Murder Most Exotic

By Lev Grossman

America is a stoutly murderous nation--the FBI reports we had 16,204 homicides in 2002. That's not exactly something to be proud of, but you'd think it would at least give us an edge in one of our prized national exports, the mystery novel. Agatha Christie aside, we pretty much owned the genre for a goodly slice of the 20th century. But it's time to admit that the cutting edge of mystery writing has shifted overseas. Damned outsourcing--where will it end?

Sweden's murder rate, for example (167 in 2001), is downright puny compared with ours, but that hasn't stopped Henning Mankell. His latest novel, The Return of the Dancing Master (New Press; 391 pages), gives homicide a moody elegance. The victim, Herbert Molin, was a retired police officer with a fondness for jigsaw puzzles who lived in a remote, wooded part of the country. So why would somebody take the trouble to whip every inch of skin off his back and the soles of his feet? And why would that person leave behind bloody footprints in the pattern of a tango step at the crime scene?

That's for phlegmatic Swedish policeman Stefan Lindman to discover. Lindman is struggling with his own doom--he has been diagnosed with cancer--but he's dogged in his pursuit of an investigation that drags him into the world of Swedish Nazis and the eerie quiet of the deep Scandinavian countryside, where distances are vast and detectives few.

Russia (32,285 homicides in 2002) can lay claim to a worse murder rate than our own, and Boris Akunin takes full advantage of it. His fiendishly witty Murder on the Leviathan (Random House; 223 pages) begins with 10 of them: the entire household of one Lord Littleby has been slaughtered by means of mysterious injections, and Littleby's skull has been bashed in. To add insult to injury, his precious golden statue of the Hindu god Shiva has been stolen. Akunin is the pen name of a Russian academic whose mysteries--all starring stuttering, downy-cheeked young detective Erast Fandorin--are wildly popular in his country and are just catching on here.

The Littleby case is not in Fandorin's jurisdiction, but he becomes entangled in it aboard the Leviathan, a massive luxury liner cruising to Calcutta; Littleby's killer is known to be aboard, as is the Parisian inspector following his or her trail. All that is the setup for a ravishing jewel box of a mystery--the lock of which Fandorin gingerly, joyfully picks--and an homage to Christie, whose Death on the Nile is the mother ship of all nautical mysteries. Akunin also knows his Arthur Conan Doyle, and his Fandorin likes to indulge in showy displays of Holmesian observation, especially when lady passengers are around. "I have developed my powers of observation and analysis with the help of special exercises," he preens. "Usually a single insignificant detail is enough for me to recreate the entire p-picture." Fandorin is Sherlock Holmes as an endearing, overeager wonk.

Holmes haunts The Hamilton Case (Little, Brown; 307 pages) as well, a miniature masterpiece of a mystery by Michelle de Kretser, who lives in Australia but was born on the island of Sri Lanka. The Hamilton Case is set there, back when it was the English colony of Ceylon--"a useful bauble," De Kretser writes, "fingered and pocketed by the Portuguese, Dutch and British in turn." Our hero is Sam Obeysekere, a Ceylonese lawyer educated at Oxford who, with his genteel Western airs, is seemingly bent on out-Englishing the English. His story takes some time to reveal itself as a mystery, but it does so when Obeysekere takes on the case of a respectable English planter--Hamilton--who gets shot in the chest. "Murder, a moonless night, the jungle crowding close."

Obeysekere fancies himself a Holmesian observer in his own right and an instrument of English justice, but he can't see the treacherousness--as a Ceylonese prosecuting a case involving white men--of the territory he's treading. De Kretser's prose is stunning and subtle in depicting his downfall, evoking the glittering excesses of colonial life--after a party "you could have strolled across the lagoon on the champagne corks"--and the tropical fecundity of Ceylon with equally irresistible power. Who could stop reading a chapter that begins, "Her father, a bony, vivid man with a taste for women and morphine, had drowned in the rip off Trincomalee on Maud's sixteenth birthday"?

Who killed Hamilton? The closer the novel comes to its conclusion, the more crowded it becomes with possible solutions. The murderers are multiple, the motives numberless, the conspirators legion. Obeysekere fails to grasp a truth mastered by all these writers in different ways: that mystery is not the fate of the unfortunate few; it's not confined to stormy nights and remote houses and crime scenes. It is the condition in which we live, and sometimes the all-knowing detective arrives too late to wrap up the loose ends or not at all. "Time never simplifies--it unravels and complicates," De Kretser writes. "Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken."