John-Henri Holmberg

Another find on Libby that charmed me, and afterwards was added to my wish list to buy.

I like stories that don’t spell everything out and leave the reader to connect the dots, what emerges with some of these 17 short stories is an unsettling picture. In Reunion a tragic secret comes back to haunt Johanna when she meets up with school friends after decades. What transpires in this story is not as violent as He Liked His Hair; which is told from a killer’s point of view – killings that show more are made more chilling with how they are mentioned in passing using familiar objects.

A few stories are revenge crimes, I liked the open-ending of In Our Darkened House, and the refreshing angle of Never in Real Life showing a stale marriage and a controlling husband. But one of the things that tied most of these stories together are its brutal truth of showing ‘good’ doesn’t always win the day, where crime does pay.

The stories also explored crimes that are harder to detect, Day and Night My Keeper Be, showed the futility of a police officer when it comes to child neglect.

There was also one by Steig Larsson, a sci-fi horror that was lightened by its darker comedy, in contrast the comedy in An Alibi for Señor Banegas is lighter with an ironic touch and is wonderfully told.

I haven’t read much Nordic noir as I want to but the variety here was a nice intro. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-darker-shade-ed-john-henri-holmberg/

I got this in advance of Worldcon 75 because John-Henri Holmberg was one of the guests of honour in Helsinki. I know him vaguely because we have ended up on panels together at all three European Worldcons this century, but this was my chance to get into his work. Which I then failed to do in advance of the convention – who knew that running the Hugo Awards takes up quite a lot of one’s spare time???

It’s an anthology show more of seventeen short stories by Swedish writers, all of them about crime and detection rather than sf or fantasy. Authors include a couple I had heard of, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and lots more whose names were new to me. Good gender balance. Almost all the stories are set in Sweden, which has been on my mind recently because it is about to assume the EU presidency.

Going back to the anthology, the weakest story is unfortunately the one by Stieg Larsson, later famous for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, but he was only 17 when he wrote it (and would probably have blocked its publication if he had still been alive). But the rest are generally good, some very good. At short length you can’t fit in a lot of detection, so more often than not the stories are from the perpetrator’s point of view, but with some interesting twists. The cold revenge of the protagonist of Inger Frimansson’s “In Our Darkened House” will linger with me. A good read. show less

When a book states “original stories from Sweden’s Greatest Crime Writers” one ( or I) would assume that the stories in the anthology would be mystery stories. But you know what happens when you ‘assume’. So, as you can guess, many of the stories in A Darker Shade of Sweden were far from mysteries, most glaringly a story about brain transplants from Steig Larsson, who apparently preferred science fiction to mystery, regardless of his huge selling Girl With the Dragon Tattoo show more series.

A Darker Shade of Sweden, indeed, contains stories from some of Sweden’s greatest crime writers including Larsson, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Henning Mankell and Hakan Nesser, Asa Larsson and Eva Gabrielsson (Larsson’s partner). And it does have some good mysteries such as Katarina Wennstam’s Too Late Shall the Sinner Awaken about someone explaining a murder 25 years after the fact or Veronica von Schenck’s Maitreya about stolen artifacts.

The most notable odd, non-mystery story was clearly Steig Larsson’s Brain Power followed by Stowall and Wahloo’s The Multi-Millionaire about a millionaire father who makes his son rough it for a year before inheriting the fortune.

As a huge fan of Nordic mystery TV (The Bron) and books in Arnaldur Indridason’s Inspector Erlendur series, my expectations of this book were not met. What did I get out of this? Well, an author or two that I might try out, primarily Katarina Wennstam and Veronica von Schenck. Other than that, not much. Is A Darker Shade of Sweden going to stay in my library? Probably not. show less

Some of the stories in this collection are awesome; some too dark and gristly for my taste. We listened to the audio version on two road trips (13 hours of listening, about one of which was a fascinating, though Very Long introduction that had the feel of a dissertation about it. But still, we both liked the collection, overall, and got to take tastes of authors we had yet to find on our own. Plus there were some of the old standbys that were fun to find again.