THE
DARKNESS KNOWS (2021)
By Arnaldur
Indridason
Minotaur
Books/St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages.
★★★★
Arnaldur
Indridason is one of
Iceland’s top crime fiction writers, and his newest novel, The Darkness
Knows demonstrates why. Some readers might know his protagonist, Konrád,
from Indridason’s The Shadow District (2017).
Konrád is
retired, but he has trouble staying that way. To say that Konrád has issues is
an understatement. Before his criminal father was murdered in an unsolved case,
he sometimes used young Konrád as a foil in his schemes. With a background such
as that, Konrád wasn’t always trusted by his colleagues when he became a cop
and, given that he has a withered arm, he wasn’t exactly the usual physical
candidate either. Konrád quit the force to care for his wife Erne, who died of
cancer, but he’s still haunted from having cheated on her when she was ill. He
also has a terse relationship with son Húgo, who is a cold fish, and is married
to a woman Konrád finds overbearing, though he loves his twin grandkids. The
latter are pretty much his sole joy.
To further
complicate matters, a cold case–the disappearance of a man named Sigurvin in
1985–heats up when, courtesy of global warming, Sigurvin’s preserved body
emerges from the melt on Langjökull glacier. This is especially unsettling as
Konrád was part of the team that arrested Hjaltalín for Sigurvin’s murder 30
years earlier, though without a corpse, they couldn’t make the charges stick.
Now Hjaltalín is back in jail and insists on speaking with Konrád. All the
evidence then and now points to Hjaltalín, and though and he and Konrád don’t
particularly like each other, Hjaltalín trusts him more than any other cop. Hjaltalín
is dying from throat cancer, but he’s confessing to nothing. He wants Konrád to
promise he will clear his name, though Konrád refuses as he’s sure the right
man is in jail.
That last point
is a Chekhov’s gun, of course. Against his better judgment, Konrád is sucked
back into a case he wishes had stayed frozen. So how does a guy who has been
off the force for six years even have the authority to investigate? He doesn’t,
actually, though he calls upon a few favors. Even those are fraught: the
pathologist with whom he had his affair, Reykjavik chief inspector Marta who
puts him on a short leash, and several surly lower-level functionaries. Major
obstacles remain. The lead investigator in 1985 despises Konrád and others on
the force find him a nuisance. Plus, he’s an ex-cop so anyone who wishes
to can simply slam the door on him and proceed to do exactly that. All the
signs say that Konrád should walk away and if that’s not another Chekhov’s gun,
old Anton was from Iowa.
Of course, Konrád
doesn’t slink away, or this would be a 25-page novel. Things get messier when Konrád
encounters a woman named Herdís who wants him to look into her brother Villi’s
hit-and-run death in 2009. Herdís remembers that Villi met a man on the night
Sigurvin disappeared and thinks something untoward occurred. If that’s not
labyrinthine enough for you, Konrád imagines that perhaps his father’s murder in
1963 somehow connects to all of this. You might wonder how three killings
spread over 46 can possibly be part of a pattern. Maybe they’re not. One of the
intriguing things about the novel is that Konrád is the opposite pole from preternaturally
prescient investigators. A big part of him still thinks that Hjaltalín is a
guilty as an Icelandic summer is long. But it boils down a question of how he
can possibly stay retired with three mysteries lying on the table like crack awaiting
an addict’s nose.
By now you
probably realize that Indridson favors complexity and damaged psyches over
cookie cutter potboilers. Before The Darkness Knows wraps, it takes us
many places. Hjaltalín’s dying refusal to provide an alibi for his whereabouts on
the evening that Sigurvin was dumped into his glacial grave is evocative of the
trial of the American labor troubadour Joe Hill. Indridson also steers us into fake
spiritualism, seedy bars, the Boy Scouts, suicide, infidelity, and the
Icelandic financial crash (2008-10). On that journey, Konrád encounters a
gaggle of characters that range from the down-and-out and remorseful to the
ominous and amoral. Like readers, Konrád is never sure what’s a real clue and
what’s a red herring.
The Darkness
Knows does employ
several Chekhov’s guns that fire blanks. It stretches credulity that the mere
discovery of Sigurvin’s body triggers memories that they did not 30 years
earlier and with implausible vividness. As much as I appreciated the complexity
of Indridson’s plotting, there is also a palpable sense that snipping several threads
would have made for a tidier book. But I’ll take an intelligent mystery over one
stuffed with clichés any day of the week.
Rob Weir
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