Would we reliably do the right or moral thing in a situation where we had to choose from among a number of possible options, whether or not we knew someone was observing us Hour of the Wolf, the latest of Swedish crime writer Håkan Nesser’s novels to appear in an English translation, explores what happens when an apparently respectable man makes a particularly dark choice. He doesn’t make this choice because he has a particularly malevolent design in mind at that point. But there is a terrible evil in what he then does as a consequence of that choice. And what consequences they are. The Swedish title for Hour of the Wolf is Carambole, which is a billiards-like game popular in Western Europe. In table games like billiards, pool or snooker, it’s virtually impossible to compute exactly where each ball will end after a strike, and Nesser returns repeatedly to the metaphor as the plot unfolds. It begins innocently enough. A man reckons he’s had enough to drink after an evening out with friends. He thinks about taking a taxi home, but it’s late, he doesn’t see one and decides to drive home. A little earlier, a boy reluctantly pulls himself away from his girlfriend; it’s late and it’s just a little too early in their relationship for her to ask him to stay the night. He sets off home but realises that because he lingered pleasurably with her he has missed the last bus and must now walk back — along a road that isn’t the best route for a pedestrian on a rainy night. Of course, our driver is drunk enough that he doesn’t see the boy and knocks him into a ditch. The boy happens to fall in a way that nearly kills him, something that the driver, who stops to see what he might have hit, is able to establish instantly. Why he is able to do this is relevant to the sheer nastiness of the way a simple hit-and-run unravels. And Nesser unravels it like a master. The killer figures that it’s late at night, and the couple of passing vehicles pose little threat — it is unlikely that he has been seen, he decides. And so, though he has taken a life, he rationalises that absolutely nothing would be gained by his going to the authorities. He goes home and though he does struggle with what he has done, it’s clear that he’s well on the way to pretending it never happened. Until the first letter arrives. It turns out that he was wrong. Someone didn’t just see him; the witness knows exactly who he is and what he has done. Even worse, the witness isn’t going to authorities right away. The letter is a blackmail demand. After the initial shock at having been discovered, the solution seems straightforward to our killer. Which blackmailer with such potentially catastrophic evidence would stop at a single demand The best option would clearly be to silence the blackmailer before the demands escalate. And that’s just what he sets out to do. In a way, this is the most chilling passage in a book that has several of them, because the cold-blooded planning and execution of the kill marks a massive transformation in the way we see our killer. Up to that point, we think he’s just a regular guy, albeit a somewhat unfeeling and selfish one, who has been caught in an appalling situation. The manner of the second killing makes it clear that circumstances have brought out a truly frightening dimension to our killer. He is going to proceed not according to any path recognisable to the conventions of civilised discourse but along some relentless and murderous logic that is simply terrifying. But he has made a tragic mistake. The man he killed wasn’t the blackmailer. It was a man the blackmailer coerced (despite the horrors our killer unleashes, it seems possible that the blackmailer is the truly odious human in the story) into picking up the money he had demanded for his silence. This only one unforeseen element of his mistake, though — Nesser’s carambole metaphor again. The murdered man turns out to be the estranged son of a legendary detective. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is something like another famous Swedish crime writer’s creation — Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander — a middle-aged Nordic anti-hero of the police procedural (Mankell and Nesser share a translator, the excellent Laurie Thompson, and fans of both writers will have noticed how differently they read, even in translation). Van Veeteren has retired from police work to work in an antique bookshop, a calling that’s in line with his rather donnish air, and one that allows him a little time to indulge his tastes for fine food, wine and chess. Though the police take the case a lot more seriously once they discover who the murdered man is, the same simple twists of fate that led to the whole complex mess also mean that they have very little hard evidence to go on. Before long there’s another murder, as the killer seeks to cover his tracks, but will be a while before even this yields meaningful clues. But the killer’s fate is sealed, because with the killing of his son, the matter has become personal for Van Veeteren. He hasn’t the resources that his former colleagues in the service still have, but ultimately it is his formidable forensic brain that leads us to the killer. How he pulls this off is integral to the compelling manhunt with which Nesser pulls together the threads of this gripping crime novel. Nesser isn’t as well known as several other Nordic crime writers, not least because only about a third of his books have been translated into English (and this can take a while; Hour of the Wolf appears 13 years after its original Swedish imprint). But he has thrice won the annual award for the best Swedish Crime Novel, and this English translation of Carambole, which won the 2000 Glass Key award for the best Nordic crime novel, is one of the best places to see just why he is so highly rated.
Hari Menon is a Bengaluru-based writer
