Dorte Hummelshøj Jakobsen

I do feel that short stories have the prerogative to end with a metaphoric question mark – providing you have some material to be able to give you food for thought. In this one, I was just a little confused.

A librarian attends a Crime Festival in Bristol (UK) and stumbles across a handbag in a dark alley; the handbag, among other things, contains a body part. The police are unhelpful – they are somewhat bored by pranksters during this particular week – and she decides to try and solve the mystery herself. Who does the handbag and body part belong to?

There were some slightly disconcerting aspects to the story. There was no usual dialogue punctuation, i.e. opening and closing quotation marks, which took a little getting used to. The author was trying to convey the accent of the Bristol area, but it didn’t come off too well. I live in Bristol so am all too familiar with it. It didn’t hit the mark, unfortunately; it didn’t register as either Bristolian or Somerset.

The story needs some extra stuffing – I felt that there are some ‘scenes’ missing, the plot leaps ahead in bounds and I really needed a little extra padding for that question mark ending. With a little extra weight, this short story could well tip the scales into something a little more satisfying. By the name and the very short description at the end of the book, I am assuming that English is Dorte’s second language. If so, then I would say this is the best book by a foreign author I have read who is writing in a non-native tongue. Her style is pleasant enough – the story was easy to read. Our sleuthing librarian did have a very corny name…..Rhapsody Gershwin….yes I know, you have to be of a certain age to ‘get’ that. But I couldn’t help but like it!

Not bad, but I think this is still a WIP.… (meer)

I got to know Dorte through her blog many years ago, first as a reviewer and then as an author. I only recently discovered that she not only writes cozy mysteries, she also writes the harder-edged ones that are my personal preference. So I was both happy and a little nervous when she offered me a review copy of Crystal Nights, a psychological suspense novel crossed with a police procedural set in rural Denmark. I needn’t have worried. I enjoyed reading it very much (and very quickly) and am only embarrassed that it has taken me many weeks to write a review.

The book opens with a passage from a familiar Hans Christen Andersen story, The Snow Queen, recounting the ending in which slivers of a broken mirror fly around the world and enter peoples’ eyes and hearts, spreading evil everywhere. I always found Andersen’s stories extremely creepy when I was a child, so I braced myself.

The next section, set in 1938, is a brief but gripping account of a Jewish woman packing up a few belongings and living in hiding in 1938 with her husband and small children, learning about krystallnacht and wondering what people are capable of. The last we see of them is traveling to what should be a safer place, but isn’t, with her little boy desperately ill and her husband too paranoid to seek help. Crystal Nights - English cover

The main part of our story begins in 1967 in Kallum, a small Danish town where schoolboys are learning about the Night of Broken Glass and their impatient teacher isn’t willing to entertain questions about what happened to the Jews who managed to escape Nazi Germany. One of the boys would rather be learning about John Glenn and the space program. Another hasn’t even bothered to go to school. He’s too busy climbing trees and peering into neighbor’s attics. When that adventurous boy doesn’t show up for days, his friends begin to wonder, and eventually the police are called in. They are frustrated by the boy’s mother, who takes a lackadaisical approach to parenting and insists the boy is with his father, a long-distance trucker. The police are not entirely satisfied, and neither is the boy’s best friend, Niels, who knows that his friend left behind an encoded message. As it happens, this isn’t the only odd thing that has happened in Kallum in recent years, and for a few chapters we go back in time to a strange road accident in 1963 and the drowning death of another boy. It’s not until the end that we know how these pieces fit together – and how they relate to the Snow Queen’s shattered mirror. As one character remarks, “It is ever so simple to hide from the truth . . . you only have to walk through life with your eyes closed.”

Dorte’s translation of her Danish work (which won an award in Denmark) is very well done. I only once or twice noted a word choice that seemed a trifle awkward. She has a nice way with description – for example, “her busy fingers picked at the knitted cardigan like nimble mice gathering material for their nests.” I am a lazy reader, so the section that took us back to 1963 confused me for a while, but I was eager to find out what the link was between the opening pages and the small Danish community where an adventurous boy disappears. Altogether, it’s an enjoyable story with a slightly Gothic psychological twistiness to it.… (meer)