Quentin Bates – Peter turns the page

By Stella Blómkvist

Translated by Quentin Bates https://graskeggur.com/ @graskeggur

Published by Corylus Books https://corylusbooks.com/ @CorylusB

285 pages ISBN 9781739298944

Publication date 3 May 2024

Murder under the Midnight Sun is the second novel in the Stella Blómkvist series that has been transferred into English. Click on the link to read my review of the first book in the series Murder at the Residence.

Stella Blómkvist has been a bestselling series in Iceland since the first book appeared in the 1990s, and has attracted an international audience since the TV series starring Heiða Reed aired. The books have been published under a pseudonym that still hasn’t been cracked. The question of Stella Blómkvist’s identity is one that crops up regularly, but it looks like it’s going to remain a mystery…

I was sent an electronic copy to enable me to take part in this Blog Tour. I would like to thank Ewa Sherman @sh_ewa for the invitation to participate and of course the Author and the Publisher.

The Cover

The bleak beauty of Iceland on show but with a bloody fingerprint. Love it.

My review

A dapper businessman visits Stella with an unusual request of her. His niece Julia MacKenzie was last heard of in Iceland nine years earlier and the police investigation threw up few clues as to her whereabouts. Now his sister is dying of cancer, and they want Stella to re-open this cold case and find out once and for all what happened to Julia, to bring some kind of closure.

Stella’s friend the old hack Máki is busy beavering away for his blog and believes he has hit paydirt. A contact is leaking important documents proving espionage on the island during the Cold War. It has caused a bit of a stir and now the establishment is putting him under pressure to name his sources, so he needs Stella’s professional help.

As if she was not busy enough, Stella gets a call from a desperate TV presenter who she has recently worked with on filming a programme, one where Stella manged to find a severed arm in the ice. Her husband has just been charged with the frenzied murder of her father and her best friend so she’s desperate for help.

Plenty to occupy our heroine and top up her Stella Fund!

Once again, we have a lot of incidents and plot strands packed into a remarkably short novel. It will come as no surprise that the story quickly gets started and from then on progress is relentless. Despite this, there is still room for the characters to develop and express themselves. What is missing is any excess padding; stylistically there is a touch of the hard-boiled but without the detailed descriptions and acute observations. The author paints with a broad brush but with great confidence using bold, decisive strokes. Like her heroine of the same name, she knows what she wants to achieve and how to do it.

Stella is a fabulous central character, certainly arresting, sometimes captivating but perhaps not always completely likeable. Stella is one of life’s determined winners, a go getter with a can-do attitude whose absolute focus can make her seem a little cold or self-centred at times. She is a thoroughly modern, emancipated woman used to getting what she wants, be it in her search for the truth or for a sexual partner. Her sexual appetite is voracious, be it for men or women, and she’s very fond of Jack Daniels. There is a softer side though, as can be seen when she is with her young daughter Sóley Árdís.

To the reader’s great delight, she is also impulsive and headstrong, so we know she is not going to balk at danger, which she inevitably finds herself in. She may be a lawyer but she’s not one for the courtroom, this lady is more like a hard-bitten private eye, and she can deliver a put down.

The plot strands are intricate and quite twisty for such a short novel but come together pleasingly in the end. In Stella’s quest for the truth, she manages to uncover a series of secrets, lies and crimes from the past. Its not just the embers of the political past that is raked over, we discover more about Stella’s early life and there is an unexpected reunion.

The motivations and themes included are complex too, there is love and betrayal, some forgiveness but the driving force is revenge. As a nation that on a world stage still appears close-knit and insular, family and community ties figure throughout.

Great work from Quentin Bates in translating from the Icelandic but capturing its individuality and soul. The quirkiness from the first novel is still there, the car being referred to as the ‘silver steed’, the police as the ‘city’s finest’ as well as her mother’s epigrams on the nature of life. What humour there is, is as black as coal and as dry as a bone.

Murder under the Midnight Sun is cracking Nordic Noir with a compelling central character. Love her or hate her but Stella Blómkvist is impossible to ignore.

Murder under the Midnight Sun can be purchased via the publisher’s web site here

The author

Stella Blómkvist has been a bestselling series in Iceland since the first book appeared in the 1990s and has attracted an international audience since the TV series starring Heiða Reed aired. This series features tough, razor-tongued Reykjavík lawyer Stella Blómkvist, with her taste for neat whiskey, a liking for easy money and a moral compass all of her own – and who is at home in the corridors of power as in the city’s darkest nightspots.

The books have been published under a pseudonym that still hasn’t been cracked. The question of Stella Blómkvist’s identity is one that crops up regularly, but it looks like it’s going to remain a mystery…

The Translator

Quentin Bates is a writer, translator and journalist. He has professional and personal roots in Iceland that run very deep. He worked as a seaman before turning to maritime journalism. He is an author of a series of nine crime novels and novellas featuring the Reykjavik detective Gunnhildur (Gunna) Gísladóttir. In addition to writing his own fiction, he has translated books by Guðlaugur Arason, Einar Kárason, and crème de la crème of the Icelandic crime fiction authors Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Óskar Guðmundsson, Jónína Leósdóttir, Sólveig Pálsdóttir and Ragnar Jónasson. Quentin was instrumental in launching IcelandNoir, the crime fiction festival in Reykjavik.

Don’t forget to check out the other great posts on this blog tour:

By Stella Blómkvist

Translated by Quentin Bates https://graskeggur.com/ @graskeggur

Published by Corylus Books https://corylusbooks.com/ @CorylusB

278 pages ISBN 9781739298920

Publication date 28 August 2023

I was sent an electronic copy to enable me to take part in this Blog Tour. I would like to thank Ewa Sherman @sh_ewa for the invitation to participate and of course the Author and the Publisher.

The Cover

The monochrome version is stark and moody, with a church and up-market residence which are significant to the plot. Fits the story rather well.

From the blurb

It’s New Year and Iceland is still reeling from the effects of the financial crash when a notorious financier is found beaten to death after a high-profile reception at the President’s residence. The police are certain they have the killer – or do they? Determined to get to the truth, maverick lawyer Stella Blómkvist isn’t so sure.

A stripper disappears from one of the city’s seediest nightspots, and nobody but Stella seems interested in finding her. A drug mule cooling his heels in a prison cell refuses to speak to anyone but Stella – although she has never heard of him. An old man makes a deathbed confession and request for Stella to find the family he lost long ago.

With a sharp tongue and a moral compass all of her own, Stella Blómkvist has a talent for attracting trouble and she’s as at home in the corridors of power as in the dark corners of ’s underworld.

My thoughts

The starting point is not so much whodunnit but who wrote it, and it sure wasn’t Jessica Fletcher. The novel is credited to Stella Blómkvist, which appears to be a nom de plume, whose identity has not been cracked yet, so doing a much better job than Robert Galbraith then. The name of the novel’s central character is also Stella Blómkvist, which poses the question are they one and the same, is it wholly fiction or is it partly autobiographical? I guess the reader must wait and decide when they’ve finished.

The novel is set in 2009 and Iceland’s economic miracle, which had foundations on the quicksand of speculative investment banking, has crashed. Bankruptcy and financial pain abound for the general population but not those directly and indirectly responsible, the bankers, fat cats and politicians, who appear impervious to losses and lack even the honour to resign. The us and them continues even though the have tanked the country and recovery will be a painful rocky road ahead.

Stella Blómkvist is a needle-sharp lawyer with a tongue to match and an attitude more in keeping with Sam Spade than Rumpole of The Bailey. She seems to be the go-to lawyer for the Icelandic lower order as we see her pick up several clients in the first few chapters. There’s a death bed request from a man to find and deliver a message to the woman who is his daughter, one he has lost track of and could even be dead. Then there is a request from a Latvian ‘dancer’ to find her friend who has been missing since New Year’s Eve, when she performed at a ‘special’ gig. A man charged with smuggling drugs in a car he was delivering contacts her after hearing about her on the ferry from Denmark. Not forgetting a young drug addict who surfaces from stupor to find the police in his room and himself in serious trouble, which really is the cherry on the top of Stella’s Bakewell Tart. Clients that have the accountant in me shouting are they going to pay! A strange assortment but Stella can manage their conflicting demands which she does with some aplomb.

It isn’t so much a storyline as a puzzle to be solved. It’s like a fifteen puzzle, one of those with fifteen tiles set into a four-by-four square, with one free square to slide pieces into. To get the answers she is looking for Stella must slide the facts she discovers about her cases around until the picture is clear and that only happens when they are in the right places. Unconventional work for a lawyer, becoming part private investigator and part investigative journalist helping an old friend, to add to a useful book of contacts. Stella proves to be a real thorn in the side of the police and her interactions with them add much to the story which doesn’t hold much in the way of danger and jeopardy.

There are several coincidences and seemingly improbable connections, but then when you think about it, Iceland is a country but one where when it comes to population size it would only be the size of a medium city elsewhere. As ever it is a magnificent setting for crime fiction.

It’s a slim novel and thanks to the fantastic work of translator Quentin Bates (a good novelist himself) there is plenty of vim to vigor to the prose. The dialogue has plenty of snap, crackle and pop as Stella is a woman who shoots from the lip and cuts down with insults, though not all vocalised (wankstain, shitbag.) Stella also employs several nicknames for people and objects which adds wit to the overall texture and often finishes a chapter with a maxim passed down from her mother to reflect upon.

The themes of guilt and remorse are explored throughout the storyline as miscreants refuse to take responsibility for their actions, except for one hypocritical but ultimately remorseful man. Most significantly relating to events from the past as the secrets that some hopes were buried resurface, but also currently as the guilty greedy are rewarded for failure. sadly this seems all too common in the twenty-first century.

Stella is a wonderful heroine and has been added to my list of great female characters. Thoroughly modern in outlook she is strong, determined, resourceful and focussed on what she wants. She is insultingly compared to Messalina, the wife of Claudius, which is a little unfair, let’s just say she’s a woman with desires who knows what she likes. I for one hope there is much more of Stella to come.

Death at the Residence is classic Nordic Noir with compelling and risk taking modern heroine it its heart.

Murder at the Residence can be purchased via the publisher’s web site here

The author