How could she do it?

Review of Inger Frimansson's Good night, my darling by Keith Oatley

In Inger Frimansson's fine novel Good night, my darling, published in New York by Pleasure Boat Studio, the question is not who committed a crime, nor whether the protagonist will meet a horrible death. There are no guns, no drug dealers, no gangsters. Instead, crimes are committed amid the ordinary lives of ordinary people. With this novel, Inger Frimansson won the Swedish Academy of Mystery Authors Award for Best Swedish Crime Novel. Newly translated into English by Laura Wideburg, this book is a gripping account of Justine who, as a child, was first neglected and then persecuted by a self-absorbed stepmother. At school, she was bullied by classmates. As we, the readers, squirm with Justine's victimization, we are ahead of her in feeling vindictive. Not until Justine is in her forties does she catch up with the readers' feelings.

Good night, my darling follows several threads, each a life of one of the novel's principal characters. Only after the middle of the book do these threads start to form a skein. Only then can we look each character in the eye. One character is Justine's stepmother, Flora: not just selfish, but so narcissistic that her cruelty makes us gasp. A second character is Justine's father: not a bad person but neither perceptive nor strong enough to protect his daughter from Flora. A third character is a former classmate of Justine's, a child bully who grows up to be a normal adult. A fourth character is a rather characterless man who meets Justine towards the end of the book, and becomes her lover. As the threads twist together, a growing sense of the ominous makes the book hard to put down. All is not well with Justine. All will not be well. But we have no idea what will happen. It is not until we are more than three-quarters of the way through the book that the first explicit crime occurs, and not until after that anyone in the role of detective appears.

Inger Frimansson enables the reader to enter Justine's child-thoughts of being an almost willing victim while she absorbs both the hurt and the methods of cruelty used to hurt her. We sympathize with Justine the child, but as she grows to maturity we become less sympathetic. As a woman Justine has two lovers. There are scenes of eroticism and even affection, but the damage we know Justine has suffered makes it difficult to believe in their goodness. Will our sympathy carry to the point when the victim achieves sufficient power to assert herself?

Crime stories have been adored in popular culture. The inventor of the short form was Edgar Allen Poe, with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" of 1841. Wilkie Collins is credited with the invention of the full-length version, his novel of 1860 The Woman in White is a thriller with puzzles. Mary Braddon acknowledged her debt to this book, and was the author of the first novel-length detective story, Lady Audley's Secret of 1862. P. D. James has pointed out that the psychological appeal of detective stories is that a crime has torn the fabric of society, and repair is needed. Classically it is made by a somewhat other-worldly person (a type already present in Braddon's story) who applies mere thought to solve the problem. With the perpetrator identified, society can function again. As the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov has proposed, this kind of story is really two stories. The first is action, the commission of a crime. The second is the investigation. In most whodunits the first story is vestigial. For seventy years, part of the other-worldliness of the detective was immunity from injury by the criminals. Then, in 1930, the first story, in Todorov's sense, stopped being vestigial and came into focus in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, in which rather than being other-worldly the detective is worldly, which puts him in serious danger. There's less cerebration and more action: we are in the world of the thriller.

Popular as these genres are, has not something been left out: exploration of why people commit crimes that tear the fabric of society? It takes courage to experiment with a new genre. This is what Inger Frimansson has done. Good night, my darling is not a whodunit and not a thriller. It's a how-could-she-do-it.

Keith Oatley Director, Cognitive Science Program University College, 15 Kings College Circle, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada M5S 3H7 phone (416) 978 1939 fax (416) 926 4713 e-mail koatley@oise.utoronto.ca web site http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/depts/hdap/oatley/index.htm