Reading in Reykjavík

Genre: Historical mystery Year of publication: 1996 No. in series: 5 Series detective: Gordianus the Finder Type of investigator: Private detective Setting & time: Rome, 52 B.C. Story: A rabble-rousing Roman politician is killed on the Via Appia highway, a day's journey from Rome, causing widespread rioting in the city. The dead man’s wife sends for Gordianus the Finder to hire him to discover what happened, but eventually he sets out along the Via Appia at the behest of another client. With a lot of digging and patient questioning he finds out what happened, but meanwhile trouble is brewing in his own household… Review: This is an interesting 1st century B.C. detective story and political thriller that reads in parts like a modern police procedural. Saylor’s writing is rich in detail and historical information, the plotting is layered and the narrative gripping, and the characters come alive on the page. Saylor is very good at drawing up an image of what Rome and the sur...

Genre: Thriller, psychological Year of publication: 1991 Setting & time: London, contemporary Story: A group of society’s outsiders rent cheap rooms in an old, mouldering school building. The owner is obsessed with underground railways and is writing a complete history of the London tube. His cousin and her children lead a fairly care-free existence, a young musician falls hard for a young woman who has left her family in order to pursue her dream to become a solo violinist, and another young man worries over his pet hawk, which seems to be dying. When a mysterious stranger arrives in their midst, he sets in motion a chain of events that will change all their lives in one way or another. Review: This is one of the best psychological thrillers I have read in a long while. The story moves slowly, occasionally making sudden spurts of action, but even the action is described slowly, almost languidly, so that the tension is magnified with each sentence one moves closer to each narrat...

The English title of this book will be Hypothermia . According to Amazon UK it will be published in Britain in September. The Icelandic title is the name of a mountain in the area where Erlendur is supposed to have grown up, meaning something like “a bare and sharp-edged mountain”. It has a bearing on events from Erlendur’s past that have been mentioned in previous books. Interestingly (at least from a linguistic viewpoint) another meaning of harðskafi is close to the meaning of the English word hardscrabble , and I am sure it is no coincidence that the two words sound similar. Genre: Mystery, police procedural Year of publication: 2007 No. in series: 8 Series detective: Detective Erlendur Sveinsson Setting & time: Reykjavík and Þingvellir, Iceland; contemporary Story: A woman discovers her friend’s body hanging from a beam in a summer house by lake Þingvallavatn. She seems to have killed herself, but the friend is convinced she would never have done that. This is enough for ...

I was recently lucky enough to come across a cheap hardcover omnibus volume of all five of Dashiel Hammett’s novels, and as four of them are part of my Top Mysteries challenge, I consider this a piece of good fortune. This book, Hammett’s final novel, was the spark that started the series of Thin Man films, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as sleuthing pair Nick & Nora Charles. Like many others, I was under the impression that Hammett had written a series of Thin Man books, but when I did a little research, I discovered that this was the only book and the rest of the Thin Man stories were all movie originals, some of which seem to have been based on stories written by Hammett exclusively to be turned into movies. Year of publication: 1934 Genre: Mystery, detective novel Type of mystery: Murder, missing person Type of investigator: Private detective (retired) Setting & time: New York, USA; 1930s Story: Retired private eye Nick Charles gets dragged into a case involvin...