Crime novel thematise collective and individual memory
By Lars Ole Sauerberg
When the police procedural emerged decades ago readers welcomed a more realistic take on crime and crime detection. A recent development in the genre is to introduce even more realism in the form of po- lice investigators prey to all kinds of illness not due to wounds and other damage incurred in the line of duty. Chief Inspector Konrad Simonsen is recovering after a heart attack. While watching with jealousy his for- mer subordinate in charge of the investigation of a brutal school killing in central Copenhagen, he is told to put the lid on an old case requested re-opened by a member of the Danish parliament. Routine work and a piece of cake, apparently, that is, until one of the intended victims of the school killing surprisingly ap- pears in the routine case.
Konrad Simonsen refuses to be held back by health considerations and starts digging with his team, both figuratively and literally. It turns out that something happened when the Beatles sang about the Lonely Hearts Club which has long since been buried, in minds as well as the ground.
There is a link from the motivation behind the school killing and Konrad Simonsen’s not so much of a routine case after all, in the form of peer-group bullying now and then. The parallel causes Konrad Simonsen to recall his early years as a cadet in the police force called out to control the crowds that demonstrated in Copenhagen against the Vietnam War, which runs as an accompanying and conscience-probing strain in the narrative.
Lotte and Søren Hammer’s third book looks deeply into the collective national as well as the individual memories, forcing to confrontations with what time and convenience has left, as it appears, not so safely in the past.
