Misterioso: A Crime Novel, By Arne Dahl
This odd and engaging dark crime thriller is set in a dystopic Sweden.
Misterioso: A Crime Novel, by Arne Dahl, Pantheon, 352 pp.
By Katherine A. Powers for The Barnes & Noble Review
I don't know whether I would have read Arne Dahl's Misterioso – yet another Swedish crime novel, by yet another hitherto-unknown-to-us Swedish crime writer – if I hadn't noticed that it was translated by the great Tiina Nunnally. I first came across this master of Englishing in her scary and wondrous translation of Hans Christian Andersen's "Fairy Tales" and, later, in her stunning rendering into crisp and vivid English of Sigrid Undset's "Kristin Lavransdatter." That was a momentous discovery; so disguised and disfigured had this magnificent work been by its musty, faux-archaic 1920s translation that I had previously found it unreadable. My own command of Swedish doesn't extend beyond knäckebröd and smörgåsbord, so I'm unable to tell you if Nunnally's translation of "Misterioso" is true to the original; but I can say that it seems true to the spirit of this odd and most engaging story.
Paul Hjelm is an alienated, chronically weary policeman who does things his own way – a familiar figure to readers of Swedish crime novels. It is the mid-1990s, and we meet Hjelm as he intervenes in a hostage situation without waiting for specialists to arrive on the scene. This maverick act, successful and celebrated by the media though it is, nearly leads to his dismissal. Instead he is assigned to the A-Unit, a newly created task force for solving major crimes quickly by cutting through the tangle of mandates, prerogatives, and obstructive jealousies of competing law-enforcement and security agencies – the muddle and malice which turned the investigation of the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme into a fiasco.
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