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 Karin
Fossum
Karin Fossum made her literary début in Norway with a collection
of poetry in 1974. She has since published another volume of poetry,
two collections of short stories and one non-crime novel. Her crime
novels featuring Insepctor Konrad Sejer are published in sixteen
languages.
Don't Look Back - plot Summary
Beneath the imposing Kollen Mountain lies a small village where
the children run in and out of one another's houses and play unafraid
in the streets. But the sleepy village is like a pond through which
not enough water runs - beneath the surface it is beginning to stagnate.
When a naked body is found by the lake at the top of the mountain,
its seeming tranquillity is disturbed forever. Enter Inspector Sejer,
a tough, no-nonsense policeman whose own life is tinged by sadness.
As the suspense builds, and the list of suspects grows, Sejer's
determination to discover the truth leads him to peel away layer
upon layer of distrust and lies in this tiny community where apparently
normal family ties hide dark secrets.
Critically acclaimed across Europe, Karin Fossum's novels evoke
a world that is terrifyingly familiar. Don't Look back introduces
the tough, ethical Inspector Sejer to British readers.
Author Interview
The interview below was carried out for Crime Time Magazine
- How long have you been writing and what do you think attracted
you to crime?
I have been writing since I was 18 years old. And, in fact, I
fell into crime literature by coincidence. My first story, Eve's
Eye was never meant to be a crime story. I made the decision half
way through the book. Because it turned out to be a success, I
continued.
- How did you come up with the plot for Don't Look Back? Do
you draw your inspiration from real cases or from your imagination?
I never make a plot. I just start writing, and things happen as
I move along. I never get inspired by real crime cases, I work
very much in fiction
- You include a quite a lot of facts and technical data. How
do you research this aspect of your books?
I do very little research. I might make a phone call, or write
a letter. My ideal is to write my books, sitting quite still in
my chair, without having to get up and leave the house for information.
- How do you write - do you use a word processor or a pen?
Do you have an office or can you write anywhere?
I work on a Mac. And I have no office, I work in my own living
room, whenever the house is empty, and quite still. However, a
writer is always a writer. All day long I'm taking notes in my
head.
- Norwegian reviewers compare you to the British crime writer
Minette Walters. Do you read other detective writers (British
or not) and if you do, which ones do you admire?
I do not read much crime fiction. Of course I know Minette Walters,
but my favourite is Ruth Rendell. When I read for myself I prefer
other kind of books. However, as a young girl, I read a lot of
crime stories. Mostly the Swedish couple Sjöwall and Wahlö.
- Who or what was the inspiration for your detective, Inspector
Sejer? Does he share any character traits with you?
Yes, I think I have some things in common with my inspector. We
like the same kind of music and the same kind of whisky. When
I wrote about him for the first time, I made him the same kind
of hero that I grew up with in the fifties and sixties. The kind
and serious type, like Jim Reeves and Dr. Kildare. Decent and
good.
- In 2000 Don't Look Back was made into a TV series in Norway.
How did you feel about this and was the experience of seeing your
work on television positive or negative?
My impression was very positive. The TV version is very true to
my story, and the characters look very much like the ones that
I see in my head.
- You write very vividly about the tiny, rural community in
Don't Look Back. Is this a typical Norwegian village?
Yes. And I live here myself. I know it very well. The TV series
was also made at this location. It is a small place with about
two thousand people, and it's easy for me to choose and describe
a place that I know so well. I could never write a novel set in
a big city, because I don't know what it would be like.
- Can you imagine committing a crime and if you did, what would
it be?
Of course I could commit a crime. We all can. It depends on which
situations we fall in to. In despair I would steal food if my
children were hungry.
- What advice would you give to an aspiring crime writer?
Make sure that the reader believes your story. Do not try to be
too clever or too smart. Just be devoted to the characters. Do
not make extremely clever plots. Because, in real life, they never
are.
 Michelle
de Kretser
Born in Colombo to a Sri-Lankan 'Burgher' family which emigrated
to Australia when she was fourteen, Michelle de Kretser, taught
in Montpellier, took an MA at the Sorbonne, and worked for several
years as an editor at Lonely Planet. She now lives in Melbourne.
The Hamilton Case - plot summary
The place is Ceylon, the time the 1930s. Set amid tea plantations,
decay and corruption, this sinuous, subtle, surprising novel is
a masterly evocation of time and place, of colonialism and the backwash
of empire. It is the story of an embittered Ceylonese lawyer, Sam
Obeysekere himself a product of empire - 'obey' by name and by nature
- and of a family that once had wealth and influence but starts
to crack open when Sam's charismatic father dies leaving gambling
debts, an ex-beauty of a wife, an unstable daughter and an inadequate
son. But the writing has been on the wall for a generation, ever
since another sibling died in his cot… And at the heart of
the novel is the Hamilton Case, a 'White Mischief' murder scandal
that shakes the upper echelons of the island's society. Sam's involvement
in it makes his name but paradoxically ensures that he will never
achieve his ambition.
A miracle of delicacy and restraint, full of volte faces, and narrated
with perfect pitch in a voice that catches both the tragedy and
comedy of their situation, this is a gripping, nuanced tale of the
end of an era, suffused with 'the unbearable thought that everything
might have turned out differently'.
Michelle De Kretser on her early inspiration:
The Passage below was written for Crime Time Magazine by
Michelle de Kretser, it looks at some of the early influences which
lead her to write The Hamilton Case
I grew up in Ceylon in the 1960s, a time and place when murder
was in the air. Not the ethnic violence, the large-scale public
murders with their numbing statistics that would later become synonymous
with Sri Lanka, but intimate, claustrophobic tragedies reported
by the press in tones of scandalised righteousness. A goaded servant
seized a bread-knife and slit his master's throat. A diplomat's
Eurasian mistress was shot in the chest as she stumbled down an
embassy staircase, pleading for mercy. A doctor kept his wife prisoner
in a back bedroom where he poisoned her by degrees, some said with
the connivance of his teenage daughters. That last murderer was
the creepiest: a doctor who brought death, not healing. Here true
crime conformed to the golden principle of detective fiction: that
guilt lies with the least likely suspect.
By my eighth birthday I had begun reading the Agatha Christie novels
that lay piled on our bookshelves. Books like The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd and Crooked House introduced me to the intellectual
pleasure of puzzle-solving. While they offered no scope for the
imaginative identification I found in, say, the novels of Arthur
Ransome, picturing myself as an Amazon in a red-knitted cap, I read
whodunnits as if entranced. The racism and classism of Christie's
fiction washed over me unnoticed. I read as if addicted, helpless
before the urge to know what happened next. It was a valuable early
lesson in the absolute supremacy of story.
My father told me about a perfect murder. When he was a young magistrate
in an outstation town, a villager was brought before him. Muttuhami
had fallen out with his neighbour over a breadfruit tree. The tree
grew on Muttuhami's land, but some of its branches overhung the
neighbour's property. Muttuhami had complained to the village headman
that his neighbour was helping himself to the fruit that grew on
these branches. The headman, who was related by marriage to the
other man, sent Muttuhami away with a flea in his ear.
Shortly afterwards Muttuhami and his wife went to stay with her
parents, who lived forty miles away. Two days later their neighbour,
his wife and their three children were found dead in their hut.
Autopsies showed the cause of the deaths to be strychnine poisoning.
The family had ingested the poison with their evening meal of rice
and lentils, and had died in agony. A clay cooking pot still contained
a little lentil curry, which was analysed and proved to contain
traces of rat poison.
The story of the dead man's quarrel with Muttuhami came out and
the police hauled him in as their prime suspect. But on the evening
in question, Muttuhami, his father-in-law and several other men
had played cards late into the night. One of the card-players was
a retired constable, who could vouch that Muttuhami had never left
the game. Since the poison had been introduced into a meal prepared
forty miles away, his alibi was unshakeable. Yet the inspector in
charge of the investigation was sure that Muttuhami was his man.
Guilty as sin, he told my father. But how had the murderer done
it?
In the presence of a conundrum the relentless application of logic
is required. Muttuhami's victims had been murdered in their hut;
therefore he must have had access to the premises. It was necessary
to visit the scene of the crime. The inspector and his sergeant
rode out to the village. The headman, a pot-bellied scoundrel who
reeked of toddy, led them to the hut where the bodies had been found.
It stood in a tiny little plot crammed with pineapples, jak fruit,
a betel vine, a patch of yams where someone had left a hoe driven
into the red soil. The headman pointed out the breadfruit tree that
was the origin of the quarrel; and there, on the other side of the
barbed-wire fence, Muttuhami's hut could be glimpsed through a thicket
of plantain trees.
There was little to see in the single cramped room where the family
had died. The inspector noted a square of mirror on one wall, and
a calendar, years out of date, advertising Reckitt's Blue. A tin
trunk contained clothing. There were sleeping mats rolled up neatly.
An enamelled basin, five clay cooking pots, a grinding stone, a
wooden rice chest, an ancient Huntley & Palmer's biscuit tin
half full of flour. The inspector noted that the floor in the hut
was intact. Where theft was the motive for murder, the assailants
would always dig up the floor in search of buried valuables.
The air was foul with the reek of rancid coconut oil. The headman
had already stepped out onto the verandah and was chatting with
the sergeant. The inspector was about to join them, the taste of
failure sour on his tongue, when something made him scan the room
one last time. And suddenly he saw - everything. There were five
cooking pots in that hut
Most people would have missed the significance of that trivial
fact, said my father. But the inspector knew that in a poor village
home, where every cent is scraped together and possessions are scant,
five pots is a luxury. The dead family would have lived on rice
eaten with a little curry, some chillies and onion. What were they
doing with five pots? The inspector knew the answer. Proof was another
matter. He had all the pots taken away and analysed. Two of them,
noticeably less blackened from smoke than the others, were found
to be impregnated with rat poison. They were also covered with Muttuhami's
fingerprints.'
The police charged Muttuhami. He was brought before my father and
confronted with the evidence. For thirty seconds his eyes ran this
way and that. But then he smiled. They were probably his very own
pots, he said, bold as brass. Only a few days before he left the
village, his wife had complained of finding rat droppings in their
hut. So he had asked her to cook a little rice, which he had divided
between two pots, having swilled rat poison around them. In the
morning the rice was gone. He had meant to throw away the contaminated
pots, but … Muttuhami shrugged. They must have been forgotten,
kicked into a dark corner and left there.
My father said he felt nothing but admiration for the man. Under
other circumstances Muttuhami would have made a great artist. His
understanding of human nature, his insight into the workings of
the mind. He knew very well that his enemy would be unable to resist
that empty hut standing there like an invitation. And what would
he have found inside? Why, two cooking pots in mint condition, overlooked
in the commotion of leaving. The man must have been laughing, savouring
his triumph when he took that booty home to his wife. They were
probably still congratulating themselves when they squatted down
to eat that evening. `And Muttuhami, forty miles away on the other
side of the jungle, no doubt he was smiling too,' said my father.
Check out the reading
guide for Michelle de Kretser's novel The Rose Grower
- out now...
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