Ruumiin kulttuuri 4/2006: English Summary The star guest of the KrimiHelsinki event in November was German mystery writer Doris Gercke whose disturbing, poetic crime novels are also known in Finland. She has written some twenty books, 14 of them with Bella Block as the main character. Block started as an Inspector in the Hamburg police force, then turned private investigator. The latest Block novel Georgia came out in Germany in August, and several TV films have been based on Bella Block’s investigations. Gercke says her prosperous hometown Hamburg is a city of millionaires, but at the same time she is bluntly critical. ”I hate the way the city derives benefit from prostitution. Unofficially, of course, but they have made Reeperbahn the main Hamburg attraction,” Gercke cries out in Tiina Torppa’s interview (Doris Gercke – a Radical from Millionaires’ Hamburg). Bestselling new Swedish author Camilla Läckberg does not like the title of Queen of Crime which has already been offered to her. ”I’m an ordinary girl next door, mother of two small children, earning my living writing crime novels. I want to set an example to others who dream of writing,” she said when visiting the Helsinki Book Fair in late October. Läckberg’s ideas come from little things. She likes to study real crime and uses details of the cases in her books. She is interested in the dark side of the human mind. ”Everything begins with the motive and the murderer. Without them there would be no mystery,” she explains (Girl Next Door, No Queen of Crime). Turku-based medievalist Hannele Klemettilä’s book Ritari Siniparta (Bluebeard) is a study in cultural history, the story of Gilles de Rais, the 15th century French baron, Satanist, and mass murderer. In his extensive article Risto Raitio examines both Klemettilä’s study and Bluebeard’s ”heirs and soul mates” in 20th century crime literature and cinema (Ladykillers at Large). Now ranking among the best Finnish crime writers, Markku Ropponen was awarded the Clew of the Year back in 1991 for his novel Kuolemanuni (Sleep of Death). In recent years he has planted his criminal plots in his hometown Jyväskylä, in mid-Finland, with private investigator Otto Kuhala as the hero, a fiftyish, divorced man whose undertakings will also be turned into a TV series in summer 2007. Ropponen finds that an intensive atmosphere created through the use of language is what is most important in a good crime story. ”No element must fail, not the milieu, the characters, the plot, but more importantly, the reader must sense the atmosphere. Which can simply mean enjoying reading the book. And what’s nicer than that?” (”Mood Matters Most”) The Helsinki Book Fair also had a visitor from Korsholma, on the coast the Gulf of Bothnia: Marita Gleisner, Swedish-speaking Finnish crime writer whose first book was even translated into German a few years ago. Her second crime novel Lydia Light, out this year, deals with the difficult theme of domestic violence. ”When a woman is being battered, she thinks at first it’s all a mistake. When violence is repeated, she begins to think it’s her fault,” Gleisner puts it. (Gentle Author inside the Head of a Murderer) Late this year we pay tribute to two famous crime writers who were born a hundred years ago. The first centenarian is John Dickson Carr, born on November 30, 1906, and on Christmas Eve it’s time to celebrate James Hadley Chase. John Dickson Carr was the man who made an art form out of the locked room mystery. ”The reader is drawn into the stories, the final solution comes as a surprise, the atmosphere is spine-tingling, mysterious, and, at times, the stories break out into downright comedy, resembling the very best of the Marx brothers,” Outi Karemaa lashes out praise in her article (Anniversary Year of a Golden Era Master) James Hadley Chase has not survived as well: this once popular writer of crime and thrillers has few readers today. ”Chase’s early books are set where there is no society. The police and other elements of an organized society hover somewhere in the background while gangsters, plagued with their own power and sexual obsessions, fight it out between themselves,” is how Juri Nummelin defines it (A Briton Who Wrote about America). Other items 2006 Clew of the Year winner, author and TV news anchorman Matti Rönkä listed his ten favourite mysteries (My Top Ten). A Dish to Die For: crab cakes à la Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta (In a Pathologist’s Kitchen). Movie Mania presents the latest productions of interest: Brian de Palma’s adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia, Martin Scorsese’s massive police thriller The Departed, and Casino Royale, a return to the pith and marrow of the 007 tradition, powered by Daniel Craig, the new James Bond. Our jurors have worked hard with Capital Sentences: 54 this autumn’s mysteries get their just deserts. Translated by Liisa Koskinen

Ruumiin kulttuuri 4/2006