Dark Music by David Lagercrantz
How far from the original can a book allegedly inspired by Sherlock Holmes get before the allusion breaks? This does have a wonder-mind at the heart of what little investigating is going on, but there is not a lot that Conan Doyle fans could really pin down as on their exact wavelength. For one, the main focus of the narrative, Micaela, is no John Watson MD. She's a Chilean in the Stockholm police, put on a murder squad as she knows the prime suspect of old, in a case where a referee of a junior football match was found stoned to death shortly after the match, and just outside the stadium. Beppe, the suspect, was drunkenly antagonistic to the ref during the closing minutes, but refuses to admit anything, through days and weeks of interrogation. When some disreputable coppers (the kind who dismiss anything their superior comes up with, the kind who think they can judge Micaela from her fringe and how she might dress – that kind) are told to go and see what brainbox Professor Rekke thinks of it all, she can only smirk when he says Beppe is innocent and the investigation is a shambles. But taken off the case, she can no longer help solve the crime, and with Rekke the most erratic, irregular kind of guy, she can't get his full verdict on it all. Until, that may be, she manages to stop him in the middle of an apparent suicide attempt...
| Dark Music by David Lagercrantz | |
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| Category: Crime | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: The murder of a much-loved Afghani refugee, just after he'd done his bit for youth football, manages to escalate into a whole dredging up of extraordinary rendition, the Taliban, and so on. You know that bit on the blurb about Sherlock Holmes being an influence? Yeah – query that. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Maybe |
| Pages: 384 | Date: August 2022 |
| Publisher: MacLehose Press | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1529413199 | |
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So what out of this is Conan Doyle's Holmes? Rekke is introduced in a way that allows him to show off his powers of observation and abductive reasoning, and he likes his drugs of a night when his mind gets dark. He's a musician, too. And there's a similar address for them both at one point, and brother in power. But by making him the character he is, the author has made him much more reactionary, never instigating anything, never snatching his accoutrements with a cry of the game's afoot! and fleeing to the crime scene. And he's not really there either to say the lawmen are asses, as it were, because in being so contemptible to both their job and to Micaela, on then immediately off the murder squad for finding herself Team Rekke, they start out with naff-all of our empathy.
And Micaela soon proves herself to be another problem. Coincidentally from the same banlieue-styled environment as Beppe, her past and her brothers add another layer to proceedings, but it's yet one more layer that doesn't exactly make the main plot any more enjoyable. So there's her side of things, the dodgy cops a-plenty, the issues the main murder brings, what with the victim having fled Afghanistan, and the whole dark nature of Rekke – little of this can be said to be here for our pleasure, making this not the most sprightly of page-turners.
Finally on the Holmesian references, this proves to be an entirely different kind of thriller – this is one of those more wide-reaching, geopolitical, post-Cold War kinds of novels, before it just about grasps a more intimate nettle. If you like that sort of read, and we've had a lot over the decades since the Soviet Union fell and the Red Peril disappeared, this might be fine – although until I saw what actual, specific aspect of its topic and setting I was to experience and learn about I did think it an awkward choice, reviving a real-world theme long since talked over and dealt with and forgotten.
This by no means is a failure, and I did have enough invested in the case to read every word, but I do think it will suffer by its nature. Why get the likes of me interested in a Holmes-goes-Scandi crime piece, when it turns out to be a different kind of thriller entirely? Rekke is allowed carte blanche to give snap, ever-correct judgements, yet we never get the more pleasurable bits where he shows his workings. Neither is he the cleaner kind of character one can grasp – there is a most awkward spell here where he is on drugs and depressed, and she's got a lump to the head, and neither seem that compos mentis, forcing us to always feel doubt and on thin ice as we read. I know genre fiction has changed greatly since Conan Doyle's day, but he would never allow us to feel so insecure and unassured. Nor would he produce something nearly this woolly.
All that said, I would be on board for the sequel as posited here, as long as it does what I'd come along for.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Possibly lasting longest in the memory for Stockholm-set genre pieces has been Missing by Karin Alvtegen; while Lagercrantz kind of pulls back from showing the anti-Micaela sexism, our heroine here has different issues indeed to overcome.
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