Hannah Krause-Bendix is a nightmare of a woman. She’s a literary marvel, but when it comes to people, she can write about them but she can’t read them. Or perhaps it’s that she just can’t be bothered. Cosy if unhappy in her writer’s bubble, she is interested neither in her readers nor her peers. She is one of the least sympathetic protagonists I’ve yet encountered, and yet in Thirty Days of Darkness Jenny Lund Madsen has us, if not quite rooting for her, wanting the situations that she is in to be resolved gracefully. That’s quite some achievement. 

Hannah’s at a book festival under protest when Jørn Jensen, her nemesis – a genial genre writer – gets up on stage for a puff interview. His work is loved by ‘obscure blogger sites’ (rude!) and the general public. Hannah flings a book at Jørn and they have a stand-up row at the end of which it transpires that Hannah is going to write a crime novel in thirty days. Her editor dispatchers her from Copenhagen to a village in the Icelandic back of beyond. And, of course, a real-life murder occurs. And, of course, Hannah sets out to solve it. She’s misanthropic and spiky and alienates – or should alienate – almost everyone, but she ploughs on regardless. And, of course, Jørn Jensen turns up.

There’ve been a few attempts at this kind of meta treatment recently. Anthony Horowitz has tried it twice, with his Atticus Pünd and Hawthorne series, and Jonathan Coe has had a bash. The twist is that while Horowitz in particular keeps his protagonists sweet (especially the one in the Hawthorne novels who just happens to share the name and (we assume) some characteristics of Horowitz himself), Madsen sets Hannah up as the ingénue we almost hope will fail. Unpleasant, self-absorbed but mainly un-self-aware, and mildly sociopathic, Hannah delights us readers through moments of slapstick and/or social awkwardness. But so negatively has she been painted that occasional flashes of understanding, such as when she realises that she is a ‘stuffy, farcical killjoy’ or compares her ‘poor book sales, omnivorous envy and self-imposed bitterness’ with the lot of the person who in the final showdown is trying to kill her.

It isn’t even clear that Hannah Krause-Bendix is actually a good author. Madsen, however, is, and Megan Turney is a fine translator with some enjoyable idiomatic flourishes. As a result, we’re served a mix of darkness (the crimes are bleak) and subversion of the form. When there’s a heavy fall of snow which effectively turns the murder investigation into a locked-room (or locked-village) mystery, we nod happily. And, at times, there may have been giggling.

The result is a novel which is far more fun than it has any right to be. If you want your protagonist to sparkle, then look elsewhere, but if you want a mix of gentle satire, some severe eye-rolling and a bit of fun with the crime genre (not glossing over that the crimes are serious and appalling and perhaps sit awkwardly with the rest of the novel) then this is one to try.  

Cafethinking’s coverage of Under the Blazing Sun, book two in the Murder by the Book series

Thanks to Orenda Books for the review copy.