Gallows Rock

A tale told from different points of view is no rarity but this one starts with the victim’s and that shortly before he’s hanged in a lava field in Iceland. Promising, moreover the rock gallows is so close to Reykjavik it’s within sight of the presidency and the visiting Chinese Foreign Minister. Police are scrambled to cut down and hide the body pronto only for them to find a notice nailed to the “suicide’s” chest, thus proclaiming it murder – and all, or mostly all evidence now destroyed. Worse, the notice vanishes.

But Icelandic noir this is not. It’s a police procedural and the cops are familiar except that these are full of jokes although mostly facetious and seldom black. The leading man is Huldar: the customary good detective, disillusioned and weary, capable of violence but with more than a streak of humanity. His boss is Erla, foul-mouthed and volatile, who bullies clever little Lina, the student on work experience who’s chained to a computer like Gudlaugur, her gay bumbling colleague. Predictably it’s these minions who run rings round their elders. So – a cop shop peopled with types we have met before from Los Angeles to Edinburgh, and all living on a diet of coke and chips and cardboard chicken. A saving grace: the jokes stop at domestic violence and child abuse of which Iceland appears to have its share.

Helgi is the hanged man, a banker: one of a quartet of ageing professionals who love to party. Their story is woven with that of Freyja, a child psychologist whose brother, Baldur, is a thief currently on day release. A further thread involves Sibbi, heavily pregnant, and her violent husband; all initially unconnected but ultimately close, too close.

Women and children steal the show. The thief’s small daughter is the fascinating horror you wouldn’t want to sit near in Macdonald’s but four-year-old Siggi, found abandoned in the banker’s luxury apartment, is a charmer with winning manners. The need to protect such innocents from present dangers provides enough suspense that the introduction of a python (legal if under two and a half metres) into the small girl’s home is superfluous.

A simple plot with fiendish embellishments. Tricks abound and construction is a sequence of cliff hangers. A book in translation can be difficult to review. If it reads well, the reader says it’s good; if it irritates or jars you can’t say it’s a poor read because it could be elegant in the original language; you can say only that it’s an inadequate translation. I mourn the day – was if fifty years ago? – that I discovered Sjowall and Wahloo.  

A faint echo here of Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love who read one book and it was so good he never read another. It was White Fang.

Translated by Victoria Cribb