Characters come to life in Norwegian murder mystery 'Don't Look Back'

Don’t Look Back

By Karin Fossum

Harcourt, 295 pp., $23

Scanning bookstore shelves, it's easy to believe that Anglo-Saxons have a monopoly on the mystery genre.

Edgar Allan Poe created the detective story with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens further developed the mystery novel, and the modern whodunit with a recurring detective came into full bloom in 1881, when Poe enthusiast Arthur Conan Doyle introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes with "A Study in Scarlet." Ransacking my memory and polling my friends who read mysteries, I came up with a list of almost exclusively British and American authors (and fictional detectives).

Occasionally -- but not often enough, clearly -- American readers get a glimpse of the wealth of mysteries being written and read outside the former British Empire. Since 1994, the sometimes silly but usually clever thrillers of Spaniard Arturo Perez-Reverte have been available in the United States. And to this day I am grateful to the professor who loaned me his 30-year-old copy of "Murder at the Savoy," a wonderful novel by Swedes Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, whose work has, sadly, been out of print in the United States for some time.

And now I can add Norwegian Karin Fossum to the list. "Don't Look Back" is her first US publication. And it's about time: Her earlier mystery novels have been translated into 16 languages and have been available in the United Kingdom for two years.

Inspector Konrad Sejer visits the village of Granittveien to investigate the disappearance of 6-year-old Ragnhild Album. She eventually reappears, unharmed. But she mentions that she saw a female body lying on the ground in the woods "quite still and with no clothes on."

The body turns out to be that of 15-year-old Annie Holland: A good athlete, good student, dutiful to her parents, kind to small children, Annie appears to have been a favorite with everyone. To complicate matters, there's no evidence of sexual assault.

And after Sejer starts asking questions, Annie's murder becomes only more puzzling. He unearths a lot of secrets. He finds a lot of unhappiness in Granittveien, and a long-ago crime or two. But nothing that adds up to a reason to kill Annie.

Admittedly, none of this is terribly original: Fictional crimes, like real-life ones, are simply variations on well-known themes. A mystery's effect lies in its power to make us forget that fact by making its characters seem real to us.

And Fossum's characters are painfully real. Raymond Lake -- who, with the child, found Annie's body -- is a man with Down syndrome and pedophilic impulses, the sole caregiver for his elderly father, and a poignant mixture of perversion and innocence.

Halvor Muntz, Annie's boyfriend, was an abused child and is now a wreck of a young man. But the emotional poverty of his life is fully apparent only when we realize how much his pallid relationship with Annie -- who kept him at arm's length, who always shut him out -- meant to him.

Solvi Holland is Annie's half sister and opposite: vain, boy crazy, and not very bright. As even Solvi's father says, "I would have understood it better if something had happened to Solvi. She's so unbelievably gullible."

And then of course there's Sejer himself. The reader is drawn in by the emotional engagement Sejer brings to his detective work, and can share his discomfort as he is forced to consider people he pities as suspects, as well as his strange sense of getting to know a girl he will never meet.

But Sejer's personal life alone would make a novel. He's a widower still grieving for his wife, a son who feels guilty about how seldom he visits his mother, a pet owner worried about the long hours his dog spends alone at home, and a father who can only watch helplessly as his son-in-law's career takes his daughter and grandson to another country.

Sejer belongs alongside the likes of Adam Dalgliesh and Inspector Morse -- a gifted detective and troubled man, whom I am grateful to have met and look forward to knowing better.