Blood on Snow. The order

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Blood on Snow. The order (original title Blod på snø ) is a detective novel by the Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø from 2015. The novel about a hit man marks the beginning of a trilogy under the common title Blood on Snow .

content

It is December 1977, a few days before Christmas in Oslo's coldest winter since World War II . Olav Johansen is the son of an alcoholic and a brutal father who beats his wife and is jailed for beating someone to death. On the day of his release from prison, 19-year-old Olav kills his father, or at least that's what he thinks. His mother tells another story that her husband just didn't come back. Olav has been an avid reader since childhood, but because of his dyslexia he often reads differently than what is written in the books. So he changes the plot of Die Miserable until he has adapted it to his taste and Jean Valjean has become a murderer.

Olav also becomes a hit man after giving up his study plans. He believes he's not good for anything else. He has proven to be too soft to play the pimp for gang boss Daniel Hoffmann . Instead, he buys the deaf and mute Maria, who is forced into prostitution to pay the debts of her drug addict friend, free. Since then he has been following the young woman, watching her at work and confessing his love to her every day in the crowd of the subway, although or precisely because she cannot hear him. However, he does not find the courage to hand her a letter declaring his love for her. Olav has fewer problems with working as a travel agent , as he describes it for killer. For Hoffmann, he kills gangsters from his opponent in the Oslo heroin business, the so-called fisherman. He only shows compassion for the bereaved of his victims and sometimes leaves them the full reward for his deed.

His latest assignment causes Olav scruples. He is supposed to murder Hoffmann's young wife Corina because she is cheating, but at first sight he falls in love with the beautiful woman with the grace of a tightrope walker. Instead, he kills her lover and reports this to his client, only to find out that this is the only son of the gang boss who is now hunting him. Olav saves Corina and places her in his barren apartment, where it comes to an overwhelming night of love for Olav. The next day he turns to the fisherman. Hoffmann's opponent seems to him the only chance to escape the persecution of his former boss.

With the help of two of the fisherman's men, Hoffmann is murdered at the wake for his son. But then Olav himself is struck down on behalf of the fisherman, who has not forgiven him for the murders. Olav survives due to a chain mail loan from a previous victim. He arrives bleeding at his apartment, where Corina takes care of him. But when he briefly fainted, she had already betrayed him to the fisherman, since she had long since switched sides to her advantage and defected to the next brutal and powerful man. Olav escapes from his apartment. In the middle of the night, he doesn't know any other destination than the shop where Maria works. But on the eve of Christmas Eve it has long been closed and he leans in vain against the dark shop window.

The story takes an almost magical turn when Maria shows up and drives him to her uncle, a surgeon, who can save him with an emergency operation. It turns out that Maria is not deaf and dumb at all, but rather a French woman who only speaks broken Norwegian. The drug addict was not her boyfriend, but her younger brother, for whom she voluntarily sacrificed herself. And Maria heard all the words of love that Olav whispered to her in the subway and that made her as happy as the love letter he finally handed her. With this happy twist, Olav wants to end his story. When Maria, who is actually deaf and mute, wants to open the shop the next morning, she discovers the dead Olav who has frozen to the shop window during the night. In the snow she finds his letter that fell out of his coat.

interpretation

The commission , the first part of the loosely linked trilogy under the series title Blood on Snow, is written in the style of classic pulp or noir . Marcus Müntefering names The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson as genre models , Elmar Krekeler names the Parker series by Richard Stark . Typical of the genre is the lonely hero who gets caught between rival gangster gangs, the fateful femme fatale and the fatalism of the story, but also the gloomy end and - measured against the market requirements of the 21st century - the small size of almost 200 pages. Nesbø had originally planned to publish the novels under the pseudonym "Tom Johansen" and to pass them off as rediscovered classics from the 1970s.

The classic noir crime thriller is broken again and again by ironic or fairytale elements. The typically American crime story is based in Nesbø in the supposedly idyllic Oslo of the 1970s. The tough hero has a soft heart and shows sentimental tendencies that stalk his lover and make her write love letters. In addition - quite atypical of a hardboiled detective - he shows references to literary history, to TS Eliot , David Hume , Brehms Tierleben and Victor Hugo . When he hears the blood in the snow, which gives it the title, which flows abundantly, he thinks of kings, purple and ermine fur . The novel is thus “hardcore boiled for the educated classes. Slaughter with level. First class train station thriller. ”Hendrik Werner reads a“ picaresque novel ”, an homage“ to pulp with wit, to noir with style ”.

In particular, the first-person narrator of the story turns out to be an unreliable narrator who leads himself and the reader by the nose, which, according to Martin Müntefering, gives the novel a “modern twist”. The passionate high volume reader Olav has got used to rearranging his reading according to his own preferences. So he kitches Hugo's Die Elenden into a love story whose hero is exactly like him. He also rewrote his life, turning the unscrupulous contract killer with a slight tendency towards sentimentality into a “killer with a heart” and his day's work into a “quite sentimental piece of adventure”. Using this metafictional element, Nesbø transforms classic pulp fiction into “a kind of meta noir”, according to Müntefering.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Marcus Müntefering: Killer in a cold city . In: Spiegel Online from September 24, 2015.
  2. ↑ a b c Elmar Krekeler: Jo Nesbø lets it rain blood on snow . In: Die Welt from October 8, 2015.
  3. ↑ dpa : Jo Nesbø's "Blood on Snow" - killer on the wrong track . In: Focus from September 29, 2015.
  4. ↑ a b Bernd Graff: Bloody snow . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 9, 2015.
  5. ↑ Hendrik Werner: Pulp with wit . In: Weser-Kurier of October 18, 2015.