Ruumiin kulttuuri 1/2008: English Summary February 13th revealed the winner of the Clew of the Year award for the best ’criminal’ achievement in 2007. Only the second time in these more than twenty years the award was given to a first novel. Its writer is Marko Kilpi, 38-year-old senior police constable from Kuopio, mid-Finland. Before his career in the police he was involved with advertising and films, directing several documentaries. According to the jury, Kilpi’s award-winning police novel Jäätyneitä ruusuja (Frozen Roses) is ”exceptionally mature for a first novel, compact in structure, with no aimless meanderings”. The main characters are a trainee policeman and his mentor, an experienced sergeant. Kilpi has consciously chosen a new kind of protagonist and strives towards authenticity. ”In many crime novels a DCI deals with everything and is the first man to rush in on the scene, whatever the situation. In a peculiar way, in any country, authors keep repeating this stereotypical and unrealistic pattern,” Kilpi points out in Leena Korsumäki’s interview. The award ceremony took place in Helsinki in a notorious prison now converted into a hotel (”A Kuopio Policeman Was Celebrated in Prison Surroundings”). The same day, French writer Fred Vargas received the special commendation reserved for foreign crime literature. She is best known for her two excellent series: the mysteries depicting the investigations of the ”three Evangelists”, and the police novels with the confusingly obscure and idiosyncratic thinker, commissaire Adamsberg. ”The wonderfully extraordinary characters and all the historical and philosophical allusions are what’s most interesting in Vargas’s books,” says Asko Alanen (”Perceptions of Crime and Glimpses of History”). Taina Haahti worked in international and Finnish banking and investment for some ten years until turning into writing in the mid 1990s. Her psychological thrillers, located in the world of business and finance, are sharply drawn pictures of contemporary Finland, of greed and the calculative efficiency-thinking. ”Alongside stories of individuals I want to describe the social dimension, the network of interdependences,” Haahti explains to her interviewer Leena-Kaisa Laakso (”Money, Power and Borderline Cases”). Sakari Vainikka’s novels also take a step aside from the mainstream of crime literature. They are dark, Dostoyevskyan essays on guilt, evil, distorted human relationships, destiny, freedom of choice. Vainikka is an ex-clergyman who wrote his doctoral thesis on Gregorian church music. ”I have also composed a great deal, but my music turned out too beautiful, too fluent. I had to switch over to literature where I could put up a proper fight, instead of shadowboxing,” Vainikka says with a laugh (”From Shadowboxing into a Good Fight”). Finnish film director Hannu Salonen has found success in Germany: he has become a regular director of Tatort, the famous TV crime series attracting multi-million audiences. ”Television is a very good school, I couldn’t imagine any better,” Salonen enthuses to our interviewer Heikki Ollikainen (”Hannu Salonen on the Crime Scenes in Germany”). Currently under work is an Estonian-German-Finnish co-production Kid & Killer for which Salonen recently went shooting in Estonia. Information technology inspires new forms of crime stories. Hannu Luntiala’s novel Viimeiset viestit (The Last Messages), published last year, is composed of text messages, and only of text messages. Max Manner is currently writing an Internet crime serial, episodes of which arrive in the subscribers’ mailboxes on a weekly basis (”Crime Fiction E-Mailed and Texted”). The Wire, created by David Simon and located in Baltimore, is an exceptionally high-quality TV series, bringing a fresh viewpoint on the police drama. Antti Turunen points out in his article (”T(h)rilling Wires – High Quality”) that the cast of characters in the series is not traditional – in the style of the goodies versus the baddies – but much more complex. Both sides of the law have their own sympathetic types and bad guys. A lot of loose threads are continually untied, in the human drama as well as in the crime investigation, and the viewer’s interest is kept alive. Other items Pulp specialist Juri Nummelin gives us a rundown on Finnish suspense story publications over the decades (”A Look at the History of Finnish Suspense Stories”). Chair of the Whodunnit Society Kirsi Luukkanen lists ten of her favourite crime books (”My Top Ten”). ”A Dish to Die For” goes classic and treats us to Nantucket Cranberry Cup Puddings. The recipe is from Virginia Rich’s novel (”A Tangy Classic on the Tray”). In the Movie Mania section, among others, the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (four Oscars), Ben Affleck’s filmatization of Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone, and the Finnish horror film Dark Floors where the monsters of the band Lordi (of the Eurovision Song Contest fame) go rampaging around. In the DVD section, inter alia, a survey of rare Finnish spy films of the 1940s. Capital Sentences: on the agenda, thirty plus crime and suspense books from late last year and early this year. Translated by Liisa Koskinen

Ruumiin kulttuuri 1/2008