Black Seconds (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Ida Joner is a sweet girl, adored by her mother Helga. She loves animals, and is looking forward to her tenth birthday. One day she rides out on her yellow bike to buy some sweets. When she fails to return 35 minutes after she should have, Helga starts to worry. She phones around, but there is no word, and eventually she calls the police. Still no news the following day, a local search is organised, with hundreds of local volunteers. However, nothing comes of it. Ida Joner and her yellow bicycle seem to have vanished into thin air.

Fossum seems to write two different kinds of novels: sensitive procedurals focusing on simple, everyday-crimes crimes (such as Don't Look Back and Calling Out For You), and psychological thrillers based on original and twisted conceits (like When the Devil Holds the Candle). Black Seconds is of the former type. It deals with a simple, unflashy crime, one that could (and does) happen anywhere. This sad simplicity adds to the strange power of her novels, with their achingly realistic crimes, and their achingly realistic victims, their relatives and neighbours.

If there is one thing that makes Fossum stand out most it is her compassion, for every character: victim, policeman, even murderer. It is the emotional sensitivity of her prose, the immense power she has of evoking empathy for the sorriest of people. Her victims are painfully normal, as are her killers; those mentally less-well off (a common feature in her novels) are generally gentle and above all noble. She has such a natural style, her emotional frankness and simplicity can sometimes be hard to read. I feel much more tarnished (in a good way!) after reading Fossum's novels than I do those full of spilled guts.

Another common thread in her novels is crimes which arise by accident, unfortunate confluences of events. Her criminals are often as much victims of circumstance as anyone else, are often good and normal but for that one act that distinguishes them from other people: they are, for whatever reason, responsible for killing someone. There's little malice in the crimes of Black Seconds, which makes its events hard to know what to do with, and certainly hard to condemn. This seems to me to be a more realistic portrayal of how real crimes occur, and a more thought-provoking one. Chance puts human failings and behaviour on show in all their sad glory.

Black Seconds is a powerful and impressive novel. Sensitive and probing, it delves deeply into the minds and lives of its characters. Fossum holds back as much as possible about the philosophical, charismatic but enigmatic Konrad Sejer, so he retains that air of mystery about him, and he carries the book well to its inevitable conclusion, with it's bitter final punch. Black Seconds is not quite as good as the last novel, the exemplary Calling Out For You, but it mirrors many of that novels great strengths, and is another in the continued peak of what seems to be an excellent body of work.

Henning Mankell introduced me to the wonders of Scandinavian crime writing, and led me to Karin Fossum, who is even better at it than our venerable Swedish friend. She's a little bit different in approach though: Mankell, who we all know, sticks, in his Wallander books at least, to the police procedural style. Perhaps that's his weakness. Fossum takes some elements of the procedural and mixes them with psychological drama.
For comfort she holds on to a common central character or two; Inspector Sejer is the reassurring anchor-man and his junior, Jacob Skarre, the device through which we learn how clever Sejer is. It all works beautifully.
Often in her books (and 'Black Seconds' is no exception), there is an 'oddity', an outcast in society on whom suspicion naturally falls. Perhaps this method of revealing society's simplistic reactions is overused in her novels, but it is effective, and usually quite creepy.
Here, a middle-aged outcast of childlike intellect is involved in the disapppearance of a child. Fossum once again manages the clever trick of fooling us into believing that what seems obvious isn't. Actually it is.
What's really clever is the way the second plot revolves around the first. In fact it's the second plot (about a teenager who crashes his car) is really the most interesting part of the novel. It throws up all kinds of questions about ideal and actual morality. Nothing is clear cut (another theme of Fossum's).
The way these two strands are pulled together is beautifully done in the author's unpretentious but stylish hand. In a way, not much happens, but the way it happens is absolutely compelling. In just a few well-chosen words, Karin Fossum creates a world you care about, people you can see and feel, and an atmosphere you can touch. I don't know anybody who does this kind of thing better.

I've read several of Karen Fossum's detective stories and enjoyed them all. This one is a bit different in that one has a pretty good idea of what happened long before the end of the book, but it's still utterly gripping as the detective pair, Skarre and Seger, dig out the truth. The chapters in which Seger interviews suspects are particularly fine descriptions of the policeman's sensitive use of human psychology to tease out confessions. All the main characters are so well drawn you have a clear picture of them in your mind's eye and can believe that they are real people. The policemen are not caricatures but men with lives and feelings outside their work. The writing is crisp with no redundant verbiage for which, I should think, quite a lot of credit must go to the translator.
The printing and paper are of a high standard for a paperback.