Bad Things Happen: Arnaldur Indridason’s Black Skies

Nothing comes without consequences - Charles Ferguson's 2010 Inside Job.

In a 2008 interview with the CBC’s Michael Enright, the Swedish novelist, Henning Mankell, commented that the vast majority of lawbreakers are not evil but that they get caught up in evil circumstances. I thought about Mankell’s musing while reading the Icelandic novelist, Arnaldur Indridason’s most recent police procedural (published in English) Black Skies (Harvill Secker, 2012) since greed, fear of public disgrace and revenge for a terrible injustice committed years earlier provide the motivation for the murders committed. In Arnaldur’s (in Iceland everyone is known by his first name) oeuvre, he is primarily concerned about domestic and social issues, and how the harsh Icelandic climate can affect people. Bad things happen when people make ill-considered decisions. He does feature psychopaths but they are frequently murdered, sometimes decades later, as a result of their incessant abuse of others.

From Jar City (2004) to Hypothermia (2009), Arnaldur’s brooding but resourceful loner, Erlander, is the senior member of the police investigation team. Burdened with guilt because of an incident in which he lost contact with his younger brother in a storm, compounded by having abandoned his wife and two young children years later, he tries in Silence of the Grave to explain to his almost comatose drug-addled daughter who has tracked him down after over twenty years that “he had been battling against that blizzard for all his life and all the passage of time did was to intensify it.” Yet in his professional life, Erlander draws upon that pain to crack open cases that were perpetrated years earlier in Silence and The Draining Lake or relive his personal tragedy in Voices so that he can salvage his daughter’s life in the present. He is assisted by the capable Elinborg, who successfully juggles her career with managing a family, and by Sigurdur Oli, a graduate of criminology from an American university, even though he is hampered by a stiff-necked personality with rigid attitudes. When Outrage begins with the murder of a young man with a rape drug in his possession, Erlander is on leave to wrestle with personal demons and the case is assigned to Elinborg, who is particularly astute in investigating cases of sexual abuse. At the same time that she is working on that investigation, Sigurdur Oli is at the centre of two cases that are the focus in Black Skies.

Recent Nordic Noir in Print and Television, Part One: Iceland

A scene from the Icelandic television series Trapped, currently streaming on Netflix.

Arnaldur Indridason is one of the most acclaimed Icelandic writers of police procedurals for his novels about Detective Erlendur, a brooding, lonely officer who is tormented by ghosts from his past: the disappearance of his younger brother, a failed marriage and two children whose lives have been scarred by drugs. Fittingly, he investigates a number of cold cases. One of the best Erlendur books, The Draining Lake (2009), begins with a discovery of a corpse that has a bullet in his head in a lake where the water level has dropped in the wake of an earthquake. Erlendur’s investigation takes him back to the time of the Cold War when bright, left-wing students would be sent from Iceland to study in the “heavenly state” of Communist East Germany.

Indridason has recently decided to put the Erlendur series in a deep freeze while he pursues another project. Making connections between the past and the present is a driving impulse of The Shadow District (Harvill Secker, 2017), the first of a projected trilogy that is set in wartime Iceland after the war, and in the present. A young girl is found murdered by an Icelandic young woman and her American beau behind the National Theatre in Reykjavík in 1944, a frequent site for trysts between local girls and foreign troops when the country was occupied by British and American forces. Two officers investigate: the more experienced Flovent and his young partner, Thorson, a Canadian with Icelandic roots. The two officers are conscientious investigators who ultimately arrest a student of Icelandic folklore for her murder and the disappearance of another young woman three years earlier who may have been driven to her death by a local folklore story. Unfortunately they botch the case when the accused is under their care, and that and external pressure cause the investigation to be officially closed. But the case shadows the two men for the rest of their lives. Thorson is so dissatisfied that he returns to Iceland after the Second World War, hoping that some new clue will turn up.