Oslo, August 2015. An old woman named Turid chances across an entry in an auctioneer’s booklet. It’s a bracelet with a minimum bid of one hundred thousand kroner, or about $10,000 today. “It is forty-eight years since she last saw her bracelet.” So Turid digs out the old papers and presents them to the auctioneer. “This is a police report,” she tells the woman. “I reported the jewellery stolen at the end of the 1960s.” And suddenly the scene shifts more than seventy years in the past to October 1942, when Turid was an infant. Then, at the peak of the Nazi occupation, her biological mother, Åse Lajord, was murdered. And subsequent chapters in Kjell Ola Dahl’s novel, The Courier, leap back and forth from 1942 to 1967 and back again. Eventually, we learn who killed Turid’s mother, and why. But it’s a long road to get there.
A terrific but confusing story
The Courier is a confusing story involving conflicts within the Norwegian Resistance and a Jewish family torn apart by the Holocaust. If Dahl had told the tale in chronological order, he could have minimized the confusion. Of course, it’s common enough for mysteries and thrillers to confuse the reader, but only up to a point. It’s called “misdirection.” To cite an obvious example, authors frequently withhold the identity of a killer, as does Dahl here. But The Courier is no whodunit in the mold of Agatha Christie or an Ed McBain police procedural. It’s a story about life under Nazi occupation and the fissures that commonly opened between Right and Left in the Resistance throughout Europe.
The Courier by Kjell Ola Dahl (2015) 276 pages ★★★☆☆
The Gestapo, the Resistance, and a messy murder
When Dahl returns us to Oslo in 1942, he introduces us to Ester Lemkov, the eponymous courier of the title. Ester is Jewish, and she witnesses the Gestapo dragging her father away from his jewelry shop and padlocking it behind him. It’s the last she will ever see of her family. Because the Nazis have also arrested her mother and little brother. All three will eventually perish in the ovens at Auschwitz.
Meanwhile, we learn that Ester and Åse Lajord, the murdered woman, had worked together in the Resistance. And Ester had been among the last to see her alive when she picked up a bundle of copies of an anti-Nazi newspaper to deliver on her rounds. Unsurprisingly, both Åse and Gerhard, the father of her infant daughter, were involved in the Resistance, too.
Gradually, the story slips back and forth through the years to reveal that Gerhard had fled Oslo, first to Sweden and then to the United States. It’s important to know why he crossed the Atlantic rather than returning to fight in Norway. But I won’t spoil the story by explaining why. What is important to know is that Gerhard returns to Oslo in 1967, intent on meeting the daughter he hadn’t known since she was an infant. Back in Oslo, he reconnects with Ester and a man who was one of his commanders in the Resistance. And they all play roles in investigating Åse’s murder. As I said: it’s confusing.
About the author
To date, the Norwegian author Kjell Ola Dahl (1958-) has written eleven Nordic noir mysteries featuring “the Oslo detectives” as well as four standalone mysteries and crime thrillers, including this one. He has also published nonfiction, numerous short stories, and two screenplays. Seven of his crime novels have been translated into English, all by Don Bartlett.
For related reading
I’ve also reviewed the author’s The Lazarus Solution (A gripping tale of intrigue in wartime Stockholm). I liked that book a lot more.
You’ll find a wealth of great reading at The best Nordic noir series. And you can gain insight into the genre at Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery by Wendy Lesser (Down the rabbit hole of Nordic noir).
You might also enjoy my posts:
- Top 10 historical mysteries and thrillers
- The 10 best novels about World War II
- 26 mysteries to keep you reading at night
- 20 excellent standalone mysteries and thrillers
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
