Chaos, confusion and me

So, I finished yet another book on my quest to read all unread books in my bookshelf. I should make a point that I only intend to read all unread fictional books not the dictionaries and encyclopedias.

This book was in swedish and written by a swede. The title of this post is my hasty transaltion of the original title - “Döden går på auktion”. The author is Jan Mårtenson who has written in excess of 30 books. Most, if not all, of them about the same main character “Johan Kristan Homan” who is the proprietor of a small antiques store in Stockholm. He is also an involuntary private detective of sorts, i.e. he frequently gets drawn into murders and mysteries which he solves.

This book begins with the disapperance of a man, probably in his thirties, and Homan through aquaintances gets involved. Originaly helping the missing mans wife who has been made aware that her husband has been been kidnapped and she doesn’t dare go to the police. Homan on the other hand is good friends with the chief of police at the national department for homicide investigations. Quite a mouthful and also my translation, I’m not even going to try to get into how the Swedish police is organised. He is also in a relationship with a department chief at SÄPO, the swedish security police. If you are going to play at being a detective these are probably very good friends to have.

Apart from the kidnapping angle there is an other parallell story in which the antique dealer Homan gets hired as a consultant at an auction house. Given the title of the book it doesn’t take a genious to see that these plots are going to get intertwined somhow. If you want to know how then read the bloody book yourselves.

I can easily say that I didn’t dislike this book but I am probably not going to buy a novel by Jan Mårtensson. If one is given to me I’ll probably read it but I am not actively going to go out looking for one. It’s not that it’s a bad book because it isn’t. It’s just that it isn’t my type of book.

The book is slow but not uninteresting. Jan Mårtenson writes a lot about the surrounding, even with my very rudimentary knowledge of Stockholm I could actually follow the main character around on his walks through town. He spends a lot of time describing life’s little pleasures; good food, dry martinis, antiques (duh, obviously) etc. I didn’t quite get a grip on the age of the main character but I’d guess late forties to late fifties. One interesting feature of the book is that Homan refers to a recipie for Bouillabaisse in the book and that recipie can be found at the end. I am definetly going to try it; bouillabaisse is good.

Posted by Edward on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 20:42:52.