A famous crime writer vanishes, her friends at a loss to know where she is. Her books are an international sensation, but secrets in her personal life haunt the author – could these have driven her to do something reckless? Fact is often stranger than fiction, and that was the exact situation for Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime, who vanished for 11 days in 1926. For Ragnar Jónasson, it also provides the inspiration for The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer.
In 2012, bestselling Icelandic crime writer Elin Jónsdóttir has gone missing, failing to meet a friend for their weekly coffee. The author herself is something of an enigma. Still topping the bestseller charts, despite having not written anything new for years, her ten-book series has been adapted for the screen, and yet there still seems something untold about her own story.
For literary lover Detective Helgi Reykdal, the chance to lead the missing-person investigation is a dream come true. His love of books – and the golden age of crime thrillers in particular – is a natural fit for this delicate investigation.
The detective soon finds out, much like Christie’s own disappearance in the 1920s, that Jónsdóttir’s past is as complex as many of her novels’ plot twists. A 40-year-old bank robbery, unrequited love, and a history of disappearing in the past all shroud the picture of what exactly has happened.
Like Christie’s own works, this is a plot that simmers and develops over time, with events of the past shaping current actions. Jónasson plays with this timeline to great effect. We get snippets of a press interview with the missing author, conducted seven years before her disappearance, peppered throughout the story. We also journey back to view a bank robbery being planned four decades previously and the subsequent police involvement, including the return of Detective Hulda, well known to readers of Jónasson’s earlier works.
It all creates a slow burn of a plot – a crime investigation where it’s not always apparent whether a crime has even been committed. For those looking for the darkness and chills often found in Nordic noir this may be disappointing, but The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer is a different beast. This is a work very much in the mould of golden age crime mysteries, but that doesn’t make it a museum piece. What we get is the time and space to delve into character, to play the long game and revel in the detail.
Jónasson, himself something of a Christie expert, used the same technique in his last novel, Death at the Sanatorium. While this isn’t a sequel as such and can be read without familiarity with any previous Jónasson works, it is a continuation of themes and characters developed earlier.
We learn more here about Helgi’s own troubled domestic life, his attempt to escape an abusive relationship, and his continuing efforts to fit into the police system despite being perceived as something of a lone outsider.
Jónasson also has some fun, taking a wry, often tongue-in-cheek look at Icelandic crime writing itself. Comments about Icelandic crime writers’ pseudonyms, screen adaptations, and politicians writing crime novels will all elicit a knowing nod from any reader familiar with the Icelandic literary scene.
Like Christie herself, Jónasson throws in just enough red herrings to confuse the reader and weaves the previously disparate threads together at the end with theatrical flair. The cliffhanger ending suggests there’s more to learn about Detective Helgi. What classic Christie device Jónasson chooses to tell that story remains to be seen.
The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer by Ragnar Jónasson, translated by Victoria Cribb, is published by Michael Joseph.
