After hesitating in the middle of Helene Tursten's first novel, Detective Inspector Huss, I ended up making my way through it to the end. Like many European mystery novels and crime shows, the actual crimes seem almost quaint and trite compared to what needs to get cooked up in America to rise to the level of being worth investigating. Drug smuggling? Hells Angels? Infidelity? Oh my!
But I slogged on, in some ways almost because of the detective's domestic situation. It features many of the accepted tropes of Scandinavian fiction, the husband who sacrifices career to spend more time at home with the kids so the wife can have a career, the married couple who get frisky late on a weeknight after full and stressful work days.
But there's something compelling to the character development and the earnestness of it all. In some ways it almost makes sense to view the home life of detectives and their families as their own subgenre worth looking at in its own right. Over several decades, for instance, the marriages of Inspector Wexford and his sidekick Mike Burden in Ruth Rendell's Kingsmarkham series cover an awful lot of ground. Indeed, there's almost no other genre where an author can drag a reader along through many phases of marriage and child-rearing in the same way as can sets of mystery novels, which are published over decades. Readers and detectives age together. It's very interesting reading situation. You can almost say that, just as the plot of the mystery novel serves as the device to drag the reader through a variety of sociological settings, sets of them do the same with life phases. It's possible someone has done good work on this, or it may seem too trivial and demand too much work to grind through multiple sets of novels. But it could be interesting.
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