then she hears the slam of a car door, the sound of hurrying feet, and grows even more uneasy.

Moments later she discovers something that will haunt her for the rest of her days. In the flower beds of the town square a severed head is displayed on a wooden stake. As if that were not horror enough, it belongs to a young girl.

So starts a case that will bring Chief Inspector Wisting as close to death as he has yet come, as it does his intrepid daughter Line. Both are still struggling in the aftermath of Wisting’s wife’s death.

Wisting’s son Thomas, to whom he is not close, is serving with the Norwegian forces in Afghanistan, his absence giving the detective time to reflect on his parental neglect down the years, and prompting guilt at the special bond he has always had with Line.

They make an unusual pairing, and one of the reasons Horst’s novels are distinctive. Unlike so many fictional detectives, there is nothing dysfunctional about Wisting, who is calm, thoughtful and decent.

Line is the driven one, a journalist with her eye on a scoop. Working for the country’s top-selling newspaper in Oslo, whose deadlines are punishing, she will neither eat nor sleep if it impedes her progress.

While Wisting solves cases by police work, Line’s methods are less formal. Sometimes they are more effective, even though she takes preposterous risks few journalists would consider. As Wisting’s team begins to trace who the victim is, and why she has been so viciously murdered, Line arrives from the capital and opens her own lines of enquiry. The juxtaposition of these separate, occasionally overlapping investigations, makes for a clever plaiting of plot, quickening the pace of discovery, and mixing up the mood.

One of the Chief Inspector’s strong points is his conscience. The Night Man, like Horst’s other novels, is a conduit into a Norway few tourists will ever encounter. Early suggestions, based on her ethnicity, that the teenage girl has been a victim of an honour killing are overturned when a second body is discovered; what gradually transpires is just as dreadful, and with grim implications for young and vulnerable asylum seekers.

It is not normally recommended to turn to the last paragraph of a book before reading, but in this case, that is where the inspiration for the novel is found. “621 asylum-seeker children disappeared,” reads the headline in a news item, which continues: “Oslo (Norwegian Press Agency): Since 2000, 621 children have gone missing from Norwegian reception centres for asylum-seekers.”

“Only a very few of them have been traced. Last year, 18 children disappeared from reception centres in Norway without giving a forwarding address.

“Whether or not the cases are investigated is dependent on which police district the child lives in, and in many cases no investigation is initiated at all.”

The fate of these youngsters is both scandalous and tragic, as Horst painstakingly reveals.

Behind his plain, pragmatic style, the author’s anger is palpable. Introducing a believable cast of suspects, police, informants and peripheral characters who quickly assume a central role, he carries the story on with the vigour of someone who knows how police work proceeds.

Even when the plot takes his detective to Afghanistan, there is no time for padding a sentence or a scene. Horst’s writing piles on information and theories, occasionally backed by statistics and figures, not least of the economics of the narcotics trade.

His style can be direct to the point of abrupt, and at times he diminishes the full impact of a shattering event by cantering through it with almost casual haste. Nevertheless, the concentration his fast-moving investigation demands, and the speed at which he writes manages to convey the nature of how Wisting and Line both work.

Although the plot of The Night Man is at times uneven, and the writing can be repetitive, it offers a powerful portrait of a barbaric criminal underworld that exploits society’s most vulnerable, and brings shame on the West.