Finland hasn’t had quite the Scandi-Noir fuss made over it as either Sweden or Denmark. While bookshop shelves the world over are crammed with Scandi/Nordic-Noir paperbacks, they are mostly by Danish or Swedish writers who regularly tour the English speaking world, such are the scarily-good English speaking abilities of most Scandinavian authors. Outside of the ubiquitous Jo Nesbo, Norway is often overlooked, hence we did a Crime and the City on Oslo. Iceland similarly, and here’s another on Reykjavik. Now it’s time for Helsinki.
Helsinki has a robust crime writing scene yet, unlike the other Scandinavian cities, it’s historically a city associated with espionage, being so close to the former Soviet Union. Len Deighton’s classic Billion-Dollar Brain (1966) sees a British spy dispatched to Helsinki to encounter murder, private armies preparing to overthrow the communists in Russia, and the threat of chemical warfare. Michael Caine made a movie version of it, reprising his iconic role as Harry Palmer from Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1962) and Funeral in Berlin (1964), although it flopped, not matching the standards of the previous two films.
Helen Halme’s The Red King of Helsinki (2018) is set in 1979 at the height of the Cold War with the KGB. There are spies running round the city, disappearing daughters of Finnish diplomats, and a British Royal Navy officer undercover. More recently, and with Putin now in charge of neighboring Russia, Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow (2013) trilogy, featuring Russian intelligence officer Dominika Egorova, regularly visits Helsinki. Of course there is now a movie version of that series too with Jennifer Lawrence, but the less said of that…
Spies aside, Helsinki has its share of crime fighters in the grand Scandi-Noir tradition. Matti Joensuu’s Finnish detective, Inspector Harjunpaa of the Helsinki Violent Crimes Unit, is seen by many as an important forerunner of Henning Mankell’s far better known Kurt Wallander, next door in Sweden. Joensuu himself served in the Helsinki police for over thirty years (latterly in the Arson & Explosives Unit) giving his books a very realistic touch. Joensuu has won most of the big Scandinavian crime writing awards and there is a Finnish TV show of Harjunpaa. Not everything by Joensuu has been translated into English, but The Priest of Evil (2003) has. It’s a good introduction to Joensuu and Harjunpaa—a series of deaths on the Helsinki metro, a strange absence of any CCTV evidence, and a weird recluse living in a fortified bunker hidden in the hills outside the city. To Steal Her Love (1993) is another procedural featuring Harjunpaa (earlier than The Priest of Evil, but the order doesn’t much matter) investigating a series of seemingly inexplicable “appearances” by a man in single women’s bedrooms who then disappears into the night leaving no trace. Those who have read Joensuu will probably agree that more translations are needed.
Some more Helsinki noirs:
- Dark comedy noir in Antti Tuomainen’s Palm Beach, Finland (2018) where Helsinki cop Jan Nyman of the National Central Police travels to the coast and a bizarre holiday village to investigate a murder—a sort of Fargo in Finland, if you can imagine such a thing. Tuomainen’s The Man Who Died (2017) is another dark noir about a mushroom industry entrepreneur, Jaakko Kaunismaa, whose doctor tells him that he’s dying from prolonged exposure to toxins; in other words, someone has slowly but surely been poisoning him.
- Detective Lieutenant Kari Takamäki is faced with a case that seems to link arson in Helsinki to a Finnish gangster living in Bangkok in Helsinki Homicide: Behind Closed Doors (2012). The book is author Jarkko Sipila’s twelfth Helsinki Homicide novel and the sixth which has been translated into English so far. Another in the Kari Takamäki series, Against the Wall, won Sipila Finland’s Best Crime Novel Award in 2009.
- Matti Rönkä’s A Man With a Killer’s Face (2017) features the little known world of the downtrodden Ingrian community, Russian-speaking ethnic Finns who have emigrated from their Russia back to Finland. Murder, old scores and post-Soviet Russian-Finnish tensions abound.
- Police investigator Anna Fekete (who originally comes from the Balkans), and her partner Esko, investigate an elderly Finnish man apparently run over by his Hungarian au pair in Kati Hiekkapelto’s The Defenceless (2015). People trafficking, illegal immigration and tensions between Western and Eastern Europe all feature—major themes in so much Scandi-Noir elsewhere too in the post-enlargement European Union. Fekete returns in The Exiled (2016) to investigate corruption in Finland during the recent European refugee crisis.
- And, by way of contrast, we must mention Helsinki-born Minna Lindgren’s Sunset Grove series that have earned her the title “Finland’s Miss Marple.” Sunset Grove is an old people’s home where ninety-year-old Siiri and Irma solve murders and have formed The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency (I am not sure if they have any formal partnership with the 1 Ladies‘ Detective Agency in Botswana!). Their tales begin in Death in Sunset Grove (2013) and continue in Escape from Sunset Grove (2014). Fans await translation of the final book in the trilogy The End of Sunset Grove (well, the heroes are over ninety when the series starts, so how many books can you expect?). All three have been bestsellers in Finland.
Series are, of course, what so many crime readers love and what so many Scandi-Noir authors are known for doing so successfully – Harry Hole, Wallander, Beck, Sara Lund etc, etc. Helsinki it seems is no different. American author James Thompson started his writing career in Finland, where he has lived for more than fifteen years. We meet his creation Inspector Kari Vaara first in Snow Angels (2010) with dead Somali immigrants turning up in Lapland—hate crime, sex crime, revenge crime? Whichever, it is a racially charged murder the Helsinki media will eat up. Varra—tough childhood, failed marriage, moody in typical Scandi-style—returns in Helsinki White (2012) encountering black-ops units targeting high-end criminals, the rise of a shadowy extreme right-wing political party, the assassination of a leading immigrant rights campaigner, and Vaara, post-brain op, absorbing it all. Helsinki Blood (2013) sees Vaara back once again on the hunt for a missing Latvian kid with learning disabilities and uncovering brutal people trafficking networks operating in Finland.
And finally…Leena Lehtolainen, a prolific Helsinki crime writer and author of the Maria Kallio series that she started writing back in the early 1990s. Every one of the Kallio books has hit the Finnish book charts top ten. The series starts, appropriately enough, with My First Murder (1993). Argumentative, take-no-prisoners law student Maria Kallio is recruited for a temporary position with the Helsinki Police Department. A dead playboy, a bunch of rich kids who don’t think the law applies to them, and an investigation among Helsinki’s super-rich follows.
In English, Lehtolainen’s Maria Kallio series now comprises ten books. By book eight, Below the Surface (2017) Kallio has risen to become Commander of the Violent Crimes Unit. The most recent book, Derailed (2018) sees Kallio behind a desk although life doesn’t slow down for long as a murder leads to the uncovering of sports doping scandals, money-laundering schemes, domestic abuse, and death threats.
Most of the Helsinki crime writers stand in the now long-established traditions of Scandi-Noir—broody detectives, procedurals, loners. Some, like Antti Tuomainen, include Helsinki itself as a character—its quirks, specificities, what makes Helsinki different from, say, Copenhagen or Stockholm. Scandi-Noir often tends to get lumped together—it’s all sort of “up there,” dark, brooding, slow burn with similar themes. But Helsinki is a little different—perhaps it’s the country’s proximity to Russia, it’s knife-edge place in the old Cold War, that makes it so. Whatever…what is certain is that Helsinki, and Finnish, crime writing is worth the effort and deserves a serious place in the Scandi-Noir canon.
