Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Dark Music, by David Lagercrantz.

 

  

          Swedish writer David Lagercrantz is internationally known for creating well-written and credible sequels to the late Stieg Larsson’s ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ series after that author’s premature death from a heart attack;  now he has used terrible historic events of the beginning of this century as the background to the brutal murder of Jamal Kabir, an Afghani refugee in Stockholm – and he introduces as his main protagonists his modern version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to solve the crime.

            Holmes played the violin:  his modern-day equivalent, Professor Hans Rekke, was a concert pianist of some renown.  Holmes has frighteningly brilliant deductive powers, as does Rekke, but Holmes liked his opium pipe, and Rekke has his very own drug-dealer Freddie to supply him with whatever he needs.  Holmes was sad and solitary, and Rekke is bipolar, prone to fits of manic energy or abysmal despair. 

Lagercrantz’s version of Watson, that shrewd, loyal and trusty sidekick, is Micaela Vargas, from a Chilean refugee family who is a new and inexperienced police officer seconded to the Kabir killing.  She comes from a tough suburb of Stockholm and has a couple of brothers on the wrong side of the law;  naturally, they are not keen on her choice of work but too bad:  she loves her job and she’s good at it.  Especially when she meets Rekke and observes his marvellous logic in action – after he recovers from a suicide attempt, rescued by her!  And after he recovers sufficiently enough to use his mind for more positive and productive reasoning, Rekke and Micaela realise that there is a lot more to Kabir’s murder than they could ever have imagined, including the sinister influence of The Good Guys – the American CIA, who are anything BUT, in regard to this crime 

Throughout the whole story is a musical theme, that of thwarted ambition: Kabir in his youth had dreams of being an orchestral conductor, but  the forbidding by the Taliban after the Russians left Afghanistan of all musical forms (particularly decadent western classical music), and the destruction of all instruments used to produce it –‘because it leads us away from the only beauty that means anything, the love of Allah’ stifled any such dreams, and at the time of his murder he was a garage mechanic – and a part-time football referee.  And CIA informer.

Mr Lagercrantz has given us two worthy modern-day successors to Holmes and Watson and the plot fairly sizzles along, especially in the later stages, but I have to say that Ms Vargas had a two-dimensional air about her initially – which could have been translation problems. Anyway, I look forward with great anticipation to their next adventures.  FOUR STARS.