Ruumiin kulttuuri 4/2010: English Summary In recent years, Nordic crime novels have gained great international repute. One of the best-known names is Norwegian author Anne Holt, former Minister of Justice of her country. She visited Helsinki in October, around the time her 12th crime novel Pengemannen (Money Man) was released in a Finnish translation. Holt says her books have one and the same theme. ”I always deal with family life,” she declares. A surprising theme, perhaps, in crime literature where you meet murder, evil, suspense. ”Families have secrets and big feelings, in crime books as well as in life,” Holt explains. The light and the dark you find in your family as a child stay with you a long time. ”The need for a family is a very basic need. When I travel, every day I miss my family in Oslo,” Holt confesses to her interviewer Tiina Torppa (”Anne Holt Delved into Hate Crimes”). ”The historical crime novel has been enjoying great success in the 2000s. Never before have so many books been published in this genre, and many have also been bestsellers,” Outi Karemaa writes in her extensive article where she takes a look at new historical mysteries. The books are not carved from the same block, the stories represent a wide variety of time periods, places and styles. Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire continue to be popular milieus, but many authors also locate their mysteries in the Middle Ages, in the 19th century or in the wars and turmoils of the 20th century (”Historical Crime Is Thriving Round the World”). In Finland, few authors write historical crime. One is Ata Hautamäki whose novels depict Helsinki in the 1950s, particularly the idyllic garden suburb of Käpylä. In her essay in this issue of Ruumiin kulttuuri, Hautamäki tells us what writing epoch means to her. ”To me, nostalgia is a positive feeling. I want to revive the past on the pages of my books. Perhaps for selfish reasons only – I enjoy doing research and wallowing in memories,” she says (”The Importance of Epoch in Crime Fiction”). With six novels in six years to his name, Tero Somppi is one of the most promising Finnish thriller writers of the 2000s. He works in the Defence Forces, with security issues, and has often located his fast-paced stories in environments he is familiar with. One of his best-known thrillers Tuomion konsertti (A Concert of Doom) has terrorists make an attack on a concert in Helsinki where a world-famous rock band is performing. The venue resembles the popular Hartwall Arena where Somppi has often been in charge of security. But ”it’s a place I have made up, I didn’t want to write a guidebook for kidnappers,” Somppi smiles. Heikki Ollikainen’s interview ”Tero Somppi Rolls Out Thrillers”. End of October, Ari-Matti Auvinen met and interviewed English author David Hewson who attended the Helsinki Book Fair to see the first book of his eight-part Nic Costa series, A Season for the Dead, come out in a Finnish translation. Hewson says he did not want to create another conventional hero, a middle-aged, troubled and cynical policeman. And so he came up with young Nic Costa, 27, who is just beginning his career in the police force in Rome (”David Hewson and the Charm of the Eternal City”). Other items Actress and script writer Liisa Nevalainen (1916–1987) had reached her pension age when she began her crime writing career. Her debut was ”The Sleeping Beauty” (1976), and in ten years she wrote eight novels of suspense, rising to the top ranks of Finnish crime fiction in the 1970s and 1980s (”Murderous Rose Thorns”). Researcher Voitto Ruohonen deliberates on whether crime novels can be read as working man’s literature and whether a crime author can be considered a working man’s writer. This was the subject of a literary event in Tampere (”Who Are You Waving the Flag For?”). Email interview of Barbara Fister, creator of Chicago private investigator Anni Koskinen (”Anni Koskinen Was Born Out of Love for Finland”). Who knows his/her Agatha Christie best? A quiz contest was organized at the Helsinki Book Fair, and the winner was Ulla Huhtala from the northern town of Kajaani. In the cinema section, inter alia, the new Finnish film directed by Olli Saarela based on Matti Joensuu’s novel The Priest of Evil, and Director Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s book (Movie Mania). Capital Sentences: some 50 reviews clearing the autumnal congestion of new books. Translated by Liisa Koskinen

Ruumiin kulttuuri 4/2010