Cover of Arctic Chill by Arnaldur IndridasonI’ve come across a few references recently to Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason. All of them have been positive, praising his use of the Icelandic setting and the development of his brooding detective, Erlendur. His latest, the first I’ve read, is Arctic Chill.

The book begins, naturally enough, with the discovery of a body. This time it’s a young boy, the son of a Thai immigrant, who’s found dead on the ice outside his apartment building. From this beginning, Indridason builds his theme of tensions surrounding Iceland’s immigrant communities, set neatly against the backdrop of the freezing weather. All of that’s exactly what you think it’s going to be: it’s good, it works. But there’s rather too much of everything else.

Arctic Chill is Indridason’s seventh Erlendur title (the fifth in English), and over that time, the detective has picked up a sidekick or two, and a few elements of backstory, and a lot of them are on display here. At times, it feels like there’s too much going on. There are estranged relatives to be dealt with, dying ex-bosses to be visited, traumatic memories to be revisited, and so on. There are also three investigating detectives, and the narrative switches between them in a way that’s sometimes fun but still feels unnecessary. I suspect that this might be a better, tighter book if the other two—the ones that aren’t Erlendur—were simply sent on holiday for the duration.

If the novel’s story suffers from feature bloat, the narrative in Arctic Chill can also feel a little plodding and repetitive at a paragraph level, such as this scene in which Erlendur enters a suspect’s apartment:

Erlendur was more aware this time of how sparsely furnished the flat was. When he first entered he’d had the impression that it was larger than Sunee’s place, although they were, in fact, identical. Standing in the middle of the living room, he thought he knew why: there was very little furniture in Gestur’s flat.

It goes on to describe the contents of each room, and guess what? There’s not much furniture. Elsewhere are other repetitions. Events are sometimes first shown and then described in dialogue. The discovery of the murder weapon is one example: we’re shown the discovery, than one of the characters reports the discovery. In all, some of the details are repeated four times within the space of a dozen pages.

Sadly, this kind of repetition, which appears at both a sentence and scene level, really works against the book; together with the underdeveloped (here, at least), and possibly too-numerous lead characters, it prevents the prose from ever really getting off the ground.

Which is a shame, because Indridason seems to have a good eye; his observations on racial tensions in Iceland form a decent setting for the novel, and some of the minor characters are nicely developed. But overall, Arctic Chill could have used some trimming to give it a tighter focus and allow those superior aspects of Indridason’s prose more room to breathe.

I suspect that at least some of my criticisms are the result of my not having read the other books in the series beforehand, and certainly Arnaldur Indridason has a great many supporters—Adèle Geras is a self-declared Indridason bore, Glenn at International Noir Fiction is a fan, and Eurocrime thinks this might be the perfect crime fiction novel. For me, however, Arctic Chill would need to lose a good quarter before it could live up to Arnaldur Indridason’s reputation… a reputation which is, along with the qualities of this book, still enough to make me consider going back to the beginning and his first (translated) novel, Tainted Blood. As for Arctic Chill, while I can well imagine that it contains a lot of pleasures for Indridason’s fans, I’m not convinced that it will make many new ones.