A Big Hit, A Small Miss

By John Skow

TITLE: SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW

AUTHOR: PETER HOEG, TRANSLATED BY TIINA NUNNALLY

PUBLISHER: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 453 PAGES; $21

TITLE: A SIMPLE PLAN

AUTHOR: SCOTT SMITH

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 335 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: Two ballyhooed books are classic examples of how to -- and how not to -- write a great thriller.

"It's freezing -- an extraordinary 0 degrees Fahrenheit -- and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik -- big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost. December darkness rises up from the grave. . ."

So begins a remarkable, brooding detective thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish writer whose work is new to the U.S. The story's grim background is Denmark's exploitation of Greenland, the bleak northern island given its bosky name by Erik the Red, an early real estate promoter who hoped to attract settlers. Most recently, Danes have mined and exhausted Greenland's vast reserves of cryolite, a mineral used in the refining of aluminum, while giving only perfunctory and highly patronizing attention to the culture of the native Inuit.

That's the antiestablishment view of Hoeg's heroine, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her mother, a hunter and tracker, and the comfortable wealth of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Smilla knows both science and snow, but she is too rebellious to work regularly for the ruling Danes. She is at loose ends in Copenhagen when a six-year-old Eskimo boy she has befriended slips from the snowy roof of their apartment house and is killed. An accident, of course; but the boy, Smilla knows, wouldn't normally have been running on the roof, as his tracks show. And wouldn't have slipped on snow.

Who killed a harmless boy? Come to think of it, where does his alcoholic mother get her money? Smilla begins to poke into a mystery that no one else acknowledges. Answers disappear in the gray, corporate fog that surrounds a great mining conglomerate. The police warn her roughly to stop annoying important citizens. She is befriended -- Why? Simply because she's good- looking? -- by a hulking, silent man, a mechanic, who seems to have had a violent past.

So the storyteller's ancient, changeless pattern develops, working as well in Denmark and Greenland as it did for Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California and for Martin Cruz Smith and the series that began with Gorky Park in Moscow. Smilla puts her nose in harm's way and gets it bloodied. Like Archer and like Smith's Russian cop Arkady Renko, she keeps on poking. She's in peril in a glossy casino near Copenhagen, on a powerful, mysteriously equipped icebreaker plowing north toward Greenland, on the floating metal atoll of a huge fueling dock, and finally on the Greenland snow.

Why does this pull so strongly at the imagination? Partly (though this is the least of the elements) because the puzzle is good: Is the icebreaker really prepared to bring back something that has been living for centuries in the Greenland ice? Partly because, seen by Smilla under stress, the background texture -- the casino, the sinister ship -- has the grain-by-grain fascination of a prison cell's stone wall. And finally because Smilla is good company. She's interesting, full of odd quirks and skewed perspectives: someone you'd enjoy talking with over a long dinner.

This last element -- the not unreasonable requirement that at least somebody in a thriller be interesting enough to spend an evening with -- is utterly absent from another much whooped crime novel about to reach the bookstores. It doesn't matter that the story comes from Rent-a-Plot in first novelist Scott Smith's A Simple Plan. The idea has worked before and will again: a couple of ordinary guys in northern Ohio stumble over a small plane crashed in the woods. The pilot is dead. The cargo is $3.5 million in used U.S. currency. Should they . . .?

Sure. But don't tell anyone. Naturally, the word spreads, to a drinking buddy, his girlfriend, a wife and so on. There's nothing wrong with the narrative idea here, and the reader should skid amiably into the underbrush of Chapter 2, as the treasure finders turn into thieves and murderers, miring themselves in treachery. But Smith has written a story in which all the characters, not excluding the first-person narrator, are stupid, mean and boring. They are jerks, irredeemable fools, and if one sat down next to you at a bar and started talking, you would pay your tab and move on. The point is not that every crime story needs a hero -- Elmore Leonard writes brilliantly and almost exclusively about career wrongos -- but that at least somebody in a novel should be worth the reader's attention. Not even your friendly neighborhood parole board would be interested in Smith's bozos.