UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Arnaldur Indriđason, Jar City (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004). Translated by Bernard Scudder. The Icelandic edition was published in 2000.

Erlendur Sveinsson is a Detective Inspector in the Reykjavik police, divorced for twenty years, fifty years old, with a daughter, Eva Lind, who’s pregnant and a drug addict.  His son has just gone through rehab for the third time. 

In a bleak, rainy, cold and dark autumn, Erlendur investigates the death of another man who lived alone.  He soon finds that the man’s past and his family are the keys to the murder. 

            As if his job wasn’t depressing enough, Erlendur’s favorite reading is of ordeals and deaths in the wilderness.  The darkness of the weather, the oncoming total darkness of the Arctic winter, and Erlendur’s dark thoughts all give a new intensity here to the idea of noir fiction.  And Indriđason’s telling of the story tends to preserve and even create mysteries.  For instance, not until page 116 do we find out exactly what the three-word message left on the body of the murdered man was, though it is mentioned in the first sentence of the book.  And a shadowy former boss of Erlendur who investigated the murdered man in his past life shows up several times, but we don’t know whether it’s a man or a woman. 

Jar City is what the medical students in Reykjavik called the room in the medical school where organs were kept in formalin-filled jars.  Late in the book Erlendur makes the term more metaphoric by applying it to a controversial genetic data base that includes almost all of Iceland’s population.  Because Iceland is racially nearly homogeneous, it makes a good population for the study of genetic disorder.  This data base is supposedly absolutely secure, but it is breached by a character in the book, and the result is misery rather than the promised medical benefits.  Iceland is a little country and its family secrets, those of a small interconnected world, can be easily pried into.  At one point in the book Erlendur ponders this as he thinks about his own daughter and himself, about the abused daughter of a friend whose story he had investigated at the urging of his ex-wife, and about the daughters and sons in the case he is pursuing officially.  A painful connection between his private and professional life comes when Erlendur interviews a friend of the murdered man, a psychotic prison inmate, and the man knows Erlendur’s daughter.

I was reminded a bit of Ross Macdonald by this book’s excavation of family matters and the recurrence of the sins of the past, but Jar City’s plot wouldn’t work anywhere but Iceland.

This book won the Glass Key award for the best Scandinavian mystery of the year.  The following year, Indriđason won the award again for a sequel called Lady in Green.  If you’re a fan of gritty police procedurals and romans noirs, I think you’ll like Jar City.