REYKJAVIK NIGHTS + INTO OBLIVION – a twofer by Arnaldur Indridason

Yowyow. Say that, and you're speaking Icelandic. I learned it from Ransy, a photographer at the newspaper we worked at. I overheard her on the phone to a relative in (or from) Iceland. She was speaking an unfamiliar tongue. I asked and she explained after hanging up. She'd been saying yowyow a lot during the conversation. I asked her what it meant. “Yes?” she said. “Yowyow,” I said again. “What does yowyow mean?” “Yes,” she said again. “Yes? Yowyow means yes in Icelandic?” She laughed. “Yes, it means yes.”

Remembering the charm of this little language lesson might explain my hesitation before deciding to try one of Arnaldur Indridason's Inspector Erlendur mystery novels. For one, I suspected my tongue might get tangled in what's left of my molars asking a librarian to put anything by one of Iceland's most popular authors on hold for me. Overriding this potential nightmare was my difficulty in assuming I could accept at all seriously a fictional police officer saying yowyow in any but the most comically painful circumstances.

I needn't have worried about the yowyow, although I did get a few laughs from the little quirks in Victoria Cribbs's translation, such as “drink-driving'” and “He was in his shirtsleeves, his flies were undone...” On second thought, I suppose more than one fly might have to be negotiated with the layered clothing Icelanders presumably wear during that arctic rim country's sub-zero, blizzardy winters. Then again, who but the keenest-eyed of police inspectors in any climate might notice such lapses in sartorial propriety beyond the outer layer? Inspector Erlendur perhaps? Well, yowyow!

Not that Erlendur (Sveinsson--Icelanders refer to each other by first names) finds this evidence to be of even the scantiest value in Reykjavik Nights, which leads me to pin the blame for such excessive acuity on Ms. Cribbs—with a wink from Sigmund Freud, of course. Nor do “flies” play any role in its sequel, Into Oblivion. Loopy translations aside, I read both books back-to-back, entranced, after the bracing slap of awareness I no longer had to try to say “Arnaldur Indridason” to any of our savvy, though deeply empathic, librarians. I found the Kindle versions.

I owe my vicarious Icelandic trips to an enthusiastic blurb by novelist/crime writer Patti Abbott, founding host of the Friday's Forgotten Books weekly blog feature (hosted this week by Todd Mason), to which I and dozens of others contribute. “Indridason is a master at plot, creating memorable characters, and evoking Iceland during World War II and today,” Patti writes. “His detective has a compelling personal life, is likable and gets the job done.”

I looked over the list of fourteen Inspector Erlendur novels, and lucked out when I picked Reykjavik Nights, one of the more recent in the series but a prequel to those in which Erlendur is a bona fide detective. In this one he's still a junior cop, a patrolman, who uses his own time to investigate a disappearance and a drowning. His diligence impresses one of the department's longest-serving detectives, Marion, who tells Erlendur, “Get in touch with me if you’re interested in doing more of this kind of sleuthing.” It comes near the conclusion of Reykjavik Nights.

By now I am hooked, and identify among the other thirteen books the succeeding prequel, Into Oblivion, the first in the series with Erlendur as a detective. I soon learn Erlendur has been a detective only two years after waiting several years before taking Marion up on his offer. I also learn Erlendur has a five-year-old daughter. The mother is never identified, but presumably is Halldóra, his girlfriend in Reykjavik Nights. The girl appears briefly in a single touching scene, with Erlendur seeing her on a playground:

Erlendur hunched his shoulders against the cold and headed back to his car, thinking about the little girl and himself and what a mess he had made of things. One day he hoped he would have a chance to explain to his daughter who he was and why he’d had to leave.

Of course I must read the other dozen novels to find out, too. But don't expect me to reveal it here, in another Friday's Forgotten Books report. Nuh uh. You'll have to find it out on your own. And if you get there ahead of me you might also get to peer deeper into the darkness that's clouded Erlendur's heart from the childhood loss of his brother in a blizzard:

Bergur had been only eight years old when he disappeared in a blizzard and was never found. The incident had set an indelible mark on Erlendur’s soul. He had been out there with Bergur but lost hold of his hand, and later had been rescued, more dead than alive, from a snowdrift. Ever since then he had been wrestling with the question of why Bergur should have suffered such a cruel fate while he himself was spared.

So Patti Abbott is spot-on when she mentions Erlendur's “compelling personal life,” which, apart from his professional obligations, drives him in his investigations. In both novels the fate of a person gone missing grabs and holds his interest in addition to the mystery of an unnatural death. His obsession extends to collecting accounts of morbid deaths in the unforgiving landscape and climate of Iceland, a tiny country of fewer than 340,000 citizens living on only 40,000 square miles:

When he was in his teens, and bored with life in the city, he had taken to browsing in antiquarian bookshops. One day he had chanced upon a series of volumes recently acquired from a house clearance, a collection of true stories about people going missing or getting lost on their travels in Iceland. Some had survived to tell of their own ordeals, but there were also second-hand accounts of incredible feats of endurance or of tragic surrender to the forces of nature. Erlendur had not realized that such tales existed in print. He devoured the entire series and ever since then he had been collecting books, and anything else he could find, about human suffering in shipwrecks, avalanches or on the old roads that crossed the Icelandic wilderness.

Author Indridason (glad I don't have to read this out loud) does not give us much to go on as to Erlendur's physical appearance, leaving it up to our imaginations. One scene in Reykjavik Nights gives us a clue, noting that he's “powerfully built” and had done some boxing—this just before he defends himself by decking his attacker with two blows to the gut. I should note here that Icelandic police do not carry firearms. In Into Oblivion, an elderly woman wonders why he's so intent on digging into past sadness. “‘You’re very serious,’ she said, ‘for such a young man. Why are you…why are you doing this?’ Erlendur had no answer ready. Why was he doing this? Why couldn’t he leave well alone? Why did he have to reopen old wounds and wallow in grief and loss? ‘Is it something to do with those mournful eyes of yours?’ she asked. ‘Has anyone ever told you? What beautiful eyes you’ve got?’"

I enjoyed both novels, although in part for different reasons. While the principal characters and Iceland's uniqueness provide continuity, Reykjavik Nights is set in summer, during the months of “midnight sun.” The nights, Erlendur muses, reflecting on his night shift as a patrolman, were “so strangely sunny and bright, yet in another sense so dark and desperate.” Into Oblivion takes place in the harsh winter, with news accounts of a couple of men missing in “a ferocious blizzard” haunting Erlendur throughout the novel. In this one he's paired with Marion, a librarian before he joined the police force. Marion, serving as mentor/partner--almost a father figure to Erlendur--suffers his own haunted past that has nothing to do with shushing library patrons or fining them for overdue books.

The suspense is more immediate in Into Oblivion, with scenes that kept me on the edge of my recliner (assuming that's even possible) and clicking Kindle pages long past my usual bedtime. If you're thinking I'm going to try to be clever and get yowyow in one more time before closing out this report, trust me, I won't.

[Note: the aforementioned Patti Abbott is on vacation this week, but her loyal, diligent backup blogger, Todd Mason, has once again picked up the weight for Friday's Forgotten Books.]

THE PISTOL POETS – Victor Gischler

[Precautionary boilerplate: Highly refined readers should be aware this report aims a tad lower than optimum on the aesthetic spectrum. It is advised that readers even vaguely uncertain of their Joycean Taste Grade quotient proceed with at least a modicum of carefully measured insouciant caution. Thank you.]

I am fully aware of the risk I'm taking here, revealing my marginal literary sensibility by writing about Victor Gischler's The Pistol Poets. “Marginal” my foot, for sure some are thinking. And I did come close to rupturing various vitals laughing at the crude, quirky, frat-boy goings on in this satirically farcical look at an amalgam of gratuitous violence, incessant insobriety, and startling poetics in the presumably idyllic setting of hick-town Okie academia.

Sporadic appreciative sputters continued to diesel thru my larynx next morning on my constitutional walk up and down Main Street as I paid homage to various scenes from this the second of a raft of novels by former English professor Victor Gischler. I would hope the “former” is a reward for his success as a novelist and not punishment for making fun of a milieu that suffers gangsters, poets and drunken English professors. And I perhaps am fortunate not to be posting this report from the recreation room at Happy Daze Rest Home while undergoing observation for reports of unseemly public behavior.

At the same time I nurse a very real, burgeoning anxiety that should my indispensable literary advisor Fictionaut's Kitty Boots happen to stumble upon and read this report she is more than apt to throw her arms up in dismay and discharge me as a client. As I mentioned above, this is for me a risky undertaking--the more alarmingly risky, it's becoming apparent, the more I worry.

Fictionaut's Kitty Boots

But dammit, I love this book, and I shall defend it against all comers, starting with the amateur "reviewers" on Amazon who panned it.

This from Suzanne Graden: The biggest twist was the location of East St. Louis. Last time I checked it was in Illinois not Missouri. After I read the error in the location I lost interest in the book. [An East St. Louis cab driver mugged me when I was drunk on a weekend pass from Ft. Leonard Wood (Missouri) some years back. I didn't give a rat's ass what state we were in--still don't. Nor has the rare brain fart ever bothered me.]

"mmk" says: This is a terrible book - badly, written, crude, uninteresting and simply a waste of time. I hung in there through about 75% of it before finally giving up.
If you're a horny adolescent male who loves chase scenes and guns, knock yourself out. [Safe to assume you are not a horny adolescent male, etc. Alas, my adolescent days today are but a misty dream, yet I know for certain I'd have missed completely the sly ironies and cleverly entendered nuances in The Pistol Poets back then. Dr. Freud lifts an eyebrow and asks: Do you frequently read novels you loathe?]

"Kindle Customer" suggests: I don't know how I finished this book-but for a author that teaches creative writing this was one that should have been buried. [Yet you finished the book. Dr. Freud weeps with joy.]

There are more. Had I read any of them before buying The Pistol Poets, I'd only have been the more intrigued.

Gischler

Several years ago an English professor friend recommended Gischler's work to me, particularly his first two novels: Gun Monkeys and The Pistol Poets. I read Edgar-nominated Gun Monkeys first. My recollection is that I liked it, but I can't recall anything about it. Not sure why or how, but I lost track of The Pistol Poets. Possibly my interests drifted from the genre, or maybe I packed the book for a move and didn't unpack it—something I'm notorious for. Picked it out of a pile the other day when both of my laptops were in the shop and I needed something to read to keep from going berserk. Hooked by the second chapter when an East St. Louis street thug steals a dead victim's papers that indicate the victim has a graduate scholarship to study poetry at the aforementioned hick-town Oklahoma college. Thug decides then and there to turn his life around. He makes off with the gym bag full of cocaine he's supposed to be selling for his boss, (big bad) Red Zach, and heads for “Fumbee”, OK.

I'm not full-bore laughing quite yet but there are preliminary snickers, and I can feel the chortles building as I try to imagine the thug, Harold Jenks, participating in a poetry seminar in any school setting. He lands in Jay Morgan's classroom the same day Morgan awakes with a blinding hangover to find one of his students dead in his bed. He assumes he picked her up at a typical campus party the night before. The plot has thickened by now, but the chortles are still only gathering subliminal force.

Gischler with hair

[Poetry break] Pressed for time, Jenks, using the victim's name, Sherman Ellis, had taken his first verse from a greeting card, and met with derision when he read it to the class. This one he wrote himself:

I was cruising the hood in my red Mercedes,

keeping it real with my homies and my ladies,

nobody can touch my crew because all them cats

are fraidies.

Them St. Louis niggers ain’t got no class,

twitching on the crack bust a cap in my ass.

They rocking and shaken and frying up some

bacon,

but if they think they know Sherman E then they

sadly mistaken.

Gonna POP that COP

C*cks*cker m*therf*cker never make me STOP.

Bleed the bitch out now shout now shout.

On your knees on your knees, show you what it’s

’bout. I’ll pull you a stunt, smoke my blunt Sherman E

don’t

Take sh*t from some c*nt.

After gasped comments by some baffled classmates following Jenks's reading, the instructor, Morgan, “shuffled the stack of poems, stood slowly. He turned, walked out the door. The students waited a minute, looked at one another, but their professor didn’t come back.”

Other characters of dubious interest include Dean Whittaker, interim chair of the English Department, a bearlike man with “a big voice”, whose dissertation had been on ladies' costuming in Elizabethan theater and who wears lace panties despite their considerable discomfort. And let's not overlook “Fred Jones”, the geriatric gangster currently in a witness protection program, who gifts the college with ten grand to keep its “third-rate literary journal” afloat but with the understanding Morgan will read Jones's voluminous portfolio of original poems. Of the slender selection of poems Gischler provides us in The Pistol Poets, this, by Jones, is my favorite. It also won raucous approval from the student body in a college-wide poetry slam. Jones called it The Zydeco Gangster:

When I came from Philly to the Big Easy in ’72

in a baby blue Impala full of smack,

I was already pushing gray around the ears.

And I don’t move so quick no more,

and the back gives me trouble,

and the hands are kinkin’ up.

The hands are key.

So when the dagos hired me

to work the Quarter,

I got a big moulie shadow to do the bone work.

So I went to hear his song

on a humid night in some bayou sh*thole,

and Che was huffin’ on the accordion,

and another bony moulie

was beating time on a washboard,

and the shuffling, breathless racket

sounded like the time we leaned on Tiny Allen

in the homo bar

at the rotten end of Bourbon.

So I’m talking to Little Mike

on the phone

with Big Mike on the extension

and they say everything is jake back in Philly.

I try to explain the zydeco shakedown,

and how it’s so different from

the tearful, slow Pagliacci pleading

when we’d bear down on the mark

like a lumbering toilet-paper mummy

in a Peter Cushing flick,

but they don’t get it.

So I ask Big Mike if he remembers the time

we chopped down the glassblower over on Sullivan

   the brrrrpt da bript brip chingle chingle bript

when we riddled his display cases with Mac-10s,

the nine-millimeter percussion

the tambourine tinkle of broken glass,

and I think he’s starting to get zydeco.

And we laughed and laughed

and wondered if the Motor City fellas

do it to Smokey Robinson.

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE – Laird Koenig

Thirteen-year-old Rynn Jacobs, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, deliberately kills her mother and landlady, scares her 16-year-old boyfriend half to death, and appears to be killing the landlady's son at the end of this gripping tale. With these creds, Rynn should satisfy the suggested theme—difficult children--of this week's Friday's Forgotten Books feature hosted by novelist/blogger Patti Abbott. In fact “difficult” may seem a tad euphemistic when draped over premeditated murder. And yet…

And yet if being difficult means not letting villains ruin your life, even should the resistance be intentionally lethal, I would say that is a difficult question. Especially if you allow, as I've no doubt do some ethicists, that a preemptive strike can be a form of self defense. If it appears I'm trying to weasel out of embracing this week's FFB theme, I would proffer that I found this novel in a Google search for “novels about bad children” listed in a category called something like “bad to the bone kids.” I expect a judge or jury majority likely would disagree, but were I on a jury trying Rynn Jacobs in the killings I would vote to acquit. Consider the circumstances:

The girl is living alone in a house leased for her by her dying father, who instructed her not to let anyone mess with her—especially her violent mother, from whom the father, an internationally recognized poet, had rescued Rynn. I should note at this point the girl is brilliant. More mature in learning and outlook than many if not most adults. She quotes Emily Dickinson, in particular, "I don't go from my home, unless emergency leads me by the hand," says she's memorized all of Dickinson's poetry. It occurs to me the novel is inspired by Dickinson's poetic sensibility and secluded life. An homage, if you will, and with quite a twist. 

Rynn's victims had threatened her freedom and her safety. She poisoned the mother, who had severely beaten her and then found her despite the father's efforts to keep her whereabouts from his former wife. She locked the landlady in the windowless cellar and pumped gas in from an appliance. The landlady thought the girl was Jewish and had vowed to break the three-year lease and have her and her father evicted. One of Rynn's ploys was to pretend the father was living with her, despite his never being available to meet guests. She'd claim he was either working, resting or out of town. The landlady's son was a known sexual deviate who made his intentions abundantly clear in a threatening way to the child. The novel closes with the son drinking tea and eating almond-flavored biscuits Rynn served him, much as she had her mother, whom she poisoned with cyanide. 

A romantic thread appears early with the arrival of Mario, a lame youth who works as a magician. That the two become underage lovers may be seen as "difficult" by some, especially parents, although both seem vastly more mature than their ages would indicate--at least vastly more mature than I recall being at that age (and to some degree even now!). 

Here's a snippet of conversation between Rynn and Mario that may give you a glimpse of their premature sophistication:   

"No. You were thinking about something else."

"Emily Dickinson."

"And how she never left her house unless she had to?"

"Unless emergency leads me by the hand."

"You think she had some stud hidden away up in her bedroom?"

"I hope so." She giggled, her soft lips on his.

Laird Koenig

     Koenig emphasizes in his foreword to the novel that he wrote it originally as a play in London, and it was not intended as a children's book. Failing to get the play produced, he says because producers couldn't find a 13-year-old actress with enough name recognition to increase the odds of success, he converted it into a novel. Several years later, he notes, the ideal 13-year-old female lead was found for a film version, starring Jodie Foster as Rynn.

The writing is sensitive and artful. Sympathy for Rynn is established early. Here's the girl "celebrating" her birthday alone in the house:

"Happy Birthday," she said to the girl in the mirror. She was careful not to smile, for a smile would show her chipped front tooth and she could not bear that. "Happy Birthday to me," she said and any worries about her eyes—and they were green and she loved that—paled in comparison to the agony she felt over the chipped tooth. Abruptly she told herself, very sternly, not to think about the tooth, not to let it spoil this special day. Slowly as one in a ceremony, she carried the blaze of candlelight away from the mirror. Music throbbed around her, and the night wind tearing at the house soon filled her with a joy so great she closed her eyes trying to hold in her happiness, to keep this moment from passing.

 

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]