#RivetingReviews: Max Easterman reviews THIRTY DAYS OF DARKNESS by Jenny Lund Madsen

Danish protagonist Hannah Krause-Bendix is probably the most unpleasant fictional crime investigator I’ve come across: even by the final pages of Thirty Days of Darkness, when some of her rougher edges and more irritating traits have been tempered by events and experience, she remains an infuriating figure: arrogant, cantankerous, at times compulsive beyond belief. All of which must surely be intentional on the part of the author. There is more than a whisper of parody here. She even shares with many other Scandi-noir heroes an addiction to alcohol, albeit in her case a secret one. And although she does have her moment on her personal road to Damascus, when she ‘suddenly sees herself from the outside … she really is just a stuffy, farcical killjoy … And it hits her that she can’t remember the last time she genuinely laughed’, it’s hard to believe she really understands how completely her attitudes get her on the wrong side of people. People like her host, Ella; the local policeman, Viktor; Ægir, the father of Thor, a teenager found dead; and the local drunken vagrant, Gísli, who knows more than he’s letting on … But I’m getting ahead of myself!

Hannah is a Danish writer, an author of deeply psychological and analytical novels, hailed by the critics but read by almost no one. She is dismissive of popular fiction, especially what she regards as formulaic crime writing. Her particular bête noire in this genre is Jørn Jensen: his whodunnits have made him the darling of the Danish reading public. She encounters him at a book festival, where he’s about to be interviewed on stage. Enraged by his smug, self-satisfied attitude – and angry that no one has come to have books signed by her, she throws a copy of his latest oeuvre at him and ends up having a very public, very vicious argument: ‘we can’t all write little, intellectual novellas for the elite’, he snaps; Hannah waves his book at him ‘this is mediocrity with page numbers’, she ripostes: ‘Any idiot can write a book like this in a month.’ It’s a challenge thrown out in the heat of the moment, which she can’t realistically duck, when her agent seizes the PR opportunity it offers. He dispatches her in short order to stay with Ella, a family friend in a remote fishing village, Húsafjörður, in Iceland; just the place, he contends, for Hannah to concentrate in peace and quiet on writing her crime novel in thirty days.

Her relationship with her host is problematic from the start: Ella speaks neither of Hannah’s languages, Danish and English, though somehow manages to understand the latter and responds with scribbled Icelenglish messages on random scraps of paper, interspersed with vocal exclamations and interjections in Icelandic – not all of which are entirely clear when you read them, which I found irritating. But Ella is determined to help Hannah on her literary way and gives her a copy of one of the Icelandic Sagas, a bloody, corpse-filled story she insists will inspire an excellent crime novel. Hannah, however, is soon diverted from her task when a real-life victim turns up: a teenager, Thor, whom his father, Ægir finds floating in the sea. Suddenly, she finds herself driven to investigate this death, which appears to be murder, and use it as the basis for her novel.

There follows a tale of snares, delusions and false trails, none of which are made any less opaque by Hannah’s blundering, ham-fisted attempts to prise information from the police (in the guise of assisting them) and to help the grieving family and the tight-knit community of Húsafjörður. No one, even Ella, is quite what they seem, however, and everyone is apparently hiding something. It slowly dawns on Hannah just how much effort has to go into an investigation, how carefully she has to tread:

‘She has never reflected so deeply on her own writing process … she has a strong belief in her understanding of the human psyche and her insight into life … but … she barely has a strong enough insight into her own life.’

Writing a detective novel, she realises, isn’t as easy as falling off a frozen Icelandic rock.

Hannah’s sense of alienation in the long dark Icelandic nights and short, snow-filled days leads her to alienate the very people she needs to cultivate to reach her goal of solving the murder and thus writing her book. There are gunshots, imprisonments and a nightmare ride in a stinking fishing boat before the exciting denouement. The tale is well told by Jenny Lund Madsen and well translated by Megan E. Turney, and Hannah is an intriguing and highly original character, but the final plot twist on the final page is pure Hollywood kitsch, though it will no doubt serve the purpose of adding a new plotline to Hannah’s next foray into the lives (and deaths) of crime.

Reviewed by Max Easterman

THIRTY DAYS OF DARKNESS

By Jenny Lund Madsen

Translated from the Danish by Megan E Turney

Published by Orenda Books (2023)

September 2023 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Max Easterman spent thirty-five years as a BBC broadcaster. He was a lecturer in journalism for seventeen years at Huddersfield University and is today a translator, media trainer with Sounds Right, jazz musician and reviewer.

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